[Abortion][REVISED POLL] If you had the power...

[Ifreann]

To avoid repeating the arguments every 5 pages or so, let us look at something "new".

On the november 25th 2017 Emma Wren Gibson was born. Emma however was conceived 25 years ago - and the embryo that is now her was kept in a frozen state all this time until a suitable couple to implant it in was found: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/19/healt ... index.html

Now, this seems to be exactly what the pro-lifers want: an egg not gone to waste; even though it took a while.
Now suppose we had the technology to extract and freeze unwanted fetuses from unwilling mothers - and keep them on ice until a willing parent is found.
Should we ?

So if we're counting life as starting at conception, does that make this baby an adult who can vote?

It would be only logical.

[Stellar Colonies]

To avoid repeating the arguments every 5 pages or so, let us look at something "new".

On the november 25th 2017 Emma Wren Gibson was born. Emma however was conceived 25 years ago - and the embryo that is now her was kept in a frozen state all this time until a suitable couple to implant it in was found: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/19/healt ... index.html

Now, this seems to be exactly what the pro-lifers want: an egg not gone to waste; even though it took a while.
Now suppose we had the technology to extract and freeze unwanted fetuses from unwilling mothers - and keep them on ice until a willing parent is found.
Should we ?

So if we're counting life as starting at conception, does that make this baby an adult who can vote?

Except that the fetus's development was stopped when it was frozen...

[Ifreann]

So if we're counting life as starting at conception, does that make this baby an adult who can vote?

Except that the fetus's

Embryo's.

development was stopped when it was frozen...

So? Age isn't a measure of development. Emma Wren Gibson was conceived 25 years ago, and pro-lifers tell us that this is when life begins. Ergo, Emma is 25.

[The New California Republic]

Emma Wren Gibson was conceived 25 years ago, and pro-lifers tell us that this is when life begins. Ergo, Emma is 25.

I dread to think what kind of confusion would have resulted if she had been born on February 29th of a leap year...

[Ifreann]

Emma Wren Gibson was conceived 25 years ago, and pro-lifers tell us that this is when life begins. Ergo, Emma is 25.

I dread to think what kind of confusion would have resulted if she had been born on February 29th of a leap year...

That's how you get Time Lords.

[Godular]

Except that the fetus's

Embryo's.

development was stopped when it was frozen...

So? Age isn't a measure of development. Emma Wren Gibson was conceived 25 years ago, and pro-lifers tell us that this is when life begins. Ergo, Emma is 25.

Think how confused the bartenders would get when they try to card her.

[The New California Republic]

I dread to think what kind of confusion would have resulted if she had been born on February 29th of a leap year...

That's how you get Time Lords.

[The Alma Mater]

Well, if we are sharing articles and images...

(Image)

Cyanide and Happiness is a curious comic series.

But they do make a relevant point
And a nice steak.

[Attempted Socialism]

I accidentally wrote something over the vacation time to distract me from my papers. It's not perfect (Yet?), but I feel it's good enough to offer up to you now.

I am writing this in order to outline why we ought to minimise abortions, but also why we ought to allow abortions. I will try to offer a better use of “person” and “personhood”, which will not only be superior because it is philosophically grounded and consistent, but also because it works in other areas such as law or commerce. This last part is also a clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to be careful about their use of certain words.

Terminology, in so many words.
First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro- and anti-choice rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.
Regarding the words “human” and “person”, they have almost interchangeable use in common parlance. However, when we are talking about “personhood” and when one becomes a person, compared to being human, the differences are crucial to avoid conflating causes and effects, and overlapping but distinct categories. As such, “human” here is either (a) member(s) of our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, or the adjective, something that is of or by members of said specie (“Human DNA”, “human reaction” etc).
“Person” is here a member of the category of beings with the trait of having personhood, as I elaborate later. It is overlapping with most humans, but would also include any hypothetical sapient spacefaring aliens. As I explain subsequent, it is also the state of being where you have legal rights and obligations (In English law terminology AFAIK “natural person”). I use “legal entity” when referring to any entity, such as corporation, collective, state, etc., that also has rights and obligations, but does not have personhood. This is not the normal usage in law where I live (Where “legal person” would be the accurate translation), but it makes it less confusing to be talking about natural versus legal persons.
I try to use specific terms for the stages of human development and legality. “Children”, “baby”, “toddler” etc. are terms that refer to offspring after birth, “zygote”, “embryo”, “foetus” etc. refer to offspring while still in some stage of prenatal development. “Homicide” is when a person kills another person (From Latin, ‘the killing of a human’), but without or before any legal judgement. “Justified homicide” is a legal killing, for instance self-defence, and “manslaughter” is an unintended, accidental, or non-malicious killing, but one where the killer is still punished. “Murder” is an intended, planned or malicious killing of another person with the associated long sentence. While there are several distinctions between various jurisdictions on what constitutes justified homicide, manslaughter and murder, I think my intended meaning comes across.
Lastly, “life” simply uses a common biological definition: Homeostasis, cells, metabolism, grow, adapt, react to external environment and capable of reproduction. This places humans alongside our fellow animals in Kingdom Animalia, and our fellow multi-celled organisms in the Eukaryote Domain, and within the Tree of Life as a whole. While religious groups may want to talk about their divine being(s) and soul(s), I prefer to plant my philosophy and policy preferences on ground as close to objective reality as possible.
With these distinctions out of the way, I can get to the meat of my project.

