If I may:
One of the aspects of a free society is that we are very hesitant to force individuals into situations (or keep individuals in such situations) where they must suffer and have no remedy for that suffering. We hesitate before instituting a military draft or mandatory military service (and even then, provide the possibility of various “outs” such as conscientious objector status). Though we must imprison criminals, our prisons do not have torture chambers (please spare me a Bush-related hijack) where we inflict additional suffering just for the hell of it. In granting individuals a degree of personal freedom and autonomy, we recognize that our individuals can make their own decisions and need not run to a government agency and the arbitrary decision of a bureaucrat to solve every problem, great or small.
If an individual dislikes his job, he has a remedy - he can quit and get a new one. If a marriage is unsatisfactory, the married couple can dissolve it. There was a time when, for some of the population at least, neither of these situations were escapable - being born into slavery or serfdom specifically prevented anyone from leaving an arduous job, under pain of death. Marriages were not dissolvable; a wife who was being beaten by her husband had no choice but to keep taking the abuse. Agents of the state would very much like to enter homes at will, but we recognize the value of protecting the individual from this intrusion and it is the state that must prove its need, not the individual.
This is critical - the individual does not have to provide reasons to the state for wishing to exercise a freedom. A man who quits his job need not explain his decision, though he may choose to do so if some sort of contractual penalty applies. With the advent of no-fault divorce, it is sufficient that a couple files some paperwork expressing their wish for a divorce, not their reasons for seeking it. A person who owns a home need not come up with reasons why the police cannot arbitrarily search it.
We recognize these freedoms and accept that whatever reason the individuals have, be they in the eyes of a casual observer fully justified one or fully frivolous one, the decision belongs to those individuals. Experience tells us that is reasons are demanded, with some reasons being unacceptable, individuals will simply learn what answer to give to the inquisitor that will satisfy him and prevent further interference. If forced to decide between continued suffering and a quick lie, individuals will lie. Which of the acceptable reasons is the most vague and difficult to prove or disprove? That is the one that will be claimed most often. Prior to no-fault divorce, when a specific misdeed on the part of one spouse was a required element, a common accusation was “mental cruelty”. Was it true? Can it be proven? Who knows? It was, however, the easiest hoop (or at least one of the easiest) to jump through to satisfy the authorities. As a result, it didn’t matter anymore if mental cruelty was actually happening to anyone, because anyone could claim it and many did (in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas describes using “mental cruelty” as the grounds to end his first marriage, deliberately chosen as the path of least resistance - I also suggest the wiki page on “no-fault divorce” for more immediate perusal).
Situations where an individual is being intruded upon by another require some care, of course. Is someone staring at you on a dark street an intrusion? I expect not, since that person’s right to be there is presumably equal to your own, and if you feel menaced, you are perfectly free to walk on. The person who was staring at you begins to walk in your direction. Is this an intrusion? Again, I expect not, since his right of movement is again equal to your own. At some point, you may feel menaced, especially if you walk faster and for some distance but the other person stays with you. You do not have the freedom to preemptively assault the stranger, and if you did, I fully expect any reasonable person would want the police or the courts to later examine the event and require you explain your reasoning, and the reasoning better be sound. In the situation described so far, you do not full freedom of action - the stranger’s rights remain equal to your own.
You get to your house and it’s at this point that the laws (in some venues, at least) begin to slide in your favour. During your public interaction with the stranger, you had the ability to withdraw if you felt threatened, and the legal norm was that you should withdraw (or at least try to) before taking violent action. Now, in your home, you don’t necessarily have to withdraw, even if it is possible. If the stranger enters without your consent, you can (again, exactly to what degree varies by venue) take violent action. Your intent is to remove the stranger from your house. Your reasons for wanting the stranger removed
are now irrelevant - you may feel your life is in danger, or not. You may feel your possessions are in danger, or not. You may want your privacy, or not. It doesn’t matter. The law recognizes your right to make the decisions and not be questioned on them. The circumstances may be open to question (i.e. did you invite the person in and then attack him?) but the fundamental right to exclude others from your home is not, nor are you required to put yourself at physical risk or discomfort during the exercise of this right.
