So, not including cases of rape, does a woman have a responsibility over the life of their unborn child, and does that responsibility lead to a limit on the bodily autonomy. That is the debate.
To me the answer is no, the woman has no responsibility to the fetus, at least not in it’s early stages.
Arguments differ but I believe the core disagreement in this debate will always be the question of whether we think of a fetus as a human being or not. For most of us I think the rest is just backwards rationalization.
If the fetus is a human being, then the question of responsibility plays a big role, but if not there’s nothing to have responsibility to.
The most common arguments that early stage fetuses are human beings tend to center on the concept of the potential it has to develop into one. But this is flawed, the same argument can be made for anything. My sperm has the potential to become a functioning human being, all I need is an egg. Yet I’m sure no one will argue that a woman denying me access to her egg is murder.
This is what the potential argument comes downs to. The woman’s body is necessarily part of the equation but you cannot include it without her consent, so if she is unwilling then there is no potential. At least there is no potential without removing her rights *first*, but rights for one are not born out of the removal of someone else’s rights.
The other end of the responsibility argument is that the mother is responsible because it was her actions that brought the fetus into existence in the first place. But what were those actions? Having sex. Essentially, the argument here is that a women losing her rights is justified as punishment. But sex in and of itself is not (or at least should not be) a punishable act. It’s a basic human desire which hurts no one, except maybe a fetus who has yet to be shown to be a person.
So for those reasons I am pro choice. Now when it comes to late stage abortions my attitude is different. Once the fetus can survive on its own it’s a different conversation, and even before that as we get past those early stages and the fetus develops, the responsibility argument gradually carries more weight as it gets closer to what we would recognize as a person. So I don’t have an answer as to where I draw the line exactly, but somewhere between the two.