Why abortions ought to be as few as possible.
Abortions aren’t without consequences. The medical effects of messing with the human body in this way are seldom harsh, but they are there even when mild. Most abortions happen at a time where the procedure can be done with a pill, potentially even in the women’s own home, with limited adverse effects and few risks of side-effects. Late-stage abortions are often comparatively riskier, though in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine has made abortion safe in most instances. Still, there are non-zero risks involved with abortions. This is a point where pro- and anti-choice actually agree, though with different emphasis. Even if we leave aside the oft-overstated risks that the anti-choice advocates offer for restrictions on abortions, we also have to consider the health risks of being pregnant and giving birth.
Without being a doctor, I can hardly give a medical evaluation of the associated risks with either. Going through both my own country’s Ministry of Health websites and the CDC, however, the list of risks involved with abortion is substantially shorter than the combined list of risks with a continued pregnancy and a birth, and any risk with abortion is also included in the list of pregnancy and birth risks. When considering the peer reviewed literature, it seems clear to me that the mortality risks are simply not comparable [1]; the mortality rate for births are roughly 15 times as high as abortion, and that risk is obfuscating a stark difference in abortion risks over time [2].
While abortions are safer than birth, that still leaves abortion as a non-zero risk for the zero gain of reverting to a state of non-pregnancy. We should clearly not invite people to take a risk with their bodies without mitigation. Luckily, contraception is a thing.
While medical complications as area can only be improved through scientific research and improvement, social condemnation is an aspect that we can evaluate and improve separately. This also ties in to mental issues. It is currently a fact that terrorist organisations like Operation Rescue, as well as long-term US social trends, translates to ostracization of women who get abortions. Doctors who perform abortions are literally risking their life as well. The discourse is largely about judging and condemning. While I can’t get solid numbers on social effects, but must infer them from polling, we can quickly see that roughly half of the US population are “pro” life [3], and that while roughly half want to make abortion legal in ‘some circumstances’, for many people that list can be reduced to the classic “rape, incest and life of the mother”. Another 20% want it illegal in all circumstances.
While I in no way suggest that all these respondents are as extreme as, say, Keshiland has been in this thread, this polling and news stories on the subject suggest that for roughly 50-70% of the US population, abortion is a socially condemnable act, even if not legally. This will have a negative impact on the women who choose abortion, regardless of any inherent effect from the abortion itself. Numbers on e.g. post-abortion depressions are statistically not significantly different from post-birth depressions [4] when taking confounding factors into account, but this study does not take social evaluation and culture into account. This means that women who are brought up learning that abortions are evil, who subsequently have abortions, may have worse mental conditions than usual. Social evaluation of abortion can also impact women’s mental health, with any range of negative evaluations of women who have abortions, such as them being ‘slutty’, ‘unable to take care of themselves’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘murderers’ or any other list of adjectives (Just within this thread, there are numerable examples to this effect). These factors are not included in the controls of the linked study (Which I get – both because it’s not the purpose of the study, and because it’s incredibly hard to do well), which means we cannot know to what degree these adverse mental effects from abortions are biological or social in origin.
Regardless of whether mental effects are biological or social, however, they are a large part of the social discourse. Condemnation of abortion as an evil act, and hyping or overselling the medical, mental and social impacts of abortions, have been repeat offenses by the anti-choice advocates, even in this thread.
That does not invalidate the impact, though. A non-zero risk, whether medical, mental or social, is better avoided when the ‘gain’, as here, is reverting to a status quo that could be achieved without taking the risk. In other words, between staying non-pregnant and having an abortion to re-become non-pregnant, staying non-pregnant is preferable. The question on how to achieve that is not the primary subject for this debate, as it’s about family planning and contraception rather than abortion per se, but I would offer two points for consideration:
First, that abstinence-only is an abject failure in every way, shape and form [5], and the proponents of abstinence-only are directly promoting teen pregnancies, teen abortions, social ruination, adverse economic effects and more. Abstinence-only is directly responsible for more abortions, more teen pregnancies and higher STD spread rate.
Second, that while comprehensive sexual education is a right way to go, it is not the only right way to go. Colorado had a huge success with its IUD programme, which lead to a dramatic fall in unintended pregnancies, which in return lead to fewer abortions of said unintended pregnancies [6]. Offering free IUDs to women around the onset of sexual maturity is also economically viable, as the savings offset the health-costs. Furthermore, one has to assess the empowering factor of giving women control over their own reproduction, and the process of family planning that starts already when taking the IUD out, when a woman desire to get pregnant.
To sum up: For women, abortion is associated with fewer health risks than pregnancy and birth. It is comparable to birth in mental health risks, though some as-yet unaccounted-for factors may show abortion to have fewer mental health effects than birth. Social condemnation is substantial and at times dangerous. Meanwhile, to prevent abortions, one has to prevent pregnancies through comprehensive sexual education and free IUDs, while abstinence-only proponents fail at every level.

Concerning Contraception.
Not all anti-choice advocates are in disagreement with the assessment above. Some would claim that they try to empower women to avoid unintended pregnancies exactly because they want specific anti-abortion policies, so fewer or no unintended pregnancies would offset the consequences of illegal abortions. This attempted compromise-argument rests on a particular foundational falsehood: That contraception always works, and that not using contraception is blame-worthy.
Contraception failure is a wonderful example of double-think among some anti-choice advocates. The argument goes that because the number of abortions due to contraception failure is so small, we oughtn’t make abortion legal for all those who do not use contraception, or only uses it infrequently (Because, some reason, they chose not to use contraception, and thus their own carelessness got them into the mess). However, any ‘small amount’ argument would also work on the exceptions due to “rape, incest and life of the mother” that many anti-choice advocates want to allow for (And which I will address in depth later), and it counters the anti-choice advocates who decry the moral failure of late-term abortions. It also follows that if contraception had a much higher failure rate, we ought to legalise abortion for that reason, which runs counter to the argument anti-choice advocates try to make with contraception failure statistics.
Furthermore, unless an anti-choice advocate also wants to make contraception free for all forever, they need to grapple with the fact that access to contraception is not universal, and that many women, especially young or from ethnic minorities, can’t afford contraception entirely on their own [7], leading to women being blamed for not using an option they never had.
By focusing on contraception-use, anti-choice advocates sometimes try to make “sex without contraception” mean “consent to pregnancy”. There is no logical step from A to B here; the argument is a complete non-sequitur.
I would also argue that we should not limit rights by such an arbitrary punishment mentality. This doesn’t happen anywhere else; with rights to free speech, voting, search and seizure etc. Limiting e.g. rights to free speech happens mostly of concerns for other people’s rights, and not because you didn’t care enough to buy a megaphone before attending a rally. Abortion ought to be legal or illegal regardless of contraception and the efficacy thereof.
The most damning argument regarding contraception, however, comes when we consider the way contraception works, more specifically hormonal birth control like the Pill, Patch, IUDs and other. While these may influence how the egg develops and how likely sperm is to reach it, they all prevent implantation in the uterus, meaning that a potentially fertilised egg will fail to implant, and be removed with the next menstruation cycle. If one is of the opinion that “life begins at conception”, or, to put it in legal terms, that embryo have personhood, then each such failed implantation is a dead person, which merits investigation, and each use of the Pill is potentially a homicide (Legal or not). I will get back to the question of personhood and contraception; until then, just be aware that one cannot consider embryo persons if one favours contraception, and anyone arguing for personhood for embryo is implicitly arguing for convicting anyone using the Pill, Patch, IUDs and all other hormonal birth-control of murder.

