Kelvyquayo the Hand wrote:
Waht is the legal basis that they can tell somone waht they can do with their body?
Is it because of the "rights" of the thing in the womb?
Well. As several people have pointed out, we do pass laws saying what you can and can't do with your own body. I don't happen to agree with most of them either, but it's silly to pretend that the precident does not exist at all, or that this is some kind of exception.
Additionally, it *does* have to do with the rights of the "thing in the womb". Here's where a law against abortion differs from a seat belt law:
With a seat belt law, I'm being told what I can do with my body purely for my own protection. I don't affect anyone else directly either way. But a very vague economic issue (some percentage of people wont have insurance, and the state must pick up the tab for them, so all people should be required to wear seatbelts to lower the cost incurred to the state by those people). That's *horrible* legal logic IMO, but we use it all the time.
With abortion, your action directly affects "someone else". The problem of course is whether you define that lump of material in your womb as someone else or not. And here's where we get back to the real disagreement. To a pro-lifer, life begins at conception. Thus, that lump *is* a human being and should be afforded the same rights as every other human being. To them, this is not the same as a seat belt law. It's more like any of a number of laws we have that prohibit you from harming another person. Technically, making murder illegal is "telling me what to do with my own body", right? After all, maybe I want to wrap my fingers around someone's throat and choke the life out of them.
The point is that it's very clear in the case of murder that my freedom should be restricted in order to protect that of someone else. That part really should not be up for debate, and really should not be confused. The only subject of debate is at what point we legally define an embryo or fetus as a "human".
So. You can disagree with the pro-lifer's position. But it's not really correct to bash them for having it, or questin by what right they do. To them, life begins at conception, and the person choosing to abort is violating the rights of the unborn child (I seem to recall that "life", is at the beginning of the list of "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"). So you can argue that the law states that life really only legally begins at some other point, but to a pro-lifer that just means that the law is *wrong*.
I've made this comparison before, and I'll make it again. A pro-lifer is like an abolishionist back in the 1800s. He acknowledges that the law says that something is legal under certain conditions (abortion ok in the first trimester, slavery ok south of the Mason-Dixon line), but he simply believes that the action is *wrong* and the law is *wrong*. He believes that abortion should be illegal all the time, and not just at some arbitrary point in time after conception. In exactly the same way that an abolishionist believed that slavery was wrong everywhere, not just north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Certainly, they have a right to try to change those laws. Disagree with them if you will, but don't try to argue that they're wrong for even trying to want to change the law.
