I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.
He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense
Okay but in all honesty, this is what the argument should be.
The question of "what constitutes life worth preserving" is fundamentally a metaphysical discussion, and thus both crucially emotional and absolutely impossible to objectively answer. That's why anti-abortionists want to fix the argument there.
The place where we should be forcing the argument is bodily autonomy. Even when there's a very clear "if you do not donate an organ, this child will die" — we do not force people to become organ donors. We do not force rich people to house poor people in their homes, even though it is clear that to do so would save lives. We did not walk into Elon Musk's house and force him to solve world hunger by gunpoint. In many states, we agree that someone has the right to shoot someone if they get surprised by them in their home!
In almost every other case, we honor the human right to make their own choices regarding their bodies and personal property, even when doing so puts other people's lives at risk. It is, in fact, incredibly inconsistent for our society to decide that in this one case, people don't get to decide what they're doing with their bodies, and it has everything to do with the infantilization/dehumanization of women (note that the other places that bodily autonomy gets trumped tend to be on racial or disability grounds), AND everything to do with the way the anti-abortion lobby has done such a good job in fixing the argument on the ethical question of "are fetuses babies" when it should never have been there.





















