Huh? If you think its such an important question, you would have taken more time to consider the consequences of the proposition, instead of engaging in logical fallacies (see below).
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.
You have employed at least three logical fallacies in a single statement, distraction, strawman, and appeal to motives. In the case of the rape victim, the only "forcing" involved is the result of a violent criminal act. Yet you seek to somehow remedy that by allowing the murder of an innocent human being. That is a rather Draconian and diabolical theory of crime and punishment. No one here wants to go back to the days of coathanger abortions, we just don't want any abortions except perhaps in that most rarest of last-resort cases, wherein one must make a medical decision to preserve at least one life, where the alternative is two fatalities.
Rights are gradually accumulated by the maturing child in every other realm of the law.
Absolutely incorrect and incredible that a FReeper in good standing like yourself should make such an assertion. If you really believe this, try it out sometime, in the clearest of all cases. Go to a maternity ward and, at the moment of birth, which seems at this time to be the legal definition of personhood (a poor one, to be sure), and kill a newborn. By your system of ethics, that should be no big deal. By your moral compass, apparently, the child has not matured, has accumulated no rights, has demonstrated no capability for exercising any kind of moral judgements. If you do this, do you think you will be exempt from any legal or moral consequences? You might think that, but when the warden pulls the switch on the electric chair in which you will eventually find yourself sitting, he and others will judge differently. BTW, while I shouldn't have to say this, based on the content of your previous posts I feel I should: don't really do what I have suggested above. It was a rhetorical challenge. The last thing I would do is advocate the killing of a newborn.
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.
You know, I've seldom seen a clearer and more egregious example of a false moral equivalence. There is simply no way to equate the allowance, as a society, of the deliberate, premeditated, proactive decision to kill a specific individual, and produce an outcome that is sure to result in the death of an innocent human being, to a public policy that may result in a greater chance of harm coming to a broader population exposed to that risk on a non-individual basis. The moral issues and shadings are completely different, and your credibility in this discussion suffers if you continue to insist on such apples-to-oranges comparisons.
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.
The issue of self-preservation is an accepted tenet of almost all ethical systems of thought. And, in essence, the issue of killing in the context of mortal combat ultimately encompasses, in some form, this concept. But, even then, one does not have a blank check. Read up sometime on the various attempts to apply ethics in a combat situation. Such attempts generally result in unsatisfactory outcomes in a practical sense, but people have wrestled with them. For example, the notion of legal-illegal orders, "rules of war", treatment of prisoners and wounded, etc., represent attempts to limit the blank-check murder concept you allude to. Granted, in a firefight, these concepts have little practical import, since you goal is generally to get out of there with a whole skin and do likewise for as many of your friends as you can, but still, the attempt is made.
Similarly, in the abortion debate, the pro-life position generally recognizes the single, very limited exception upon which an ethical defense can be made, that of self-preservation of the individual, but this is hardly a "blank check".
Pretty oddly selective moral lenses, if you ask me.
Not really. The pro-life position is remarkably consistent on these issues. I have found that those who attempt to justify abortion on demand usually are the ones who end up with a patchwork quilt of exceptions, special cases, and rules that bend with the wind. A simple application of Occam's Razor usually shreds those rather cumbersome systems and scatters their remains to the four winds.
Another convenience case of right-to-life amnesia. You passed a "law", and hired thugs, called sheriffs, to enforce in by violent means, if necessary, on the pregnant woman. "forcing" is exactly the moral issue on the table, and pretending it isn't there won't make it go away.
Yet you seek to somehow remedy that by allowing the murder of an innocent human being. That is a rather Draconian and diabolical theory of crime and punishment. No one here wants to go back to the days of coathanger abortions, we just don't want any abortions except perhaps in that most rarest of last-resort cases, wherein one must make a medical decision to preserve at least one life, where the alternative is two fatalities.
You speak at length, and pursuasively, but, at bottom, your certainty on this, and similar subjects, is based on a trick, called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in formal circles. You start with the base assumption that fetuses are full-blown rights bearers, and refuse to acknowledge that it is the basic premise of the logic that is being challenged.
Your exception is the death of your case. Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill had this argument 100 years ago or so ago. Medical intervention is a deliberate, calm act. Self defense has, by long formal legal tradition, 3 attributes, the important one for our discussion being: the danger must be immediate and sudden. If we let your line of reasoning go unchecked, we are soon faced with someone saying "well, this prisoner is innocent, but riots will break and and people will be killed if we don't execute--isn't the best outcome the most moral choice?"
And the answer is: NO. The State is the monopoly holder of the legal power for a human to do violence on another human. Humans being fallible, this requires that the State be made to wear a girdle of Moral Principal, not expedient number crunching. That's why we have a Constitutionally Limited Republic, not a Monarchy, or a Democracy. ...
You have failed to acknowledge my evidence, which wants an answer. How is it that kids don't vote, or have religious freedom, or toddlers can't be prosecuted for manslaughter? Younger people's rights and corresponding obligations are clearly minor, and growing. That is how the world works, and should work, howls of protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
And, finally, your defense of war is just as feeble in your hands, as in that of the previous poster. Having a war with Afganistan is simply slaughtering for revenge and prudential considerations, claiming self-defense here is simply absurd, and puts your argument on the same footing as mine, concerning raising the speed limit. Even when war is on something resembling an equal footing, specific lives are not being specifically defended, prudential national interests are being defended, by targeting specific individuals for death. Mixing this argument with the civil self-defense argument that police shootings have to face every day glosses over the difficulties with your defense of war by bait&switch.
What kind of lawyering is this? We dress up wholesale murder with a few bangles, and that makes it not wholesale murder? Cold comfort to the surviving family members of the victims of our bombings of Libya, or Hiroshima.