Loosening my pro choice stance.

[Neo-Scholastic]

You misrepresent the highly complex and difficult work done by the medical and legal professions to describe supportable protections to both mother and child which balance the rights of both.

The moral issues of abortion are indeed complex. That is why I insist on clarity, distinguishing between philosophical/theological considerations, legal definitions, and practical implications.

Name one justification for abortion that could not also justify infanticide.

Where the birth of the child will kill both the mother and child.

I would consider that a valid justification because, like the Street Car problem, no proposed solution satisfies our moral reasoning. That extreme circumstance is relatively rare and that particular dilemma does not present itself for the vast majority of abortions. Even still, the question remains in the domain of civil law and revolves around the legal definition of a ‘person’. People have proposed many arbitrary dividing lines such as viability, vaginal birth, or the onset of consciousness.

Biological viability - the point at which a child, once born, would nominally survive birth - is based on biological facts.

Not really. Medical technology keeps pushing the age of viability forward. A fetus that is viable is viable in Boston would not be viable in rural North Korea. Likewise a viable fetus in 2016 would not have been viable in 1916. Would termination of pregnancy at the same stage of development been moral in the past but not today?

Emergent brain function - the point at which the brain starts to work - is based on biological facts.

The ability to feel pain happens at about seven weeks after conception, if not earlier. Few proponents of legal abortion would accept that as the point at which to grant personhood to the human fetus. Some bioethicists, like Peter Singer, have proposed that personhood should be granted only after the child has a sense of self, around the age of 2 years old.

One way or another, the proponents of legal abortion who wish to make a moral argument, like the autonomy and bodily integrity of the mother, must philosophically justify assigning rights to one kind of human being and not another. This raises the question: do humans have rights simply by virtue of being human? Many on AF believe rights are granted by the State rather than being ground in human nature, i.e. basically rights depend on the whims of whoever is in power. Under that concept of rights, abortion proponents are not making a moral claim; but rather, rationalizing their desires from a position of power.