First, curious to see that cited.

Second, Anti-abortion people are ok with causing significant harm to women and see their lives as less valuable and not worth protecting.

If it wasn't true, there would have to be a Simpson's paradox of epic proportions to account for the improved mental health outcomes of anti-abortion-aligned demographics. Pro-abortion republicans would have to be the happiest people in the world by a huge margin.

This isn't an argument about whether abortion is moral. Please don't bring this down to an object-level argument about abortion - I have zero interest in that. This is about the psychological states of groups who believe in the presence of an urgent moral crisis.

Are latent baby lives not worth protecting?

Why would you prioritize a “latent” life over an actual life? Anti-choice people only seem to care about others up until birth, at which point your poverty is your own problem and you shouldn’t have had so many kids.

Do you think anti-abortion activists would be OK with state-sanctioned intentional murder of babies who have been born? That would be the prediction of your model if it was applied consistently.

Being against (what you believe to be) murder should be very easily distinguishable from being in favor of whatever flavor of welfare program you're thinking about.

That's how anti-choice people want to frame the argument, but that's not the only "applied consistently" frame available, and frankly it's not one that I'm interested in. The decision is to carry a child to term, or to not carry a child to term - the "murder" (as some see it) is a consequence of the decision, not the decision itself. Nobody is choosing to have an abortion in order to kill.

So, applying that consistently, if you believe that fetuses are people, the question would be - are you ok with people being able to make legal ("state-sanctioned") choices that result in the death of other people? And of course we all are ok with that to some degree - driving is legal (40k/year dead in the USA), as is gun ownership (30k/year), as is deregulating the EPA (unknowable but large numbers of cancer deaths), and climate inaction (unknowable and growing numbers of climate related deaths).

> people being able to make legal choices that result in the death of other people? ... gun ownership (*30k/year*)

As must be frequently pointed out, well over half the deaths by firearm in the US are not the killing of other people, but suicides.

Of the killing of "other people", I'd wager a minority of those are associated with legal ownership - prior surveys of inmates in the US in prison for gun related offenses (not just homicide) show a great portion (40+%) obtained the gun used for the offense from an illegal source.

I'm guessing this representation of illegal ownership goes up when you filter for just homicide offenses (the killing of other people) and when you consider whether the possession itself was legal, even if obtained from a legal source.

Manslaughter or the killing of other people outside of homicides/suicides are in the low single percentage digits of the total figure.

You seem to be mistaking me for an anti-abortion person. I don't think you are engaging in this conversation at the right (non-object) level, and are engaging in a completely unrelated argument entirely, so I'm respectfully going to cut this off here.

I did not mistake you for someone who believed that. I took you for someone relating an argument that requires adopting a framing that I don’t hold and does not interest me

'My decision was whether I would pull the trigger or not to pull the trigger, not to commit a murder!'

We're pretty happy to accept "I pulled the trigger because I thought my life was in danger" as a reason to not punish someone for killing... many are happy with "I pulled the trigger because I thought my property was in danger". Some are even happy with "I pulled the trigger because they were threatening me for pointing a gun at them".

The reason for the trigger pull, it turns out, matters quite a bit to people.

In my view, it's not comparable.

Abortion is not something that you have to deal with daily, whereas food (other peoples', your own) is.

But, it would make sense perhaps, if many of the empathic vegetarians would also be anti-abortion too.

> But, it would make sense perhaps, if many of the empathic vegetarians would also be anti-abortion too.

Depends on where your empathy goes. You also have to consider the life of the one carrying the foetus, and the life that a being that is not yet sentient would get if it were to live. I don't see any inconsistency with being vegetarian in that respect.

Refusing to eat mussels but being supportive of abortion would seem inconsistent, though... As well as being fearlessly against abortion while enjoying a piece of a cow one in a while seems very inconsistent, if you set aside religious believes.

Just a point on the logic here - let’s agree that the trade-off is not always (perhaps even infrequently) one life for the other life in any given case of a desired abortion. It’s a spectrum that goes from the mother’s at-risk life at the most grave to convenience of lifestyle / avoidance of responsibility at the most callous. All abortions are not one or the other, but all points on this spectrum are represented. The debate is often framed to highlight one extreme scenario or the other as justifying a specific policy carte blanche. But we do ourselves a disservice as wannabe rational thinkers be ceding either assumption to the passionate advocacies on each side.

Fully agree with you there.

> convenience of lifestyle / avoidance of responsibility at the most callous

That was also what I was thinking of when I wrote taking into consideration the life of the unborn child. Being undesired or a burden isn't really giving someone the best chances of being happy and fulfilled. But then again, we can come up marginal cases.

I basically agree, except for this bit:

"and the life that a being that is not yet sentient would get if it were to live"

I don't know that I think it's not sentient, nor that it is not yet alive. I recognise that might not accord with scientific opinion, but there it is.