Briefly to give examples:
If you say abortion is OK because fetuses are not conscious or self-conscious beings, what's wrong with infanticide? Why is passing through the cervix a morally significant event that makes murder to kill you on the outside but a woman's right on the inside?
If you say that abortion is OK because the fetus, even if it is a person with all the rights that normal adults have, does not have the right to commandeer a woman's body against her wishes, aren't you saying that it has no right to the _means_ of life? But if you are a leftist, don't you think that everybody who has been born has an equal right to the means of life? Don't we support providing everyone with those means even if some people don't want to share and have to be forced to cooperate?
On the other hand . . . .
If you say that the fetus is a person with all the rights that a normal adult person has, or at least a right to life even if the pregnant woman (whom antiabortionists inevitably describe as "the mother") objects to providing it, aren't you saying that everyone has a right to means of life, that we need social welfare programs and guaranteed full employment and national health, even if some people don't want to pay for these things? (Lots of anti-abortionists are right wingers who do not want these things.
If you say the fetus is a person, at the moment of birth and going back to conception because, even though there are significant changes between a fertilized egg and a near-newborn, there is no point ot event that you can single out as making the difference, do you want deny abortions to women whose lives or health would be endangered by pregnancy, or who are pregnant because of incest or rape?
If you say that a fertilized egg is a person because there is no point to draw the line between and a newborn, aren't you saying, given that many pregnancies spontaneously abort, so that the fertilized egg is really only potentially a person, that anything that is potentially a person has a right to whatever is required to make that potentiality real? Doesn't that mean that contraception is equivalent to murder? In fact, that failing to have as much sex as you can with the intention of making babies makes you mass murderer?
OK, nuff said along those lines. The arguments get quite arcane very quickly, and people have written multi-volume books and libraries of scholarly articles on them.
The thing is, though people on both sides repeat (usually in laypeople's simplified terms) versions these arguments, I do not believe that the abortion debate is a social conflict driven by philosophical disagreement. The philosophy is a way that people express themselves, but there is something else going on here. It is, as the man with the pipe used to say, No Accident that the pro-choice and anti-abortion positions are part of a constellation of associated political attitudes that are logically unrelated but iusually grouped.
Pro-choice people tend to be progressives, leftists, liberals, and feminists. Anti-abortion people tend to be right wing, often fundamentalists or evangelicals, aggressively pro-capitalist, and very patriarchal and anti-feminist. There are exceptions, but they tend to be "prove the rule" exceptions. Catholicism is anti-abortion and has a theoretical committment to a progressive social gospel that repudiates a society based on greed, but despite the occasional Papal pronouncement, where does the Church put its efforts?
I think that for complicated reasons that are hard to spell out, the abortion debate really is about, most narrowly, women's rights to self-determination and the defensibility (or not) of patriarchy, and more broadly about whether you're on the right or the left, to put it crudely. That, and not a curious attachment to some metaphysical doctrine about the moral status of the fetus and the nature of personhood, is what makes this disagreement political. Pragmatically it also indicates where you should come down on the morality of abortion.
Btw, if you think fetuses are people or have the moral rights of people, it is very hard to see how you can defend the _legality_ of abortion. One possible way is to say that we shouldn't make laws based on highly debated deep philosophical views that are not widely shared.
--- On Fri, 12/12/08, Peter Ward <nevadabob at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> From: Peter Ward <nevadabob at hotmail.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Catholicism, was Re: blacks about as morally conservative as Republicans
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 4:29 PM
> The fact is, one encounters to extremes of fanatics and
> nothing in the middle. Whereas, aborting seems to me to be
> an issue where the answer is very murky. On the one hand the
> fetus is an organ of the mother's body, on the other a
> human being with rights independent of the mother. Yet it is
> rare to meet one person who will admit both these obvious
> facts.
>
> Personally, as a libertarian, I believe that abortion
> should be legal (i.e., I do not believe there are compelling
> enough arguments for it to be outlawed and that any law
> requires very compelling areguments) but I also believe if
> used simply to end an unwanted pregnancy that it is an
> amoral practice. It may be used in a moral manner with out
> qualification in only two cases that I see: where the
> pregnancy endangers the mother's life or where it
> appears the nascent child's quality of life will suffer
> do to birth defects than cannot be treated (at exactly what
> point we may considered quality of lfe infringed upon I
> don't think it will be possible to give an general
> answer and the decision made will of its nature always be
> controversial). I am not sure why incest is generally
> permitted as an acceptable situation to have an abortion
> (assuming the fetus if free from birth defects), it is true
> there is a social stigma, but whether the stigma is that
> terrible to suffer compared to !
> many others one can think of that are never mentioned in
> this connection is not apparent. Even in the case of rape,
> the rights of the fetus ought to be considered as well as of
> the mother. As I mentioned, I think it should be legal and I
> think in practice the decision the mother herself makes on
> the matter will be the best one. But I think if a sane
> conclusion is to come of this issue liberals need to drop
> the hypocritical stance of pretending that there are not
> valid arguments against abortion accompanied by the use of
> euphemisms such as "pro choice" that efface the
> fact we are arguing for the destruction of a human life.
>
> > Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:56:57 -0500
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > From: shag at cleandraws.com
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Catholicism, was Re: blacks
> about as morally conservative as Republicans
> >
> > At 12:41 PM 12/11/2008, Jenny Brown wrote:
> > >
> > >The main problem is that if you blame
> 'religion' for public views without
> > >taking a deeper look, where does that take you in
> the practical
> > >realm? Attack the public's religiosity?
>
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