The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord and let the fetus starve in the womb?
However, that aside, my point is that once you take death as inevitable, then the mechanism to do may fall to minimizing suffering. And so, it stands to reason that a procedure which a) doesn’t result in long, perhaps painful starvation and b) doesn’t put the mother at risk by having a dead fetus inside of her are worthy considerations. I do think that you are right to think that the violence of current procedures, while perhaps ethical due to minimization of suffering, may be contributing to moral confusion about the right to cut vs right to kill or the dehumanization of the fetus. I do fear that as this moral confusion winds it’s way upward, the rights to abortion may expand beyond viability, which to me would flip my position on where I stand with regards to maintaining the legal status quo vs reversing it. I support Roe v Wade but would not support a law which gave a mother discretion to terminate past viability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
If it's clear the mother went to the woods to create this environment to kill the child, then a state could consider prosecuting.
If there was a plane crash and it was clear that the mother was distraught and this was a side effect of the crash, I don't think most states with prosecute, but again, depends on the state.
In other words, it’s not murder, and is ethical, to pull the plug on someone who’s hooked to your body to survive, if there is no other way to save them.
This is a very enlightened stance imo, and inductively implies abortion will one day be both illegal and in low demand.