Handing out memberships.
Thus far I have gone through arguments related to abortion from a viewpoint agnostic to potential rights of the foetus, because apart from the specifics of hormonal contraception and arguments regarding embryonic personhood (A point I will come back to), only the woman is a person. To argue for abortion at any time after conception, however, will quickly get the anti-choice crowd shouting “Think of the [foetus]!”
The word a philosopher would use for the group to which we ought to have ethical consideration and include in our ethical community is ‘personhood’. The term a legal scholar would use for the category of beings who has rights and obligations is also personhood. The vexing question is who are included. So, let us consider who have memberships to the personhood club.
The reason why I develop my criteria for personhood in a somewhat roundabout or abductive way is because there are several competing claims for deserving recipients of our ethical consideration. If we grant memberships one way, it may exclude some categories, and if we do it another, we may be overly inclusive. It is not necessarily the best way to present it in more formal philosophical terms, but I hope that in showing the logic at work, anti-choice proponents’ stances can have the highest possible chance of being included and thus shown why their criteria will lead them astray.
First, we might consider whether it is just human DNA that makes you included, but while this would include all humans, it would also include skin-cells, cancer-cells, corpses and atrophied limbs or organs. Meanwhile, it would exclude a hypothetical intelligent evolved or alien race who live, work, form social communities and become citizens. When we take fictional works set on Earth, say Guide to the Galaxy or Superman, we would not view Ford Prefect or Superman as non-persons, entities upon whom we can place no ethical obligations, from whom we can expect no reciprocal consideration and whom we allow no rights. They are not human, but we would be hard tried to find the criterion by which they ought to be excluded from the club. Clearly, human DNA is not a meaningful metric for inclusion in the personhood club.
Second, what about a whole human? This would solve the issues with individual cells or dead organs, but it would also exclude humans who are not whole, so loss of limb meant loss of personhood, and it would still exclude hypothetical evolved and alien races. Depending on what is meant by “whole”, it may also exclude any children under the age of 13-20. In both considered cases, we see that defining persons by their human biology is excessively restrictive to entities we would recognise as people in any social setting and any work of fiction, that is, people we (may) want to include. It may also be excessively inclusive, to the point where our cut-off hair has the same right as we do.
Do we even need a biological definition of personhood? If we develop an AI so powerful it really becomes conscious and separate from its’ programmers, would we deny it rights and obligations because it is still an electronic machine? Is it ethically justified to turn off the electricity to a conscious machine in a way that we would never allow for the forced starvation of a human? Thus, any subsequent considerations have to allow both non-human and non-biological entities as persons, so long as they are conscious.
What is distinct about being included in the personhood club? Why do we expect something of the beings we include in our ethical consideration and ethical community? I hinted at it before: We expect some measure of reciprocity; that when we ought to consider the concerns of other beings, they too ought to consider ours’. When we include a being in our ethical community, we place them under both the protection of our community, and we expect them to follow the rules in that community. Personhood requires enough self-awareness to see oneself as a part of an ethical community that provides both rights and limitations.
We can then go to a criterion that is on the right path. Sentience, the ability to experience, and especially the ability to suffer. We do explicitly confer some rights to any being we recognise as sentient, through animal cruelty laws, but do we see them as part of our ethical community? Do we need to feel obligated to afford the same rights to all animals as to humans? I would argue not; the ability to feel pain gives us an obligation to protect that being from undue pain, but merely feeling pain is not, in itself, sufficient for personhood.
The capacity for reason is another such option that, while on the right path, doesn’t give us the full picture. If we are literally unable to reason with a being, that being cannot be explained ethical considerations, and is unable to understand the concepts of an ethical community. Like sentience, however, reason alone is not sufficient, as we would lose out on why those rights would matter to a being e.g. unable to feel pain or suffering.
Lastly in our list of criteria, we need a being to be able to communicate in some way, and to be capable of self-induced activities. A being unable to communicate will also be unable to be made aware of other persons in their ethical community, and will be unable to learn of other persons’ concerns, thus be unable to take their plight into ethical consideration. Neither will they be able to express their own concerns, thus make the rest of us able of reciprocating. A being incapable of self-induced activities, whether because it is only capable of other-induced activities or unable to perform activities at all, is either a puppet, a machine or a lump, neither of which are meaningfully entities we might want to include.
Before I go over how this impacts any discussion about the ethics of abortion, I would like to take a last concept under consideration: Whether this is a yes/no or a degree discourse. Can you be more or less self-aware? Can you have more or less capacity for reason? Can you be more or less able to experience pain? Yes, so clearly each element of the admission process can be graded. Should personhood likewise be? Gradient personhood solves some problems: A baby and a toddler are not fully self-aware until between 1 and 2 years of age, and the ability to reason can be under-developed for longer. If each degree is simply better inclusion, more consideration, more voice in our ethical community, we would not have to decide when a baby becomes a person, but we can see that it is a person with fewer obligations and rights than an adult.
Thus, a sensible list of criteria for personhood are the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason, self-induced activities and ability to communicate, but in a gradient approach. This list is agnostic towards biology or human DNA, so any sufficiently advanced AI, any evolved animal and any alien would also be able to fit into this definition of a person (Some animal activists would argue that great apes already do).

How personhood impacts abortion
With our list, we check if a foetus has the necessary traits. Before a nervous system develops, it is unconscious, unable to reciprocate, not self-aware, not sentient, incapable of reason, has only other-induced activities and is unable to communicate. Until around 20-25 weeks, a foetus has no single necessary trait. After 26 weeks, it has a nervous system and starts some movements, that means sentience some self-induced activities. After 31 weeks, those two traits become more defined, and after 36 weeks, it is technically capable of communication. Thus, the foetus at no point reaches personhood during prenatal development, but our gradient approach means that we ought to have an increasing concern for a foetus as it develops.
Meanwhile, the woman easily fulfils all 7 criteria, meaning that we ought to afford her full ethical consideration and membership in our ethical community.
This approach to personhood also means that in any case where there is scarcity of resources, or where we have to concern ourselves with two different entities, we can evaluate to what degree they are beholden to our ethical considerations. A foetus, being a non-person human, deserves less ethical consideration than a woman, being a person and a human. Without any need to invoke self-defence, we can safely say that the bodily autonomy of a human person trumps a foetus’ non-rights.

Personhood and exceptions
Some anti-choice activists allow for a single line of exceptions: “Rape, incest and life of the mother.” This seems to be from a political analysis that these cases are especially onerous, and it is hard to argue to an electorate that a woman has to bear a child forced upon her by a rapist. However, this quickly runs into an issue, namely that these same advocates also often proclaim life or personhood to start at conception. This means that anti-choice advocates need to square the rights of foetuses based on the method of their conception, rather than any criteria based on rights. For this exception alone, under their definition of personhood, persons can lose their rights based on the acts of their parents, and (Again under their definition of personhood) be legally killed without an investigation, something we do not allow anywhere else.
For any more sensible personhood definition, this is not an issue.

Personhood and contraception
If we decide to grant personhood as I do above, there are no issues with personhood and contraception. However, if we, as I explained before, grant personhood to embryo, then each fertilised embryo that does not become a baby, is a cause for a criminal investigation into the homicide of a person. Any fertile, sexually active woman who takes the pill will need to undergo up to a monthly investigation. The GOP, when championing “personhood-bills” that establish personhood at conception, are well aware of this and the fact that they would effectively outlaw all hormonal contraception, as well as make every miscarriage a subject of a criminal investigation.

