Why do so many people feel that abortion is not a major issue? Regardless of what end of the field you stand on, you’re either defending human rights or you’re defending human life, based on your perspective. Both of these things are clearly important issues so why do so many people attempt to devalue the controversy of abortion?

Why do so many people on the pro-choice end of the abortion argument insist that life does not begin until after birth and that a fetus is not a human? I mean, you can say that an embryo is not a human because it has no cognitive abilities. You can use science to show that it has no cognitive abilities too, but you cannot use science to prove that cognitive abilities are the defining attribute of a person. As a matter of fact, don’t scientists identify organisms as members of their respective species based on their unique genetic signature? Human beings have a genetic signature of their own. Every human has it and no other species shares it with us. So, scientifically the fetus is a human, it’s only when we put religious sentiment into the mix that we can define it as anything else than a member of our species. The life argument is more effective except that biologically there’s no significance to the instant of birth. It’s culturally significant but is there any real transformation in the 32-week...

Is it rational to both maintain that abortion is entirely morally permissible (on the grounds that a fetus is not a person, let's say) and to regret having had one?

The moral question of whether abortion is wrong is whether or not it is a person. Well, I don't understand why people say that a fetus is not a person. How are a fetus and an infant any different. An infant doesn't understand the future just the way a fetus doesn't. At 14 weeks a fetus begins to move and "explore" the womb and itself. That shows some curiosity and some sort of "thinking". On a genetic level or the form of the fetus also at 14 weeks it is "a person". So then at the very least shouldn't abortion be illegal after that? If we should not kill an infant, which is very illegal, why can we kill a fetus which in many instances is on the same level as the infant? If anything we should not kill the fetus because it is innocent and the infant is not. An infant cries just to be held where it should cry because it needs something. Just as a small example.

One of the most common justifications I hear for abortion is "a woman should have control over her body." If humans reproduced oviparously, would that change the debate? Let's say a woman conceives a child, and then immediately lays an egg. The egg would still need incubation and maintenance, though this could be performed by any party, not just the mother. After nine months of development, the egg would hatch into a baby human. Would a woman be justified in crushing this egg? This mimics the abortion debate, except that in this case the fetus cannot be addressed as part of the woman's body. Would that invalidate any abortion arguments?

American Protestant fundamentalists who are against abortion frequently say they are for a "culture of life." It seems that many of them also support the death penalty and have a low threshold for a willingness to wage war. Does anyone know how they justify this seeming contradiction? What is remarkable to me is that fundamentalist Christians who are against abortion seem to hold this value of "unborn life" above almost all else, saying that they are "single issue voters." Not only do I wonder how this is reconciled with their not seeming to value the lives of convicted criminals and those will die due to wars that we easily enter, but also how they put the value of a fetus' life above all the other things that Christians are supposed to value, that, if one is a single issue voter, one gives up fighting for. I guess what I mean is, how is this favoring of one class of lives justified philosophically/religiously against the valuing of other classes of lives and other "Christian" values? Thanks.

Women bring up the issue about having the right to choose to abort the fetus.It takes two to tango and it also takes two to conceive a child. Shouldn't the guy have some sort of say when it comes to abortion?

How can abortion be so easily accepted in a civilized society? Sure, it is important that a woman or any person be able to have control over their body, but the fetus is a separate entity, a new person completely, as is logically shown by the fact that a mother can give birth to a male child. Anyone can tell this without having to use the available scientific evidence which proves my point. So, what gives any person the right to kill someone else so that they can live the way that they want?

When there is no clear solution to an issue, it would seem to me that assessing risks would be the most reasonable way of dealing with it. In the case of abortion we risk a mother losing the civil right to address her pregnancy within her own moral reasoning, verses a child losing its fundamental right to live. The latter risk seems more pressing and with greater consequence. Can a struggle for justice be assessed upon risk?

How should we think of abortion in view of common sense beliefs about death? In Question #1596, Professor Gentzler's solution to the problem of death-as-punishment was to suggest that we should see death, not as placing a person in some worse state (since a dead person is in no state at all), but as depriving him of what benefits he might have enjoyed had he lived. Yet by this same brand of reasoning, couldn't we argue that aborted fetuses are harmed in an analogous way? In both cases we have a puzzle about people who in some sense don't exist; the dead person because he is no longer conscious, the fetus because it is not sufficiently developed.