If you were raped, and it wasn't your choice, then yes I agree there's an argument that you should have the legal right to decide for yourself what the moral/ethical thing to do is.

But if you instead put the baby in your uterus, of your own free will and choice, you are responsible for it.

Rape accounts for less than 0.5% of abortions. While it's important to consider, it doesn't remove the responsibility in the other 99.5%.

I acknowledge that a person is responsible for what happens in their own body. The key point is that getting an abortion IS taking responsibility, not its abdication. If you are pregnant and do not want to give birth, getting an abortion is the only responsible choice. It would be far more negligent to give birth, risking additional medical complications, and bringing an unwanted person into the world.

I am under no more ethical obligation to preserve the life of a fetus in me than I am to preserve the life of an intestinal parasite that I've ingested.

> First of all, as others have pointed out, laws that prohibit abortion even in cases of rape and incest overlook the "choosing to take action" part. In that case, a person is pregnant without ever having made a choice to engage in any action at all.

Yeah, obviously, but it barely matters for the overall argument. It's misdirection, not a substantive refutation. Is anyone on the pro-choice side happy with only allowing abortions in cases of rape and incest? I'm not. I'm pretty sure that falls under the pro-life umbrella, in fact. All this shows is that one part of the pro-life camp may have a better-reasoned position than another.

> Moreover, "living thing" is the key word here. A fetus IS a living thing. So is a cow, a cockroach, an intestinal parasite. We kill those, and we support industries that kill them, without thinking. And while there are extremists who support protecting a broader segment of "life," that is not what the pro-life movement is about. If I breed cows for a living, I have a legal and ethical right to kill those cows. And if I have a baby attached to my uterus, I should have the legal right to do what I want.

This still doesn't address the argument. In fact your keying in on "living thing" and trying to build on that as an argument is pure semantic mumbo-jumbo. Replace that phrase with "baby" (which I avoided so we wouldn't immediately have that other ridiculous, pointless discussion) and all that junk about cows is irrelevant, which it was anyway.

Again: I'm pro-choice, to be clear. I just find most arguments from "my side" totally fail to address the "other side"'s actual positions, which is frustrating if, like me, you hope for your position to gain support. Bad arguments just make us look like we're wrong.

1. There are certainly more and less extreme flavors of the pro-life movement. I reject your assertion that the more extreme side is negligible, as there are laws on the books, and now enforceable, that prohibit abortion in all cases, such as in Louisiana.

2. Fetuses are not babies. Babies are people, from a legal and ethical perspective; fetuses are not. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, as abortion would already be considered murder. So yes, fetuses are living, but that does not afford them any rights, any more than cows have rights by virtue of being alive, and it certainly doesn't afford them rights that supersede those of an actual person.

In other words: in our society, we give rights to people, not to mere "living things."

> 1. There are certainly more and less extreme flavors of the pro-life movement. I reject your assertion that the more extreme side is negligible, as there are laws on the books, and now enforceable, that prohibit abortion in all cases, such as in Louisiana.

It's not that that faction's negligible, it's that the argument isn't helpful for refuting "the mother does have some obligation to a life that was created and became dependent on her through her own actions" because someone who holds that position probably doesn't disagree with you that rape and incest are exceptions. It's a distraction not from the broader debate, but specifically from substantively addressing this particular position.

> 2. Fetuses are not babies. Babies are people, from a legal and ethical perspective; fetuses are not. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, as abortion would already be considered murder. So yes, fetuses are living, but that does not afford them any rights, any more than cows have rights by virtue of being alive, and it certainly doesn't afford them rights that supersede those of an actual person.

This is precisely the point of contention, and it is far from clear-cut even on the pro-choice side. That's why 3rd trimester abortion rights are far less popular than the rest—even to many pro-choicers, the is-/isn't-a-baby question is settled at some point before birth, but after the 1st trimester.

I think it's extremely relevant to discuss the extreme pro-life position opposing all forms of abortion, because it's the only form that's logically consistent. If one truly believes that abortion is murder, then it doesn't matter how the baby was conceived. On the other hand, what is pro-life's ethical justification for allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest? Are you saying that murder is okay in some cases? In my opinion, it's just another example of the right's crippling hypocrisy.

The argument that abortion is tolerable in cases where the women does not choose to have sex shows your hand: the pro-life movement was never about protecting life, it has always been about punishing women. You are okay killing fetuses as long as the woman didn't actually have the temerity to enjoy sex.

You have #2 backwards. The reason we're even debating this is because we can't agree on when the fetus becomes a person with rights. Pro-lifer's are very much arguing that it is murder. 43ish? states currently prohibit abortion after a certain point in pregnancy prior to birth [0][1]

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states...

[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/05/14/abortion-state-laws-bans-ro...

Pro-lifers may SAY that they think that abortion is murder, but there is no law, even a proposed law, that literally treats it as such.

I just want to jump in and say that even though we don't agree on the issue at hand, I nonetheless appreciate you trying to clear up bad arguments and present only the strongest arguments.

It's often exhausting trying to get people to think with their brains rather than with the tips of their tongues, and all the bad arguments muddy waters.