Personhood and self-defence
Most jurisdictions have some circumstances where, if you are threatened, you are allowed to defend yourself. Some jurisdictions do allow for lethal force, some do not; some require you to seek out other avenues of disengagement, some do not; some require you do disarm the threat, some do not; some require you to use an appropriate scale of responses, some do not. Common for all self-defence clauses I know of, however, is that self-defence has to be established through an investigation. Some jurisdictions bring homicides to court on principle, some can decide not to bring charges based on justified self-defence, but either way, the self-defender has to face an investigation. Some jurisdictions may not convict for murder, but for assault or manslaughter, if the self-defender can be shown to have used excessive force.
If foetuses are persons, then each abortion and miscarriage is a homicide. Potentially, so are the periods of fertile, sexually active women who are on hormonal contraception. Even if justified self-defence, and thus no sentence, facing a criminal investigation each time will not be pleasant. However, that is the necessary result of giving foetuses personhood.
This is another reason why I invested a lot of time to lay out my arguments: When pro-choice advocates allow foetal personhood because self-defence still is a thing, the consequence is an investigation to determine whether it was justified. I would therefore issue this clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to refine your language and say, for example, that we don’t even allow other persons to infringe on bodily autonomy, so why would we allow a non-person to do so?

Life at conception
Since many anti-choice advocates use “life begins at conception”, I’d just point out that it’s nonsensical. All cells are alive, so the egg and the sperm were alive before conception, and bacteria are alive as well. To say that we ought to protect “life” from “conception” means we have to protect a lot of bacteria, some of which are very harmful to us. It’s either incredibly stupid or momentously meaningless.

Personhood and other laws
Personhood, as I have said before, is already a concept in law. It is how we grant rights and obligations. It is also how we distinguish between, for example, killing a pet in a cruel way (Animal cruelty), killing a pet at a veterinarian (Legal), killing a person in a cruel way (Murder with extenuating circumstances), accidental killing a person (Manslaughter) and so on.
It is also much of the legal debate about euthanasia and persons in a persistent vegetative state. If human DNA, or some other “from conception to death” definition, is our basis for personhood, then turning off life support for a PVS is murder. If the more sensible definition from above is used, that PVS may have lost personhood some time ago, and it no longer can be homicide.

Conclusion
I hope I have shown why a definition that establishes personhood at conception is unworkable, and why you ought to adopt my definition. Furthermore, I hope to have shown why contraception is not a reason to ban abortion, why abortion is safer in medical terms than going through with pregnancy and birth, and why abstinence-only is a failure in every way.


References:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
[2] http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Ab ... ed.20.aspx
[3] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3929105/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[6] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/ ... Report.pdf
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/ ... nbirthrate
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/scie ... ccess.html
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/report/contr ... 014-update

[Eukrates the Historian]

First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro- and anti-choice rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.

Your pro life/pro choice paragraph is applying bias to complain about other’s bias. If you see abortion as a debate about whether a woman has a choice or not, that is fine, but that is not how I see it. Also, you are applying attributes, such as advocating for cuts on healthcare/social services and even advocating for “death and destruction”, to people who label themselves pro-life without knowing them. If healthcare is the debate you want to have, either find a healthcare forum or make one. This topic is about abortion. When it comes down to it, both sides have a biased connotation on their label. Pro-choice implies that anyone who isn’t is against women’s rights, and pro-life implies that anyone who isn’t is against the life of a child. I don’t think either implication is a good one. I think the labels, however, should stay where they are at. I am happy calling you pro-choice as long as you call me pro-life, with no name calling in between.

When it comes to using pro-abortion and anti-abortion, I mostly agree with what you said, and that those labels should be used more for personal feeling rather than legal wants.

[Jhman]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.Indira Gandhi made a mistake by abortion and people are against it. Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems. Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

[The New California Republic]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.

That makes absolutely no sense...

Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems.

Wrong, so wrong. Abortion gets rid of unwanted pregnancies, it doesn't lead to them. Unwanted pregnancies are caused by a variety of factors, but the availability of abortion isn't one of them.

Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

Yup, all abortion is caused by an Indian family, just to annoy a religion(!)

[Katganistan]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.Indira Gandhi made a mistake by abortion and people are against it. Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems. Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

This is about abortion in the United States. Absolutely nothing you said has anything to do with the topic.

And before you said that the United States is not the world, it was defined in the very first post of this thread that we were talking about the United States only. It's your responsibility to at least read the OP before jumping in.

[Katganistan]

I accidentally wrote something over the vacation time to distract me from my papers. It's not perfect (Yet?), but I feel it's good enough to offer up to you now.

I am writing this in order to outline why we ought to minimise abortions, but also why we ought to allow abortions. I will try to offer a better use of “person” and “personhood”, which will not only be superior because it is philosophically grounded and consistent, but also because it works in other areas such as law or commerce. This last part is also a clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to be careful about their use of certain words.

Terminology, in so many words.
First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro- and anti-choice rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.
Regarding the words “human” and “person”, they have almost interchangeable use in common parlance. However, when we are talking about “personhood” and when one becomes a person, compared to being human, the differences are crucial to avoid conflating causes and effects, and overlapping but distinct categories. As such, “human” here is either (a) member(s) of our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, or the adjective, something that is of or by members of said specie (“Human DNA”, “human reaction” etc).
“Person” is here a member of the category of beings with the trait of having personhood, as I elaborate later. It is overlapping with most humans, but would also include any hypothetical sapient spacefaring aliens. As I explain subsequent, it is also the state of being where you have legal rights and obligations (In English law terminology AFAIK “natural person”). I use “legal entity” when referring to any entity, such as corporation, collective, state, etc., that also has rights and obligations, but does not have personhood. This is not the normal usage in law where I live (Where “legal person” would be the accurate translation), but it makes it less confusing to be talking about natural versus legal persons.
I try to use specific terms for the stages of human development and legality. “Children”, “baby”, “toddler” etc. are terms that refer to offspring after birth, “zygote”, “embryo”, “foetus” etc. refer to offspring while still in some stage of prenatal development. “Homicide” is when a person kills another person (From Latin, ‘the killing of a human’), but without or before any legal judgement. “Justified homicide” is a legal killing, for instance self-defence, and “manslaughter” is an unintended, accidental, or non-malicious killing, but one where the killer is still punished. “Murder” is an intended, planned or malicious killing of another person with the associated long sentence. While there are several distinctions between various jurisdictions on what constitutes justified homicide, manslaughter and murder, I think my intended meaning comes across.
Lastly, “life” simply uses a common biological definition: Homeostasis, cells, metabolism, grow, adapt, react to external environment and capable of reproduction. This places humans alongside our fellow animals in Kingdom Animalia, and our fellow multi-celled organisms in the Eukaryote Domain, and within the Tree of Life as a whole. While religious groups may want to talk about their divine being(s) and soul(s), I prefer to plant my philosophy and policy preferences on ground as close to objective reality as possible.
With these distinctions out of the way, I can get to the meat of my project.

