Okay. So Fistful insists on hearing my opinion. It's his fault, now.
In my view, both the people who insist all abortion is murder and the people who insist that there is an unlimited right to abortion, at all trimesters whatever, are wrong. Because I'm virtually certain the latter are not represented on this forum, I'm going to start with my criticism of them, first, because I can't piss them off if they ain't here. :D
The argument for abortion being a right hinges on two nails, so to speak. One of them is to assume that human life starts at birth. Literally – the baby needs to be outside of the mother and in the obstetrician's hands before it starts counting as a person (I exaggerate a little, here – 'breathing on its own' is the standard I often encounter). This seems to be nonsense. A human baby, observed a week before birth, is normally not significantly different from a human baby observed two minutes after birth. Yet we are being told that this baby had not been a person a week ago.
The second argument for abortion is that a woman maintains a right to her reproductive system, in the same way I own my house and have the right to kill intruders on it. While I agree (unlike some people) that the 9th amendment protects a person's right to their own body, this argument is false and the people who bring it up are highly hypocritical. (Most of the pro-choice activists are leftists – how many of them, you think, would support my right to take experimental anti-aging treatments without FDA approval? Or even to simply kill people who are invading my home? Oh, wait I know: they only give lip service to this stuff because they want to have abortions!). More importantly, that right is limited by the rights of other people – in this case, the baby/babies. My right to kill intruders in my home is also limited – the law usually mandates specified circumstances under which I can defend myself. Even criminals have some form of right to life, and my right to self-defense must be balanced against that (although of course I personally would rather err in favor of the defender).
Even granting that you have some right to kill babies in your womb in some circumstances – I just don't see the bloody point of killing a baby at the late stages. This is like catching a guy walking out of your house, chasing him down and beating him to death with a brick. He was ALREADY LEAVING, what is the point? You have already carried the baby for eight months and three weeks (extreme case, I know), why is carrying him for seven more days so terrible you must take his life?
And I completely don't get the partial-birth abortion/forcing a birth and then killing the baby. What the hell. The baby has already left. Any argument you might have had about your rights to your body is completely unapplicable if the baby has ALREADY BEEN BORN.
Which brings me to the problems I have with the anti-abortion argument. In the manner in which it was expressed here by fistful, it hinges on the argument that life begins at conception, and that it is immoral to kill a baby at any stage
For one, I think that conception, too, is an arbitrary moment to choose as the start of life. Then again, all of these moments are arbitrary to some extent. Orthodox Jews sometimes claim that life starts when the sperm leaves the male body, so to them, masturbation and oral sex are acts of murder (yes, I've heard people say that). I suppose porn is genocide.
I believe that the seat of personhood is the brain. This is the case with people who have already been born. When brain activity ceases, in many jurisdictions you are legally dead. Babies born without brains (anacephalous) are usually euthanized or not given life support. The brain is the seat of your memories, emotions, love, hate, political beliefs, whatever. It seems sensible to me that if you don't have a brain, you're not a person.
But more importantly, there is indeed some right to one's body. We do not allow the harvesting of organs from dead people against their will – though the dead will not suffer any discomfort from having organs harvested. We could save many, many lives if we just said 'screw donor cards' and started looting the morgues wholesale. Even more lives would be saved if we started mandating, say, bone marrow transplants from the living to cancer patients who require them. But we recoil naturally from such a horror. People would fight in the streets if this form of life-saving were to be introduced.
I don't really know how these things can all be settled. We live in a society in which different people have different (arbitrary) views on when life starts, what are the limits of a person's rights to their own bodies, etc. I do not think (as some people do) that any limitations on abortions automatically imply hatred of women, nor do I believe that aborting first-week embryos is an act of mass-murder akin to the Holocaust.
The American system, however, already has (had?) a system of dealing with these differences. It's called the Constitution. I know it got a bit hijacked with Roe v. Wade and later expansions, but I think that as long as you get the basic right of a person to privacy of their own body recognized through the courts, details can (and should be) settled on the local level.
The problem of course is that for this to happen, people need to lay off each other – Californians need to STFU and realize that people in Georgia are probably going to have more restrictive rules than they'd like. And some other people will need to need to live with the fact that California is full of Californians. Quite recently, I think it was Michael Steele who said that Roe v. Wade needs to be overturned and Huckabee came out and attacked THAT as been insufficiently conservative... I don't think that's quite constructive.
Again, I'm not trying to derail this thread into an argument about abortion, I'm just trying to explain my position. To return to the issue of embryos - I don't really view early-stage embryos as persons, so I don't care if they become the subjects of experiments. But I don't want to pay for it – but then, I also wouldn't want to pay for a 16th aircraft carrier if I were an American, or whatever new inane mess your government is going to fund now.
