Guys.....isn't this going a bit too far?

[Angrboda]

This is getting down to a semantics battle.

That actually doesn't concern me as much as the reasoning behind abortion. A woman should be able to decide when she doesn't want to care for another life in any form at any time. This is why we have adoption for viable children. If that life is still relying entirely on that person's body and another cannot take over, then that does not mean it owns any right to that person's body.

It has to be a semantics battle, because we all understand and agree that killing a person is wrong in most circumstances, and killing an innocent person is wrong is almost all circumstances. So yeah, if we are going to be killing what is undeniably an innocent human life, we better make damn sure that either (a) it's not a person, or (b) we can morally argue that the circumstances surrounding its killing are justified.

I have issues with both (a) and (b).

I don't believe an unborn baby "owns" a right to its mother's body. I do believe that people have a right to do whatever they like with their own bodies. However, I also believe that rights can come into conflict, and conflict resolution is an important part of making moral judgements. The right to life is the most important right, IMO. It trumps all other rights, because without it, all other rights are meaningless. Therefore, when you have a conflict between an unborn child's right to life, and the right of the mother to do what she wants with her own body, I believe that the most justified conflict resolution is to favor the right of the unborn child over that of the mother's.

Two lives are at stake. The mother risks her life more in carrying a fetus to term than she does in aborting it. You're equating the rights of a fetus to those of a fully developed human being. (And yes I heard your arguments about "fully formed", which were little more than an example of the fallacy of the beard. Regardless of whether hard lines can be drawn, it's a fact that there are different stages of development, and these stages correspond to our chosen allocation of rights. As a matter of law, the early fetus has no rights; that was settled in Roe v Wade, and they gave considerable rationale for coming to that position. Historically, the early fetus has not been granted rights. You and pro-lifers want to assign new rights that haven't previously existed.)

The pro-choice response to this is to refuse to acknowledge that unborn children have rights, and whenever they try to argue that unborn children aren't "people" and therefore don't have rights, they come up with all sorts of wishy washy definitions to try and back up that view.

Regardless of whether pro-choice advocates are able to elucidate the underpinnings of their views to your satisfaction or not is not a justification.

Regardless of when an unborn child becomes "viable", my main issue with the whole "only people have rights" argument is that it only seems to be used in regard to abortion; you never see it anywhere else. Elsewhere, we call them "human rights", and even animals are granted some rights. An unborn child is a human, something that is undeniable to anyone who has studied the science of DNA. When does it become human? From the moment of conception. That's a new human life, independent from its parents. That's when human rights should kick in.

What exactly are "human rights," and why should they kick in at conception? You're just bare asserting that a new right be assigned to a class to which it has never before been applied. The reasons are largely due to the unviability of the fetus, but that doesn't justify assigning new rights to the fetus even if viability were not an issue. Equating the fetus to the life of marginal cases is yet another example of conflation, equating dissimilar classes as if they were similar. Marginal cases do not justify assigning new rights to a whole new class of things. Your justification for assigning these rights is purely ipse dixit; because you say so. "Human rights" as you so blithely refer to them, cover a spectrum. They aren't simply a fixed set of rights, we assign different rights to human beings at different stages of development. You want to collapse all gradations of difference into one, using the fallacy of the beard to do it. Nonsense. Different stages of development are assigned different rights, and your claiming that marginal cases deserve the same rights as this stage of development is just confusing the issue. So far, the early fetus has not been granted the right to life at the expense of the mother carrying it. You want to expand the fetus' rights. You need more than conflating the status of the fetus with that of marginal cases and the mere fact that it's "human" to justify doing so.

It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman's life, are not of ancient or even of common law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.

~ Roe v. Wade, s. VI