Why abortions ought to be as few as possible.
Abortions aren’t without consequences. The medical effects of messing with the human body in this way are seldom harsh, but they are there even when mild. Most abortions happen at a time where the procedure can be done with a pill, potentially even in the women’s own home, with limited adverse effects and few risks of side-effects. Late-stage abortions are often comparatively riskier, though in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine has made abortion safe in most instances. Still, there are non-zero risks involved with abortions. This is a point where pro- and anti-choice actually agree, though with different emphasis. Even if we leave aside the oft-overstated risks that the anti-choice advocates offer for restrictions on abortions, we also have to consider the health risks of being pregnant and giving birth.
Without being a doctor, I can hardly give a medical evaluation of the associated risks with either. Going through both my own country’s Ministry of Health websites and the CDC, however, the list of risks involved with abortion is substantially shorter than the combined list of risks with a continued pregnancy and a birth, and any risk with abortion is also included in the list of pregnancy and birth risks. When considering the peer reviewed literature, it seems clear to me that the mortality risks are simply not comparable [1]; the mortality rate for births are roughly 15 times as high as abortion, and that risk is obfuscating a stark difference in abortion risks over time [2].
While abortions are safer than birth, that still leaves abortion as a non-zero risk for the zero gain of reverting to a state of non-pregnancy. We should clearly not invite people to take a risk with their bodies without mitigation. Luckily, contraception is a thing.
While medical complications as area can only be improved through scientific research and improvement, social condemnation is an aspect that we can evaluate and improve separately. This also ties in to mental issues. It is currently a fact that terrorist organisations like Operation Rescue, as well as long-term US social trends, translates to ostracization of women who get abortions. Doctors who perform abortions are literally risking their life as well. The discourse is largely about judging and condemning. While I can’t get solid numbers on social effects, but must infer them from polling, we can quickly see that roughly half of the US population are “pro” life [3], and that while roughly half want to make abortion legal in ‘some circumstances’, for many people that list can be reduced to the classic “rape, incest and life of the mother”. Another 20% want it illegal in all circumstances.
While I in no way suggest that all these respondents are as extreme as, say, Keshiland has been in this thread, this polling and news stories on the subject suggest that for roughly 50-70% of the US population, abortion is a socially condemnable act, even if not legally. This will have a negative impact on the women who choose abortion, regardless of any inherent effect from the abortion itself. Numbers on e.g. post-abortion depressions are statistically not significantly different from post-birth depressions [4] when taking confounding factors into account, but this study does not take social evaluation and culture into account. This means that women who are brought up learning that abortions are evil, who subsequently have abortions, may have worse mental conditions than usual. Social evaluation of abortion can also impact women’s mental health, with any range of negative evaluations of women who have abortions, such as them being ‘slutty’, ‘unable to take care of themselves’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘murderers’ or any other list of adjectives (Just within this thread, there are numerable examples to this effect). These factors are not included in the controls of the linked study (Which I get – both because it’s not the purpose of the study, and because it’s incredibly hard to do well), which means we cannot know to what degree these adverse mental effects from abortions are biological or social in origin.
Regardless of whether mental effects are biological or social, however, they are a large part of the social discourse. Condemnation of abortion as an evil act, and hyping or overselling the medical, mental and social impacts of abortions, have been repeat offenses by the anti-choice advocates, even in this thread.
That does not invalidate the impact, though. A non-zero risk, whether medical, mental or social, is better avoided when the ‘gain’, as here, is reverting to a status quo that could be achieved without taking the risk. In other words, between staying non-pregnant and having an abortion to re-become non-pregnant, staying non-pregnant is preferable. The question on how to achieve that is not the primary subject for this debate, as it’s about family planning and contraception rather than abortion per se, but I would offer two points for consideration:
First, that abstinence-only is an abject failure in every way, shape and form [5], and the proponents of abstinence-only are directly promoting teen pregnancies, teen abortions, social ruination, adverse economic effects and more. Abstinence-only is directly responsible for more abortions, more teen pregnancies and higher STD spread rate.
Second, that while comprehensive sexual education is a right way to go, it is not the only right way to go. Colorado had a huge success with its IUD programme, which lead to a dramatic fall in unintended pregnancies, which in return lead to fewer abortions of said unintended pregnancies [6]. Offering free IUDs to women around the onset of sexual maturity is also economically viable, as the savings offset the health-costs. Furthermore, one has to assess the empowering factor of giving women control over their own reproduction, and the process of family planning that starts already when taking the IUD out, when a woman desire to get pregnant.
To sum up: For women, abortion is associated with fewer health risks than pregnancy and birth. It is comparable to birth in mental health risks, though some as-yet unaccounted-for factors may show abortion to have fewer mental health effects than birth. Social condemnation is substantial and at times dangerous. Meanwhile, to prevent abortions, one has to prevent pregnancies through comprehensive sexual education and free IUDs, while abstinence-only proponents fail at every level.

Concerning Contraception.
Not all anti-choice advocates are in disagreement with the assessment above. Some would claim that they try to empower women to avoid unintended pregnancies exactly because they want specific anti-abortion policies, so fewer or no unintended pregnancies would offset the consequences of illegal abortions. This attempted compromise-argument rests on a particular foundational falsehood: That contraception always works, and that not using contraception is blame-worthy.
Contraception failure is a wonderful example of double-think among some anti-choice advocates. The argument goes that because the number of abortions due to contraception failure is so small, we oughtn’t make abortion legal for all those who do not use contraception, or only uses it infrequently (Because, some reason, they chose not to use contraception, and thus their own carelessness got them into the mess). However, any ‘small amount’ argument would also work on the exceptions due to “rape, incest and life of the mother” that many anti-choice advocates want to allow for (And which I will address in depth later), and it counters the anti-choice advocates who decry the moral failure of late-term abortions. It also follows that if contraception had a much higher failure rate, we ought to legalise abortion for that reason, which runs counter to the argument anti-choice advocates try to make with contraception failure statistics.
Furthermore, unless an anti-choice advocate also wants to make contraception free for all forever, they need to grapple with the fact that access to contraception is not universal, and that many women, especially young or from ethnic minorities, can’t afford contraception entirely on their own [7], leading to women being blamed for not using an option they never had.
By focusing on contraception-use, anti-choice advocates sometimes try to make “sex without contraception” mean “consent to pregnancy”. There is no logical step from A to B here; the argument is a complete non-sequitur.
I would also argue that we should not limit rights by such an arbitrary punishment mentality. This doesn’t happen anywhere else; with rights to free speech, voting, search and seizure etc. Limiting e.g. rights to free speech happens mostly of concerns for other people’s rights, and not because you didn’t care enough to buy a megaphone before attending a rally. Abortion ought to be legal or illegal regardless of contraception and the efficacy thereof.
The most damning argument regarding contraception, however, comes when we consider the way contraception works, more specifically hormonal birth control like the Pill, Patch, IUDs and other. While these may influence how the egg develops and how likely sperm is to reach it, they all prevent implantation in the uterus, meaning that a potentially fertilised egg will fail to implant, and be removed with the next menstruation cycle. If one is of the opinion that “life begins at conception”, or, to put it in legal terms, that embryo have personhood, then each such failed implantation is a dead person, which merits investigation, and each use of the Pill is potentially a homicide (Legal or not). I will get back to the question of personhood and contraception; until then, just be aware that one cannot consider embryo persons if one favours contraception, and anyone arguing for personhood for embryo is implicitly arguing for convicting anyone using the Pill, Patch, IUDs and all other hormonal birth-control of murder.

