In the abortion debate, pro-choice advocates often argue that no one should have the right to tell a woman what to do with her own body. I agree. No one has that right. But this is a red herring because pro-life advocates are not telling women what to do with their own bodies, but rather what to do with someone else’s body.
While an abortion takes place within a woman’s body, the act of abortion is targeted toward the body of a separate human being. The goal of abortion is to end the life of that human being – often by cutting his/her body into pieces. Since it is morally wrong to take the life of an innocent human being, the act of abortion is morally evil.
The bodily autonomy argument makes as much sense as saying “You don’t have a right to tell me not to murder someone.” All homicide laws aim to take away our right to murder another person. Pro-life advocates are merely applying this same logic to abortion since the object of the abortion is also a human being.
Thinking to Believe 
January 8, 2020 at 6:10 am
I haven’t read all the posts here, so this may be superfluous, but…
The posts I’ve read all make the same basic assumption: the result of a human-sperm-and-egg union is a “human.” But not everyone accepts that a genetic content is the same thing as “human.” Many believe that “human-ness” is the result of the interaction of that genetic structure — i.e., the “individual” — with its environment, generating such abstracts as “consciousness” “self-awareness,” and probably a host of other qualities that develop as the individual matures.
This is a very complex argument, requiring much more than a sound-bite approach. The “fertilization equal person” advocate would have to be prepared to define (among other things) just which genetic content satisfies the “human” criteria (and how to deal with variations). The advocate of a more gradual development of “human-ness” has to struggle with identifying the point at which the fetus crosses the line into “being human.”
The courts have weighed in on the argument, generally using the ability of the fetus to survive outside the uterus (about 24-to-26 weeks of gestation) as “the line.” That doesn’t resolve the issue (“fetal viability” is not a hard-and-fast line); it merely gives the legal system a “marker” to describe when the fetus becomes the subject of a societal rather than just a personal concern.
Whether abortion constitutes “murder” is yet another difficult concept: Our society does not consider all “killing” to be “murder,” and where abortion falls on that spectrum is a bit wiggly: religion, social norms, legal definitions, personal integrity, individual rights (both fetal and parental) and societal rights — all have their say.
It’s probably best not to get too prescriptive, particularly if the prescription is driven by a religious conviction. The Supreme Court seems to have given us a manageable balancing act.
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