I understand your point. It just seems to me that an argument should take into account as many possibilities as possible: both current issues and potential future issues. That’s not to say you have to base a decision on every future possibility, but it pays to think about them. At least IMHO.
Even if that were true (which it isn’t), that would actually support the OP’s position rather than disprove it. According to the OP, the relevant deciding factor is the LIFE of the individual – not considerations such as “It’s my body!”
This is pretty commonsensical. If the unborn is a living human being, then the whole “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it” argument uses an erroneous premise. If the unborn is a living human being, then it is NOT part of the woman’s body. It may be physically attached, but it is not part of the woman’s anatomy.
I usually avoid the abortion debate for possibly obvious reasons but I think I see where the OP is coming from. I am a male and have had two partners have terminations and two others think they were going to have to. In each case I agreed and offered all the support I could (including attending).
It has always been my impression that pro-lifers and pro-choicers are aguing about two different things and that the discussion is futile.
Pro-choice (colour me and my partners) is not a moral position it is a legal position. The law says we can do this and that is what we choose to do. Never did any decision involve a discussion of the morality of the procedure. This may be coloured by the fact that myself and all my partners were medical professionals but nonetheless our actions were guided by expediency.
Pro-lifers however are attempting to ensure that they do not compromise the rights of another living creature - pretty much the basis of morality and ethics.
Since no-one can agree when a foetus has any rights of it’s own, I imagine it would be best, for those trying to be moral, to choose the earliest possible moment.
But as I say we pro-choicers aren’t being moral, we are being pragmatic - you will find plenty of posts in any thread where pro-choicers happily admit that they don’t care “what” theya are killing, they just have the right to do it.
How do you feel about giving up half of a pair of conjoined twins so that the other may live a better, more normal life? Happens all the time. I recently read a statistic that only 25% of separated conjoined twins result in both kids surviving. Is it OK?
Q.E.D.
What is that old saw? Oh yes, “A difference of opinion is what makes horse races.” 
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I always took the “it’s my body” thing to mean “It’s my body and I will decide whether or not it plays host to a developing fetus”, rather than “It[the Fetus] is [part of]my body”
I don’t have time to carefully read all the responses right now, but I think the OP is right on.
In the abortion issue, there are too many people on both sides who just don’t get, or even wilfully misunderstand, where the other side is coming from. So they keep shouting past each other, yelling slogans that are irrelevant to the other side’s argument.
Except that in Pennsylvania there is something called Baby Safe Haven. Any woman or girl who has recently given birth can legally drop her newborn off at a hospital, no questions asked not even her name, and be done with it permanently. They keep the brochures for this program in the lobby of the building where I work (I work on a college campus), so I picked it up and read it once. That is how the program is described in the brochure.
So the argument that she can’t decide she doesn’t want to be a parent after the birth is actually, at least in PA, not true. She can decide not to be a parent. The biological father can’t.
Did you mean this to be as ironic as it appears?
If and only if transplanting the embryo is less or exactly as invasive as aborting it would be, then I’d agree that it would be immoral to abort if the father wished to raise the child. I don’t see how that would be possible, so I guess the answer is no, unless that condition is met.
For me, both the issue of the woman’s medical autonomy and the fetus’ status as a rights-bearing being are relevant. A woman has the right to control her own medical decisions. If the President of the United States desperately needed a bone marrow transplant, and the only possible donor refused to give it, then the President is SOL. He doesn’t have the right to force another person to make a medical decision to prolong his own life.
This situation doubly true to abortion situations, because the clump of cells that make up an embryo in early pregnancy simply isn’t human by any meaningful moral standard. It’s non-sentient, it’s microscopic, it’s cells number in the dozens, not the trillions. Many such beings end up thrown away with the rest of the menstral waste, the parents never knowing it ever existed. The President, or the superglued baby, are at least capable of some kind of thought or suffering
Abortion does not involve another individual’s right to life.
That’s a lesser of two evils situation. Better she abandon it at a hospital than a dumpster. It’s like a needle exchange program, or a no questions asked gun buy-back program. It doesn’t condone the behavior, but the program is still in the better interests of society.
If the father were to somehow find the child, then he could still sue the mother for support. In fact, in many cases, if he asked for government assisstance, he’d be required to demand support from the other parent.
No, the OP thinks that the deciding factor is the HUMANITY of the fetus, not whether it’s merely alive. Just because something’s alive doesn’t mean it’s a person deserving of rights.
This misstates the argument. The argument is not just that it’s PART of the woman’s body but that she has a right not to play host to a parasite.
Well, there you go. Diogenes has ended the most heated debate of our time. Thanks for playing along everyone.
In all seriousness, just because you say it loudly and often doesn’t make it so, no matter how much people like you and Ann Coulter want it to work that way. Your position is not indefensible, but you have to actually defend it rather than stating it as the gospel truth and expecting us to accept that.
You should ask if Hallmark is hiring. I can see the card now: “Congratulations: that parasite you’ve been hosting magically turned into a human being after birth!”
Mayo
Even if we grant that to be true (which I deny), then once again, that claim supports the OP’s claim, instead of disproving it.
My wife’s OB-GYN during her first pregnancy said that fetuses were basically parasites. She used the word “parasite.” I thought it was a pretty apt way to describe them. They live off a host in a non-symbiotic way and give nothing back.
Stick around; I’m sure Dio is more than capable of holding his end up; in this particular case, he replied to a one-line argument with more than one line; what’s your problem?
You’re welcome.
In all seriousness, you’re the one with the burden of proof. Just because you imagine that something is a person, doesn’t mean it is one. The default is that it isn’t. I can imagine that a chicken is a person if I want to. That wouldn’t mean that you had any burden to prove it wasn’t.
A non-sentient blood clot is not a “person” in any realistic, pragmatic, non-faith-based sense of the word.
Why is this? Why shouldn’t the default position be to extend human rights to the entity in question, unless there’s a sufficiently compelling reason not to?