Handing out memberships.
Thus far I have gone through arguments related to abortion from a viewpoint agnostic to potential rights of the foetus, because apart from the specifics of hormonal contraception and arguments regarding embryonic personhood (A point I will come back to), only the woman is a person. To argue for abortion at any time after conception, however, will quickly get the anti-choice crowd shouting “Think of the [foetus]!”
The word a philosopher would use for the group to which we ought to have ethical consideration and include in our ethical community is ‘personhood’. The term a legal scholar would use for the category of beings who has rights and obligations is also personhood. The vexing question is who are included. So, let us consider who have memberships to the personhood club.
The reason why I develop my criteria for personhood in a somewhat roundabout or abductive way is because there are several competing claims for deserving recipients of our ethical consideration. If we grant memberships one way, it may exclude some categories, and if we do it another, we may be overly inclusive. It is not necessarily the best way to present it in more formal philosophical terms, but I hope that in showing the logic at work, anti-choice proponents’ stances can have the highest possible chance of being included and thus shown why their criteria will lead them astray.
First, we might consider whether it is just human DNA that makes you included, but while this would include all humans, it would also include skin-cells, cancer-cells, corpses and atrophied limbs or organs. Meanwhile, it would exclude a hypothetical intelligent evolved or alien race who live, work, form social communities and become citizens. When we take fictional works set on Earth, say Guide to the Galaxy or Superman, we would not view Ford Prefect or Superman as non-persons, entities upon whom we can place no ethical obligations, from whom we can expect no reciprocal consideration and whom we allow no rights. They are not human, but we would be hard tried to find the criterion by which they ought to be excluded from the club. Clearly, human DNA is not a meaningful metric for inclusion in the personhood club.
Second, what about a whole human? This would solve the issues with individual cells or dead organs, but it would also exclude humans who are not whole, so loss of limb meant loss of personhood, and it would still exclude hypothetical evolved and alien races. Depending on what is meant by “whole”, it may also exclude any children under the age of 13-20. In both considered cases, we see that defining persons by their human biology is excessively restrictive to entities we would recognise as people in any social setting and any work of fiction, that is, people we (may) want to include. It may also be excessively inclusive, to the point where our cut-off hair has the same right as we do.
Do we even need a biological definition of personhood? If we develop an AI so powerful it really becomes conscious and separate from its’ programmers, would we deny it rights and obligations because it is still an electronic machine? Is it ethically justified to turn off the electricity to a conscious machine in a way that we would never allow for the forced starvation of a human? Thus, any subsequent considerations have to allow both non-human and non-biological entities as persons, so long as they are conscious.
What is distinct about being included in the personhood club? Why do we expect something of the beings we include in our ethical consideration and ethical community? I hinted at it before: We expect some measure of reciprocity; that when we ought to consider the concerns of other beings, they too ought to consider ours’. When we include a being in our ethical community, we place them under both the protection of our community, and we expect them to follow the rules in that community. Personhood requires enough self-awareness to see oneself as a part of an ethical community that provides both rights and limitations.
We can then go to a criterion that is on the right path. Sentience, the ability to experience, and especially the ability to suffer. We do explicitly confer some rights to any being we recognise as sentient, through animal cruelty laws, but do we see them as part of our ethical community? Do we need to feel obligated to afford the same rights to all animals as to humans? I would argue not; the ability to feel pain gives us an obligation to protect that being from undue pain, but merely feeling pain is not, in itself, sufficient for personhood.
The capacity for reason is another such option that, while on the right path, doesn’t give us the full picture. If we are literally unable to reason with a being, that being cannot be explained ethical considerations, and is unable to understand the concepts of an ethical community. Like sentience, however, reason alone is not sufficient, as we would lose out on why those rights would matter to a being e.g. unable to feel pain or suffering.
Lastly in our list of criteria, we need a being to be able to communicate in some way, and to be capable of self-induced activities. A being unable to communicate will also be unable to be made aware of other persons in their ethical community, and will be unable to learn of other persons’ concerns, thus be unable to take their plight into ethical consideration. Neither will they be able to express their own concerns, thus make the rest of us able of reciprocating. A being incapable of self-induced activities, whether because it is only capable of other-induced activities or unable to perform activities at all, is either a puppet, a machine or a lump, neither of which are meaningfully entities we might want to include.
Before I go over how this impacts any discussion about the ethics of abortion, I would like to take a last concept under consideration: Whether this is a yes/no or a degree discourse. Can you be more or less self-aware? Can you have more or less capacity for reason? Can you be more or less able to experience pain? Yes, so clearly each element of the admission process can be graded. Should personhood likewise be? Gradient personhood solves some problems: A baby and a toddler are not fully self-aware until between 1 and 2 years of age, and the ability to reason can be under-developed for longer. If each degree is simply better inclusion, more consideration, more voice in our ethical community, we would not have to decide when a baby becomes a person, but we can see that it is a person with fewer obligations and rights than an adult.
Thus, a sensible list of criteria for personhood are the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason, self-induced activities and ability to communicate, but in a gradient approach. This list is agnostic towards biology or human DNA, so any sufficiently advanced AI, any evolved animal and any alien would also be able to fit into this definition of a person (Some animal activists would argue that great apes already do).

How personhood impacts abortion
With our list, we check if a foetus has the necessary traits. Before a nervous system develops, it is unconscious, unable to reciprocate, not self-aware, not sentient, incapable of reason, has only other-induced activities and is unable to communicate. Until around 20-25 weeks, a foetus has no single necessary trait. After 26 weeks, it has a nervous system and starts some movements, that means sentience some self-induced activities. After 31 weeks, those two traits become more defined, and after 36 weeks, it is technically capable of communication. Thus, the foetus at no point reaches personhood during prenatal development, but our gradient approach means that we ought to have an increasing concern for a foetus as it develops.
Meanwhile, the woman easily fulfils all 7 criteria, meaning that we ought to afford her full ethical consideration and membership in our ethical community.
This approach to personhood also means that in any case where there is scarcity of resources, or where we have to concern ourselves with two different entities, we can evaluate to what degree they are beholden to our ethical considerations. A foetus, being a non-person human, deserves less ethical consideration than a woman, being a person and a human. Without any need to invoke self-defence, we can safely say that the bodily autonomy of a human person trumps a foetus’ non-rights.

Personhood and exceptions
Some anti-choice activists allow for a single line of exceptions: “Rape, incest and life of the mother.” This seems to be from a political analysis that these cases are especially onerous, and it is hard to argue to an electorate that a woman has to bear a child forced upon her by a rapist. However, this quickly runs into an issue, namely that these same advocates also often proclaim life or personhood to start at conception. This means that anti-choice advocates need to square the rights of foetuses based on the method of their conception, rather than any criteria based on rights. For this exception alone, under their definition of personhood, persons can lose their rights based on the acts of their parents, and (Again under their definition of personhood) be legally killed without an investigation, something we do not allow anywhere else.
For any more sensible personhood definition, this is not an issue.

