>Neither. It's the logic of the arguments. What makes abortion hard is that if
>we want to say it is OK to kill fetuses, it is difficult to avoid commiting
>ourselves to principles that would appear to make it OK to kill newborn
>infants. As our recent discussion of Singer illustrated, that is a position
>that few of us will swallow. I know of no plausible answer to this problem.
>So people like Marta and I who support abortion rights and oppose infanticide
>are stuck in an awkward bind.
Doesn't "birth" mean anything? Sure there's a continuity between the fetus and the neonate, but a 3-month old fetus is still a very different thing from an infant fresh out of the womb. Why not be worried about spilling one's seed? Every one of those billions of spermatozoa is half of a potential life. And all those tampons flushed daily down toilets contain material of potential lives.
For most of Western history, abortion was not a problem. It didn't become a problem until a bit more than 100 years ago. I think Yoshie's right - the "hardness" is a social construction; it has nothing to do with the issue (or the non-issue) itself.
Doug