Personally, I am against declawing for my cats. But...if someone is having a problem with their cat scratching on the furniture, ect...and their options are
1.declawing the cat and keeping it in the family
or
2.taking it to the humane society where it probably wont be adopted, or if a humane society is not available in your area you pay $25 to them for accepting your cat...and in those cases, people will take their cat to a country road and just drop it off to fend for it's self.

I used to live in the country and I had so many dogs and cats just dropped off in front of our house by their horrible owners! Let me tell you a story about my neighbor there who did take in a puppy dropped off at his house. He had it about a month, and then decided he didnt want it anymore, so he tried to kill it by shooting it. Well, he missed and wounded it and the dog went running down to our other neighbors house. They found it and brought it back to it's home, saying " Ray! someone shot your dog and we found him at our house" Ray then took the poor dog into his barn and fearing the neighbors would hear another gun shot, he took a sledge hammer and beat it to death!

Now, I would rather have a cat declawed instead of something like this happen to it!