Personhood and contraception
If we decide to grant personhood as I do above, there are no issues with personhood and contraception. However, if we, as I explained before, grant personhood to embryo, then each fertilised embryo that does not become a baby, is a cause for a criminal investigation into the homicide of a person. Any fertile, sexually active woman who takes the pill will need to undergo up to a monthly investigation. The GOP, when championing “personhood-bills” that establish personhood at conception, are well aware of this and the fact that they would effectively outlaw all hormonal contraception, as well as make every miscarriage a subject of a criminal investigation.

Personhood and self-defence
Most jurisdictions have some circumstances where, if you are threatened, you are allowed to defend yourself. Some jurisdictions do allow for lethal force, some do not; some require you to seek out other avenues of disengagement, some do not; some require you do disarm the threat, some do not; some require you to use an appropriate scale of responses, some do not. Common for all self-defence clauses I know of, however, is that self-defence has to be established through an investigation. Some jurisdictions bring homicides to court on principle, some can decide not to bring charges based on justified self-defence, but either way, the self-defender has to face an investigation. Some jurisdictions may not convict for murder, but for assault or manslaughter, if the self-defender can be shown to have used excessive force.
If foetuses are persons, then each abortion and miscarriage is a homicide. Potentially, so are the periods of fertile, sexually active women who are on hormonal contraception. Even if justified self-defence, and thus no sentence, facing a criminal investigation each time will not be pleasant. However, that is the necessary result of giving foetuses personhood.
This is another reason why I invested a lot of time to lay out my arguments: When pro-choice advocates allow foetal personhood because self-defence still is a thing, the consequence is an investigation to determine whether it was justified. I would therefore issue this clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to refine your language and say, for example, that we don’t even allow other persons to infringe on bodily autonomy, so why would we allow a non-person to do so?

Life at conception
Since many anti-choice advocates use “life begins at conception”, I’d just point out that it’s nonsensical. All cells are alive, so the egg and the sperm were alive before conception, and bacteria are alive as well. To say that we ought to protect “life” from “conception” means we have to protect a lot of bacteria, some of which are very harmful to us. It’s either incredibly stupid or momentously meaningless.

Personhood and other laws
Personhood, as I have said before, is already a concept in law. It is how we grant rights and obligations. It is also how we distinguish between, for example, killing a pet in a cruel way (Animal cruelty), killing a pet at a veterinarian (Legal), killing a person in a cruel way (Murder with extenuating circumstances), accidental killing a person (Manslaughter) and so on.
It is also much of the legal debate about euthanasia and persons in a persistent vegetative state. If human DNA, or some other “from conception to death” definition, is our basis for personhood, then turning off life support for a PVS is murder. If the more sensible definition from above is used, that PVS may have lost personhood some time ago, and it no longer can be homicide.

Conclusion
I hope I have shown why a definition that establishes personhood at conception is unworkable, and why you ought to adopt my definition. Furthermore, I hope to have shown why contraception is not a reason to ban abortion, why abortion is safer in medical terms than going through with pregnancy and birth, and why abstinence-only is a failure in every way.


References:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
[2] http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Ab ... ed.20.aspx
[3] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3929105/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[6] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/ ... Report.pdf
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/ ... nbirthrate
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/scie ... ccess.html
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/report/contr ... 014-update

I don't think any of us came here to read a research paper. Too long.

[Godular]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.Indira Gandhi made a mistake by abortion and people are against it. Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems. Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

Banning abortion willnot reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and if anything will lead to even more ‘problems’.

Also, even though it seems quite obvious you’re speaking of India: I’d like some sources of the conspiracy theories you’re winging around in that post of yours.

[The New California Republic]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.Indira Gandhi made a mistake by abortion and people are against it. Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems. Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

I’d like some sources of the conspiracy theories you’re winging around in that post of yours.

I wouldn't hold your breath, it looks like he dumped the post and ran...

[Attempted Socialism]

First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro- and anti-choice rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.

Your pro life/pro choice paragraph is applying bias to complain about other’s bias. If you see abortion as a debate about whether a woman has a choice or not, that is fine, but that is not how I see it.

So you're indifferent to the question of whether abortion should be the choice of the woman whose body it is, or not the choice of the woman?
The reason I put it like that is to leave out as much bias as possible. I don't use "anti-women", though I think anti-choice policies are implicitly anti-women, and I don't use anti-freedom because any anti-choice advocate may be pro other freedoms than a womans freedom to choose whether to remain pregnant or not. Pro-birth might also be a label I could work with, but that also has connotations I wish to avoid assuming.
Pro- and anti-choice seems to me to contain the fewest biases while removing as many connotations as possible.

Also, you are applying attributes, such as advocating for cuts on healthcare/social services and even advocating for “death and destruction”, to people who label themselves pro-life

Yes. Having followed American politics for a decade, I don't think it's a stretch to say that while both major parties are hawkish, the self-proclaimed "pro" life party is the one with more wars, more cuts to education, healthcare and social services. If we're talking about pro (Human) life, we should expect some consistency across these policy areas, and when we don't see that we are justified in calling foul. Democrats don't face the same broad issue of hypocrisy, because they don't claim to be "pro" life.
We might also consider that life is not solely the domain of humans. Am I pro-life if I'm not also vegetarian or vegan? But plants are also life... damn, there's no way of staying alive and being pro-life, but if I die of hunger, I'm not pro-my-own-life!
When I call the "pro" life stance vacuous and convenient rebranding, I do mean it. There's nothing coherent about it. You might as well be "pro" good.

without knowing them.

While I don't personally know Cruz, Inhofe, Paul (Ron or Rand), Bush (Jr. or Jeb) or any number of GOP officials from the last 15 years, leaders of Operation Rescue, and more, I would say their stated policies, votes and actions are enough material for me to work with. While you're probably able to find some anti-choice advocates who are consistent (Personally, I'd look towards pacifists first), I haven't seen any in the US public discourse.

If healthcare is the debate you want to have, either find a healthcare forum or make one. This topic is about abortion.

I don't know how you got the impression that healthcare was the main subject of my post.

When it comes down to it, both sides have a biased connotation on their label. Pro-choice implies that anyone who isn’t is against women’s rights,

No, it explicitates that a person can be for or against a single right without necessarily being for or against other rights or groups. If you're concerned that your policy position may lead to people realising that you're against (some) rights or groups, reevaluate your policy position.

and pro-life implies that anyone who isn’t is against the life of a childfoetus.

And that anyone pro-life is also against wars, against hunger, against homelessnes, for education, for healthcare etc.

I don’t think either implication is a good one. I think the labels, however, should stay where they are at. I am happy calling you pro-choice as long as you call me pro-life, with no name calling in between.

Anti-choice is not name-calling, it's just inconvenient to be denied a dishonest and hypocritical rebranding. I'm not going to assist anti-choice advocates in that project. They're free to place a mental asterisk each time I use "anti-choice", that's their choice.

