Miles Jackson:
> Man, you just had to go there, didn't you? Now this should
> lead to thoughtful, well reasoned debate! It's the
> Dreyfus affair of our times, no?
First of all, a vegan is one who doesn't eat animal products; their reasons may or may not be connected with the interests of animals. For G. B. Shaw vegetarianism was a matter of taste, not inter-special ethics. You probably mean something like "ARA" (for "Animal Rights Advocate"), an object of derision and scorn on Usenet, or worse, "ALF" ("Animal Liberation Front (member)"). We'll call them the Silly People in accord with dominant opinion.
There are two major arguments in favor of freedom to obtain abortion. One is that the fetus is not a person; the other is that, whether it is a person or not, it has no right to sequester the body of another for its own use; it's an invader. The Silly People could argue, on the basis of nervous organization, that most fetuses were not sentient and therefore not persons, most of the time. However, the better argument is the second: the fetus does not have a right to the body of its host against the host's will. Even pretty extreme Silly People would probably concede that humans had the right to extrude an animal that was invading their bodies even if it meant the death of the animal. Since food animals do not typically invade the bodies of humans, however, the Silly People would probably hold that their interests in living were not overcome by any such consideration.
One might want to note as well that, whereas food animals are harmed solely for entertainment*, the abortion of a fetus markedly reduces many health and social risks for its host, including the risk of death. The latter may be considered important enough to seriously disadvantage any putative rights of fetuses.
I apologize for this tediously earnest argumentation which I feel compelled to enter, and hope that at least it may supply more raw material for humor, now that the vegans-are-Nazis vein seems to have been completely worked out.
-- Gordon
------------------------------------------------------- * The prey of Inuit, etc., excepted, of course. -------------------------------------------------------