Again with the citizenship business. You keep on repeating it in post after post and obviously have invested a great deal of emotional capital in this argument, yet when others point out the moral pitfalls of using this as your ethical lodestar you refuse to comment on them?
Perhaps my earlier post was a bit too detailed so let me present another instance that might be simpler to address. There is pending now in a court in a city not too far from mine a case wherein a citizen may have his citizenship stripped because of his involvement in earlier crimes against humanity. Now, if this person loses his citizenship, and thus becomes someone who is no longer a fully vested citizen, and is even in a lesser class than preborn or newborn children, because he is no longer even a potential citizen, are any moral claims that he might make as diminished, or moreso, than unborn children? If so, then, since evidently by your moral compass those same diminished moral claims of unborns make them fair game for abortion, could this individual then be given a late-life abortion (i.e., killed)? If so, would those doing the killing and those who aid in it, just like the abortionist and mother of an aborted child, escape legal sanctions and moral culpability? If not, why?
No, just too hard to digest in one setting. It seems to me that you have a consistent theme about rights, that you share with many here, that make them a binary switch--either you have them in full force, or you don't have them. But real life with it's real moral problems, isn't like that. Let's consider a couple of your examples, people, such as Alzheimer's victims, lose rights as they become proportionately incompetent. In a world in which courts had perfect insight, they would lose or gain rights in perfect proportion to their capacity to exercise the associated moral competence. This happens every day, and hardly anyone complains about it, which as it ought to be. Are alzheimer's victims or the mentally deficient allowed the same liberty as you? No--how you restrict an alzheimer victim's access to public facilities and thruways whould be a crime if exercised against a competent person, and that's despite the guarantee of liberty written into the Declaration of Independence.
Similarly, teenagers have abbreviated rights and responsibilities compared to adults, toddlers even less, and, I assert, fetuses hardly any. Do toddlers vote, or have religeous liberty? Do you think these things are minor, inconsequential rights? Will a 3 year old be put in prison for causing the accidental death of a playmate? Do you think manslaughter is a minor issue?
Or, alternatively, maybe it's because I think it's quite in important question. As to the moral pitfalls--I am not the one that wants 13 year old rape victims to undergo unwanted pregnancies, or go back to the days of coathanger abortions. Rights are gradually accumulated by the maturing child in every other realm of the law. What makes you think there is anything more of a moral pitfall about abortion, than, say, raising the driving speed limit to 65--an act that we know for certain results in the unneeded death's of about 10,000 citizens a year. Or declaring war on what, by many accounts, could be considered the poorest country with the worst-armed military in the world, and slaughtering them as fast as we can? Oh, in self-defense, as another poster claims gives us a blank check in the murdering department.
Pretty oddly selective moral lenses, if you ask me.