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This is essentially the same argument isn’t it? Abortion may or may not be morally wrong, but forcing a particular choice would violate the mother’s bodily autonomy, so we think it’s for her to decide.
So it is murder in the first degree after ~22 weeks/viability?
… maybe?
If at some point the baby can be "aborted" via C-section, I don’t have any objections to mandating it be done that way.
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Can't reduce it down to be quite that simple, as there are enough possible variations that might be relevant.
Because you can make an argument that the woman already 'decided' when she agreed to and participated in unprotected sex with a guy.
Or we argue that women don't understand that pregnancy is a risk of sex, which is pretty demeaning in it's own way.
And obviously if she did not agree to it, she was raped, and that DOES violate her bodily autonomy.
And, going further, if the argument is about bodily autonomy, should a woman be allowed to agree to unprotected sex for the purpose of procreation, take affirmative steps to increase the odds of pregnancy, get pregnant, willingly carry the fetus with the stated intent of giving birth, then around 3 months (12 weeks) or so into it just changes her mind and decides "nope, my body my choice. Disregard the fact that I made a different choice several times before now" and get an abortion?
And in that scenario, does the father's interest come into play at all, since he was relying on her to carry her end of the 'bargain' and bring the fetus to term?
I'm not trying to engineer 'gotchas,' I'm just pointing out that reducing it to bodily autonomy does not settle the full moral question here, unless you bit the bullet and say abortion should be available 'on demand and without apology' in all cases.
Which almost nobody actually believes.
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The first is a question of moral good, either utilitarian or deontological argument in nature. Either the imposition on the mother causes greater moral harm in the utilitarian calculus than the moral harm of killing the fetus, or it deontologically takes a higher precendence than the fetus' life.
The second is a question of jurisdiction. The claim is that it doesn't matter whether you believe the abortion itself is morally right or wrong, it's not you or the government's job to impose your view of morality on someone else.
So it's sort of a distinction on meta levels. Claim 1 is that both abortion and not-abortion are morally acceptable in some semi-objective sense, so the woman to have the object level choice of abortion as people do in any choice when both options are acceptable. Claim 2 is that morality is subjective, so each woman can decide for herself whether abortion is wrong or not, and then decide to do it or not based on her own internal morality.
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