Naturally enough, I would hope, the solution you choose involves the least necessary amount of violence and bloodshed. It may be enough to say “Hey, get out!” to make the stranger leave. Calling the police (or just saying that you’re calling them) may suffice. You might have to brandish a weapon. You might have to use it. While you later may have to answer a few questions about what happened, as the paramedics lift the stranger’s corpse onto a stretcher, you were not required to just sit back and accept the stranger’s intrusion. You could choose a remedy. Even in your home, of course, the law is not absolutely on your side, in that all remedies are equally acceptable. You will probably have to satisfy some legal standard of “reasonable”. No matter what, though, you have the right to choose to not share your home with the intruder. There are a myriad ways to serve this goal, some violent, others not, some involving police, others not, but the goal itself is unassailable and can’t be denied to you. The intruder may not have malicious intent. The intruder may be a mentally-ill adult or a lost child. No legal duty of protection attaches to the homeowner just because of this. A call to the police will likely solve the problem cleanly and easily (with the intruder hopefully returned to whatever custodial situation does have the duty of protection), but no matter how sympathetic the intruder is, the homeowner’s right of exclusion remains inviolate and he still need not explain why he wants this intruder out. It is enough that he does want the intruder out.
And then we come to abortion. If one has the right to remove an intruder from one’s home, I feel it follows that one has the right to remove an intruder from one’s body (essentially your “home”, reduced to its smallest set). That the intruder is a fetus, and thus to some people especially sympathetic, doesn’t eliminate the body-owner’s right of exclusion, nor need she put herself at risk or discomfort. Allowed to stay, the fetus will grow to impose a very considerable discomfort and burden on its host. As with the home-intruder, the owner is under no obligation to suffer this without remedy. At the moment, the only current remedies happen to be, as far as the fetus is concerned, lethal. This in no way removes the right of remedy (as I’ll call it) from the owner. There may come a time when nonlethal options exist. Great. Until then (and even then), I respect a woman’s right to choose because the alternative is and always has been far worse.
If the law was even-handed toward the strangers on the street (with no clearly definable intrusion at play) but biased in favour of the home-owner (where the intrusion is apparent), it must be even more so in favour of the uterus-owner (where the intrusion is even more extreme). Like it or not, a pregnancy (and later, a child) is a burden, despite notions of glorious motherhood and placing women on pedestals and such. There are some remedies in place once the child is born (adoption, newborn “drop-offs” at firehouses and such), but the remedy that is least stressful on the woman is a safe, quick, first-trimester abortion. She is (or at least should be) under no obligation to extend the pregnancy solely for the comfort of persons whose involvement in the situation barely rises to the level of irrelevant. As with the pre-no-fault divorces, if she must give a reason to satisfy the authorities, there is nothing stopping her from choosing the vaguest, most difficult to prove or disprove reason available. If rape is an acceptable reason, that is what she’ll claim. Being forced to carry a pregnancy and being forced to stay in a marriage and being forced to suffer a home intruder are all difficult burdens. Individuals can (and always have) found remedies to their problems and a society systematically eliminating these remedies in the name of a morality not all its citizens share simply invites the invention of workaround solutions that accomplish the same goal but with greater risk. Not allowed to tell strangers to leave your home? Buy a gun and shoot them on sight and make it look like self-defense. Want a divorce but can’t get one? Either lie in court or consider having your spouse killed. Safe abortion no longer available? Find one that’s not-so-safe, performed secretly by a sympathetic doctor, or nurse, or inserted coathanger.
Humans that find themselves in unwanted situations have a remarkable capacity for getting out of them. I have no illusions about pregnancy - which on the “potentially unwanted” scale for some people has to be pretty close to “terminal illness”. I don’t buy into the fiction that abortion is a recently-discovered sin or that it’s an industry marshaled by radical feminists or radical atheists (or radical anyone, really). I decline to be moved by appeals to emotion involving dead children. As far as I’m concerned, the only important person in the issue is the woman who wants as much safety and comfort in her body as I want in my home. The rights of the intruder are not compelling enough for me to give up my right of remedy. I see no reason she should give up hers.
As far as I can tell, there are no major logical leaps or errors in the above, though I acknowledge plenty of room for disagreement (and probably lots of valid charges of clumsy phrasing). I hope those who feel the woman’s choice must be taken from her understand why I can’t join them, and why I feel compelled to resist their efforts.