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As for the "Entire life" thing, this meant the life it would have outside the womb. Where as the mother goes to risk 9 months of discomfort, the fetus goes to risk potentially 80 years of life. Vast disproportion there.

That's what this whole debate is about. xd

Call me biased, but I see that as a horrible question too, like "isn't petting kittens better than stabbing them in the throat?" You wish the answer was DUH for everyone, but it ISN'T, and I find that appalling.

For me the debate comes down to a couple things, all of which are addressed in this thread.

As far as bodily domain goes, I'll explain it in these terms: If I were walking along the street, and saw someone who needed medical attention, who was unable to help themselves, in the middle of a semi-busy road, would you go help them? Sure, running into the middle of the street is an infringement on your bodily integrity, as you might get hurt, but what's the DECENT thing to do? What does your heart tell you is right?

I like to help people. I try to make people feel loved, and in life, you need that. But what you don't need is people who see other people as worthless, for the reason that their sexual convenience is on the line.

Bodily integrity is one thing, but allowing this loophole where the death of a person is surgically manipulated, and tolerated (sometimes touted as the "answer"), is a foul idea. No deaths of people should be tolerated because life is just way too important.

Screw the war in Afghanistan, too-- that violates Bodily integrity just as much, if not more than making abortion illegal ever would.

As for personhood, you -CAN'T- define it in black and white, like many people seem to think you can. If you can abort it in the third month, why not the fifth, or seventh? What changes? Is it a frog before it turns into a human being? If you could define personhood definitively I would have no problem with abortion-- but that's just not the case.

Which is exactly, our strongest point.

LAWS, and the types of sanctions they create and principles they imply have changed, and will change. But there are somethings that seem to remain constant. Human life, in its importance (even if in a personal sense) has always remained to be around.

1000 years from now we can assume there will still be humans still holding rather tightly to their lives and the lives of those close. What i'm sure will change, however, is the types of laws they live by and what they consider "good", "bad", and the like.

That's the thing, though. Unborn humans are, without a doubt, human. And everyone alive today was, at some point, an unborn human for about nine months. There is no dispute about that (or, if there is, it's only by people who aren't very aware of biology *wink*).

But no born human has the right to use someone else's body against their will, even when they have need of that right, and would die without it. I really cannot see why unborn humans should gain this right that no born human has, even if they do attain the status of legal person and all the rights that go with this status, for all of the pregnancy.

I try really hard to understand this point, why the life of the unborn human should trump the rights of the woman. And I can't, fully (of course, since if I did I would be Pro-Life and not Pro-Choice).

As close as I can come is this thought experiment:

I love my brother more than just about anyone in the entire world. If he were dying of kidney failure, and the only thing that would save him was a donation of a kidney from, say, McPhee (since you posted last - just a bit random, no offense I hope) I would want to do everything in my power to make you give him one of your kidneys, from trying to convince it was the right thing to do to offering as much money as I could gather, and if you refused, I might even think about (though probably not try) less ethical tactics. Even though I would understand that you have the right to make decisions about your own body, I would care more about saving the life of my brother, because I love him.

For me, that about as close as I can imagine it might be to see this issue from the Pro-Life stance. I know that usually kidneys are better matches from family members than strangers, and the whole little thought experiment is extremely unlikely, but it's hard to find a scenario that fits with pregnancy, especially one which I would feel such a way about.

Does that sound at least a bit like how it feels to be Pro-Life?

But, the thing is, I would willing give up my kidney to my brother, whether or not his condition was my fault.

But Pro-Life isn't really about one person choosing to keep a pregnancy, that's just personally Pro-Life (which I am now that we can potentially afford a pregnancy, if not a child - so there is Open Adoption). It is about people not involved in that pregnancy wanting that person to not be legally allowed to choose to terminate it. If it were my kidney, there would be no conflict, just like if it were my pregnancy (at this point in my life), and were healthy, there would be no abortion.

So I have to imagine that it's someone else's kidney, because that's rather the entire point. I'm trying to understand how it would feel to care deeply about someone's life but not be in a position to have control over if that life continues or ends. And if he's already using a kidney, there isn't really the issue that comes from him needing one, even though it differs from pregnancy in that fashion.

I'm not looking for a situation that is exactly like pregnancy, because there isn't one. I'm trying to find a way to imagine feeling the same way, which is also hard.

Right, the people not involved in the pregnancy, who are trying to enact laws which protect the unborn humans. I guess maybe you are less emotionally involved than I am in my thought experiment, but I've talked to people (albeit Christians on another site) who did claim to be emotionally and spiritually involved in abortion. Which, I guess, I was more thinking about when I thought this up.
That's true.

Perhaps then I really am not capable of seeing anything from a Pro-Life-ish view. It must be like the whole Vegan thing again, something that, from my point of view, is just a difference of opinion while the other person is practically jumping up and down and screaming "how can you not see how wrong this is"? *grin*

I try, but the whole concept is really out of my grasp. Like I said, to me it doesn't make sense to give unborn humans the right to use another human's body against their will, despite the way in which they were put in that situation (and really, "no choice in the matter"? unborn humans have no choice about anything, being completely incapable of making any choices).

You'll just have to forgive me for the passive death versus active death thing, since there just isn't another situation (baring wild thought experiments about violinists in comas) where denying use of one's body requires removing someone from one's body as opposed to just not giving someone what they need to survive. To me, both deaths are still deaths, and so are comparable, but I think you feel differently.

Except that pushing someone off a roof is actively attempting to harm them. Women looking to get elective abortions were not having sex (with contraceptives, one hopes) with the intention of getting pregnant. They, rather obviously, did not and do not want to be pregnant.

Yes, pregnancy is a biological function of the female body. But it being natural doesn't mean that the woman should naturally have to consent to it, and allow the unborn human to use her body. Rape is, after all, natural (you got to compare abortion to throwing someone off a roof, therefore I am comparing pregnancy to something distasteful as well), but no one would argue that it being natural makes it right. And yes, I do see the difference between pregnancy and rape, and yes, I do believe that pregnancy is almost never as mentally traumatizing as rape.