mbs: isn't it though? Doesn't the newborn have rights, while the fetus' are contested? Of course birth is a dividing line for the baby as well.
. . . Murder is bad but so is slavery, and enforced pregnancy is a form of slavery on women. One can grant some level of personhood to a fetus, at least on the order of animals, yet say those "rights to life" fall compared to the right of freedom for the mother. Yet if the child is months premature, we still grant a strong right to life to the child and demand medical treatment because their are no other rights in conflict.
So the issue is not talking about the personhood of the fetus at any point but how its rights stack up against other claimants, particularly the mother most effected by a pregnancy. Absolute line drawing gets you almost nowhere in such a situation. -- nathan
mbs: here again I think you're a little pregnant, no pun intended. Personhood connotes rights. And surely the most basic right is to exist, which in and of itself trumps any concern by the mother, other than equivalent biological existence. I can't escape the conclusion that outside of practical considerations about enforcement, the only philosophical justification for abortion rights is that society has the right to decide (and routinely makes decisions in this vein) who lives and who dies. That can be a hard case to make, so people tend to fall back on evasions.