How about when it’s viable outside the womb, which is earlier in the western world and later elsewhere (given the effort required to deal with preemies). Before this time, it’s a cellular construct. And, similarly, I see the commandment as thou shall not kill. There’s no asterisk that I’ve seen, so people are bending a commandment as they wish to have capital punishment. Various quotes in the New Testament about judging and vengeance suggest against capital punishment as well.

Women aren’t brood mares at the beck and call of others. There is no right to inflict one’s progeny on another.

And, if the unborn are so vital, then they should be protected before and after birth, possibly until they’re an adult. Don’t see anybody saying that they have to provide medical care to the mother and unborn child. Or, are others allowed to kill the child (pr permanently cripple it) just not the mother?

It's pretty simple, until the child is out of the womb, it's not a child. There is no overarching negative consequence if you abort that child.

There is an extremely negative consequence if you try to regulate a person who is a grown persons body.

I would only buy the argument of respecting a life if we also extend this to way beyond a child in the womb, and to everyone living. Until we do that, there's no excuse to control a person's body.

Just last night, my wife and I had a peek into the current home of our 15-week-along child. He or she was so active - wiggling and squirming, no doubt as a result of some of the prodding from the midwife. I saw arms and legs moving, fingers, feet and everything. Their heart beating at 140bpm. My other children live in the environment of our house, and this child lives in the environment of the womb. It is simple: this is a child. The consequence of killing him or her would be massive to them - ending the life which I was blessed enough to peek into for a few moments. The debate rages with passion because people are passionate about the subject - I know I am.

How would you feel if in week 16 a complication arose which meant that unless your child is aborted, your wife will die, along with your child? What choice would you make then? What if you couldn't make any choice at all, and you had to say goodbye to your wife knowing that if you lived under a different law, she'd be allowed to choose to live?

Can one choose to travel to a place where abortion is legal?

Again, this is why it's the choice of the person carrying it.

You don't want to, no one is forcing you to abort.

The discussion here is "who is forced to do something". This child in the womb would not be able to live without the life of the mother. Therefore their "choice", if you can even call it that, is irrelevant.

Control a persons body, you mean like poisoning or butchering their body and pulling out their corpse to dispose of it?

(I honestly don’t have a strong stance, but both sides have equivalent arguments and what bothers me is people refusing to acknowledge that)

Why stop there? A child about to be born is structurally and functionally identical to a child that has just been born. And once it is born, there are, as you say, "extremely negative consequences" to forcing the mother to either care for it herself or make other arrangements.

The right to dispose of any unwanted child the mother cannot or will not care for herself is one that, like in vivo abortion, women will exercise irrespective of whether the law permits it. Poor indigenous women in Brazil allow their sickly babies to starve all the time.

Conclusion: any society that does not allow humane infanticide within the first year is literally Handmaid's Tale.

By the way, let me note that this means that all the "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" is a smokescreen. The issue isn't about her body, it's about the fetus, which is not her body.

When someone brings out the "her own body" line, they're begging the question about the fetus. It's a dishonest rhetorical device. We aren't going to solve this by yelling dishonest rhetoric at each other; that hasn't worked for 50 years. We have to actually address the real question.

So long as the fetus requires the woman's body to survive, let alone come to term, it absolutely has to do with the woman's body. The fetus can also kill the woman whose body it's inhabiting.

Not considering the woman's point of view is treating her as if she's nothing more than an incubator, which comes back to "enslaving or murdering women".

And flushing her body of a fetus (or an embryo) is absolutely an action a woman may take upon her own body.

It has to do with the woman's body. But it is not only about the woman's body - the fetus exists also. The problem with the "woman's body" rhetoric is that it deliberately ignores the question of the fetus.

Just as the the pro-life stance ignores the question of the woman. There are the rights of two beings in play here, requiring compromise… something that is nowhere to be found in these discussions.

Compromise is made harder by three things, one is the parasitical relationship that only disadvantages a woman (who doesn’t want a child), the second is that a woman’s body flushing a fetus is a natural occurrence, and third is that occasionally the removal of the fetus, dead or alive, is medically required for the woman to survive.

The bans on abortions being proposed are not compromises.