Abortion

Abortion is an elective procedure. Whether or not you personally agree with it is not in question when it comes to its legality. Women will elect to have abortions for many different reasons, none of which are anyone's business but their own. No matter how or why they come to that decision, anyone electing any procedure deserves to have surgery done by a certified medical professional in a sterile OR. When it is made illegal, this is the only element that changes. No one comes to a change of heart due to a law. If this is illegal, women that would have survived the procedure will die. Not all of them, but a larger percentage than now. Things don't go away because they are illegal. 

Also, this conditional legality is really no different than proving one was raped 'legitimately' or that one was molested or whatever other morally acceptable cause for abortion. This is putting the woman responsible to the state for her sexual behavior and then beholden to state approval for her desires with regards to her own body. This is a hideous misuse of state power and probably, next to wage discrimination, the worst example of sexism in our society. It's ridiculous that any woman would advocate any legislation to limit the choices for women when it comes to their own bodies. Make decisions for yourself, fine. It's none of your business why anyone else seeks an abortion, they will get one if it's legal or not.

Even Christopher Hitchens was against abortion. It should be fairly easy to understand that is is great moral evil being perpetrated by our society. Conception is the only logical place to define life. It is at that point that the zygote has its own DNA distinct from that of either of the parents, and it begins development at an astonishing rate, this development will only stop if some violence is perpetrated against it. The viability of the embryo or foetus is irrelevant. It is already on the fast track to becoming a sentient human being. If the parent cannot keep the child then adoption is preferable to killing the embryo. A woman's choice is before she become pregnant. 

I must say that I totally sympathize, and am completely in agreement, with the sentiment of not wanting the government to tell a woman (or man, for that matter) "what to do with their own body". I definitely want the government's fingers off of both men's and women's bodies as much as is reasonably possible.

The rub, of course, is when the actions of one person's body affect another person's body. Theology aside, secular America, for example, has a long tradition of recognizing that the rights of my fist end where your nose begins. Pregnancy is a very special experience wherein one person's body actually grows, develops, and is eventually birthed through, another person's body. Two bodies are hardly ever so interdependently connected as in pregnancy. So it is unfitting to apply generic phraseology to a situation which encompasses such a unique set of specific conditions. Namely, any rhetoric about "her own body" really doesn't do justice to the complexity of the situation. Again, even with all theology aside, it is by no means obvious to many a parent who has watched a sonogram of their child in the womb that the child developing inside its mother should be regarded as a non-human-being. So resorting to the "her own body" rhetoric which is so common does not strike me as being a good, honest, or fair approach.

If someone wants to make the argument that a "fetus" is not a human being and does not warrant the protections that most of us assume are appropriate for a human being, they can set forth such an argument. But if the form of argumentation simply glosses over, or minimizes, the entirely non-trivial issue of the second body involved then I believe such an approach is doomed to appear disingenuous to those who are deeply concerned about (what they at least honestly perceive as) the "other" body in the story.