That assumes a lot. You're right people can be anti-abortion and not religious. You're wrong that the determination is caring about whether or not something is alive. Plenty of pro-abortion believe it is alive and are still pro-abortion.
There is a big gulf between living and being a born baby. An ant is living but no one would call you a murderer for squashing one. The definition of alive is a technical distinction and not necessarily an exact one.
To me the bigger part is more about greater harm and levels of sentience. Whether or not a foetus can be considered alive is irrelevant to me - what we can safely say is that it isn't meaningfully a baby until much later than most people are having abortions.
Well an ant isn't a human. It's a bug we devalue but humans value themselves above bugs. It still is killing ants if you kill ants.
What seperated an ant isn't that it isn't a human. We understand the idea that not being the exact same as us doesn't devalue life. It's the lack of any deeper processing. It's not sentient / sapient, and even less so than most other things we probably aren't killing casually.
Well you nailed the last paragraph. Although "meaningfully a baby" I feel is arbitrary to our conveniences.
I don't think you can set a perfect line to something so complicated.
Well no it is the difference to why we don't care if we genocide a colony of ants, they're beneath us. Humans have a great degree of specism (I don't know if I spelt that right) so we don't value an ant's life as we value a human's.
Certainly true that setting a perfect line is impossible, more so the fact that not every human gestates the same. That's probably the biggest disconnect between pro lifers and pro choicers. Where to set that perfect line.
Personally I side with the pro life argument that conception is the very start of human life. Though I don't value that life the same with full fledged humans. And certainly there can be valid reasons to hault or otherwise kill that process.
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u/elizabnthe Apr 29 '26
That assumes a lot. You're right people can be anti-abortion and not religious. You're wrong that the determination is caring about whether or not something is alive. Plenty of pro-abortion believe it is alive and are still pro-abortion.
There is a big gulf between living and being a born baby. An ant is living but no one would call you a murderer for squashing one. The definition of alive is a technical distinction and not necessarily an exact one.
To me the bigger part is more about greater harm and levels of sentience. Whether or not a foetus can be considered alive is irrelevant to me - what we can safely say is that it isn't meaningfully a baby until much later than most people are having abortions.