Here are my basic thoughts on it...
There are conflicting values on this issue, and, taken in isolation, each of the values is quite legitimate. So the value of preserving human life, or for that matter the life of any organism, that is a value that makes sense to accept. You shouldn't just go arbitrarily kill some animal because it's fun to kill it. That's a reasonable value. Then again, most people will agree to swat a mosquito. At that point, the idea that life should be valued has come into conflict with another value; obviously avoiding annoyance or saving one's own life/the life of others, since mosquito's are vectors for West Nile and heartworms. This is, of course, commonly the case. The values that we hold are not absolute. They are always contingent. They conflict. Life is made up of decisions and complicated situations in cases of conflicting values.
If you listen to just one in isolation, yes, it may sound legitimate and perhaps is, but you have to ask what it means under particular conditions. So, choice is legitimate, preserving life is legitimate, and sometimes they run into conflict.
Now, everyone in this debate is against outright infanticide. That is, taking a live child and deciding to kill them because it's too much trouble to take care of them. Everyone agrees on that. At least, every reasonable person I know in the debate who isn't questioning the premises of the debate. Everyone agrees that women should be able to wash their hands. I suppose you could make a case that when a woman washes her hands, cells flake off and some future technology might be able to use the information in those cells to construct a potential child. So somewhere between washing your hands and killing a three year old, there are decisions to be made about how we're going to balance what we call life, which is there in the cells in your hand, against lots of other problems. And those decisions are not simple.
People who say, "Well, I know that it's at..." whatever number of days can't be taken seriously. What we're talking about are ambiguous issues, of a complicated kind, where you have to balance conflicting interests and concerns. As is generally the case in human life in general. You're not going to get the answers from holy texts. You're not going to get the answers from biologists. These are matters of human concern that have to be discussed seriously and reasonably with attention to the array of differing values that people have and decisions they may come to under similar circumstances.
The whole question is about what you think makes killing wrong. I think that's one reason why the philosophical discussion with the general public has not come very far; because people really haven't confronted that issue. They've tried arguing over whether the fetus is human or not, just accepting the premise that killing innocent human beings is always wrong. I think if they'd gone a little bit farther and said, "Well, in one sense the fetus is obviously a human being...it's a homo-sapien and alive, but what are the characteristics that make it particularly wrong to kill a human being? Why do we think that killing a human being is normally wrong?"
And I think that if you start asking those questions, you see that it's not just being a member of the species homo-sapien that makes killing wrong. It's the fact that we (you and I) as humans have certain capacities. We think. We can want to go on living. We are aware that we are living and can wish to go on living. All of those variables contribute to why we think killing humans is wrong. But none of that applies to the fetus. When most abortions are performed, the fetus is not even conscious. Certainly it's never a being that can think, "I want to go on living."
So, the question then becomes, what makes killing humans wrong in what cases, and why? And how do these answers then pertain to your opinion of killing a fetus?
Beyond that, the important issue in the practical sense is whether abortion is legal or not.
I agree that birth control and sex education should be prerequisites in our society, thus eliminating alot of need for legal abortions. If you have legal abortions, I think that you need to have it in conjunction with those two things when going through school; to have cheap, easily accessible means of birth control, and an understanding of how to use them based on good, sound sex education. Concerning the legal cut off, though, I think it is best to simply keep the cut off before the fetus can feel pain, which apparently they can only start to feel pain at around 24 weeks.
Concerning the general issue of abortion being legal, however, I think that the illegalization of abortion disproportionately hurts poor women by comparison to more wealthy women because wealthy women can generally get an abortion whether it's legally available or not. It's a global community and they have the ability to fly to others countries where abortion is legally available and there is someone medically qualified to perform the abortion. The tragedy, to me, is the tens of thousands of women who die each year from botched abortions in countries where abortion is illegal.
In fact it is very well established that as women have more opportunities, better education, as better medical care is available, as more family planning is available, fertility rates go down, abortion goes down, children are better cared for, and women are healthier. Those things are known. And those are all things that are easily under social control and shouldn't be controversial. I don't think there should be anything controversial about making sure that women can have access to decent...say, obstetric care. That alone would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. If you want to do things that can help people, there are very easy ways to do it.
And it's not just true of women. It's also true of children. UNICEF reports that...if my memory serves me well, that about 15 million children die every year from mostly easily preventable/treatable diseases such as dehydration, diarrhea, and lack of drinkable water. Things that can very easily be treated, and could be treated literally for pennies a day from the wealthier countries of the world. So, when people say that they want to save children's lives, there are easy ways to do it.
On the other hand, if you look at the same people who are most militant about saving the fetus...are they for increasing foreign aid? Are they concerned with the fact that the United States has, by quite a large margin, the most miserly foreign aid program of any developed country. The country's got plenty of wealth. The means are easily there. They're just being used to enrich the wealthy even further and let the poor suffer, let the children die, let them starve, let the mothers die, and so on. That's an overwhelming problem.
Among people who are willing to address those problems, I at least take them seriously when we talk about things like values. When you can take people seriously in their values, you can take them seriously on other issues, such as abortion, which is a hard question to tackle. But I don't think most people should be interested in discussing with others whose values are such that they don't care about the massive problem of killing and harming women and children they could easily help...and are doing nothing about.
So, on the legal issue, I think that if you keep legal abortions available in conjunction with a functioning education and medical system, this would be a much smaller issue. And at that point it may be reasonable to assume it to be acceptable to have an abortion if the fetus cannot feel pain and has yet to reach the point of being able to live independently from its mother. Without those things, however, I still think that the disallowance of legal abortions is still detrimental to the society at large, and especially to women and children.
So when you look at it as a situation of "which is the lesser of two evils", I think it's reasonable to conclude that abortion should be at least tolerated on a societal level and left legal, if not accepted as a necessary evil as humans currently stand in our mental evolution and our ability to attain utopian ideals, such as no longer needing abortions at all.
Personally, I fall under being pro-choice because I reserve judgment on how irresponsible the average couple is that needs an abortion and prefer for there to be more freedom in most cases as a matter of principle.
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