[Che Triumphant]

I can some what understand being against the abortion once it gets to a certain point, when the thing is clearly a living creature and sucking it's thumb and what not, but before that it is by definition not alive, and most abortions like that aren't even done by the doctor, most sperm are killed long before they hit the sperm naturally, and if we're going to be making the argument that at some point in the hypothetical future there will be some hypothetical life that won't happen because of your actions and we should make laws of off that then ban contraception, masturbation, and pulling out, if you're going to have a position like that atleast me consistent

And to all the religious people who were arguing that this was against your deity or something like that, your god meticulously designed the reproductive system where the mass majority of sperm die, that makes god the single biggest abortionist of them all

[Eukrates the Historian]

Anti-choice/Pro-choice frames the debate as a discussion about the mother. That is obviously your point of view, and that of most pro-choice. People who are pro-life see the discussion as one relating to what rights the child has or not. So saying ant-choice is biased, because the way I see it, a mother's "choice" is irrelevant.

[Godular]

Anti-choice/Pro-choice frames the debate as a discussion about the mother. That is obviously your point of view, and that of most pro-choice. People who are pro-life see the discussion as one relating to what rights the child has or not. So saying ant-choice is biased, because the way I see it, a mother's "choice" is irrelevant.

So you wish to treat women as non-citizens then?

[Katganistan]

Anti-choice/Pro-choice frames the debate as a discussion about the mother. That is obviously your point of view, and that of most pro-choice. People who are pro-life see the discussion as one relating to what rights the child has or not. So saying ant-choice is biased, because the way I see it, a mother's "choice" is irrelevant.

Really? Because being anti-choice is being against the living person having a say over what happens to their own person.

I don't think it's biased to say 'anti-choice' when the argument is that the mother does not/should not have the power to decide what happens in her body.

[Attempted Socialism]

I accidentally wrote something over the vacation time to distract me from my papers. It's not perfect (Yet?), but I feel it's good enough to offer up to you now.

I am writing this in order to outline why we ought to minimise abortions, but also why we ought to allow abortions. I will try to offer a better use of “person” and “personhood”, which will not only be superior because it is philosophically grounded and consistent, but also because it works in other areas such as law or commerce. This last part is also a clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to be careful about their use of certain words.

Terminology, in so many words.
First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro- and anti-choice rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.
Regarding the words “human” and “person”, they have almost interchangeable use in common parlance. However, when we are talking about “personhood” and when one becomes a person, compared to being human, the differences are crucial to avoid conflating causes and effects, and overlapping but distinct categories. As such, “human” here is either (a) member(s) of our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, or the adjective, something that is of or by members of said specie (“Human DNA”, “human reaction” etc).
“Person” is here a member of the category of beings with the trait of having personhood, as I elaborate later. It is overlapping with most humans, but would also include any hypothetical sapient spacefaring aliens. As I explain subsequent, it is also the state of being where you have legal rights and obligations (In English law terminology AFAIK “natural person”). I use “legal entity” when referring to any entity, such as corporation, collective, state, etc., that also has rights and obligations, but does not have personhood. This is not the normal usage in law where I live (Where “legal person” would be the accurate translation), but it makes it less confusing to be talking about natural versus legal persons.
I try to use specific terms for the stages of human development and legality. “Children”, “baby”, “toddler” etc. are terms that refer to offspring after birth, “zygote”, “embryo”, “foetus” etc. refer to offspring while still in some stage of prenatal development. “Homicide” is when a person kills another person (From Latin, ‘the killing of a human’), but without or before any legal judgement. “Justified homicide” is a legal killing, for instance self-defence, and “manslaughter” is an unintended, accidental, or non-malicious killing, but one where the killer is still punished. “Murder” is an intended, planned or malicious killing of another person with the associated long sentence. While there are several distinctions between various jurisdictions on what constitutes justified homicide, manslaughter and murder, I think my intended meaning comes across.
Lastly, “life” simply uses a common biological definition: Homeostasis, cells, metabolism, grow, adapt, react to external environment and capable of reproduction. This places humans alongside our fellow animals in Kingdom Animalia, and our fellow multi-celled organisms in the Eukaryote Domain, and within the Tree of Life as a whole. While religious groups may want to talk about their divine being(s) and soul(s), I prefer to plant my philosophy and policy preferences on ground as close to objective reality as possible.
With these distinctions out of the way, I can get to the meat of my project.

Why abortions ought to be as few as possible.
Abortions aren’t without consequences. The medical effects of messing with the human body in this way are seldom harsh, but they are there even when mild. Most abortions happen at a time where the procedure can be done with a pill, potentially even in the women’s own home, with limited adverse effects and few risks of side-effects. Late-stage abortions are often comparatively riskier, though in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine has made abortion safe in most instances. Still, there are non-zero risks involved with abortions. This is a point where pro- and anti-choice actually agree, though with different emphasis. Even if we leave aside the oft-overstated risks that the anti-choice advocates offer for restrictions on abortions, we also have to consider the health risks of being pregnant and giving birth.
Without being a doctor, I can hardly give a medical evaluation of the associated risks with either. Going through both my own country’s Ministry of Health websites and the CDC, however, the list of risks involved with abortion is substantially shorter than the combined list of risks with a continued pregnancy and a birth, and any risk with abortion is also included in the list of pregnancy and birth risks. When considering the peer reviewed literature, it seems clear to me that the mortality risks are simply not comparable [1]; the mortality rate for births are roughly 15 times as high as abortion, and that risk is obfuscating a stark difference in abortion risks over time [2].
While abortions are safer than birth, that still leaves abortion as a non-zero risk for the zero gain of reverting to a state of non-pregnancy. We should clearly not invite people to take a risk with their bodies without mitigation. Luckily, contraception is a thing.
While medical complications as area can only be improved through scientific research and improvement, social condemnation is an aspect that we can evaluate and improve separately. This also ties in to mental issues. It is currently a fact that terrorist organisations like Operation Rescue, as well as long-term US social trends, translates to ostracization of women who get abortions. Doctors who perform abortions are literally risking their life as well. The discourse is largely about judging and condemning. While I can’t get solid numbers on social effects, but must infer them from polling, we can quickly see that roughly half of the US population are “pro” life [3], and that while roughly half want to make abortion legal in ‘some circumstances’, for many people that list can be reduced to the classic “rape, incest and life of the mother”. Another 20% want it illegal in all circumstances.
While I in no way suggest that all these respondents are as extreme as, say, Keshiland has been in this thread, this polling and news stories on the subject suggest that for roughly 50-70% of the US population, abortion is a socially condemnable act, even if not legally. This will have a negative impact on the women who choose abortion, regardless of any inherent effect from the abortion itself. Numbers on e.g. post-abortion depressions are statistically not significantly different from post-birth depressions [4] when taking confounding factors into account, but this study does not take social evaluation and culture into account. This means that women who are brought up learning that abortions are evil, who subsequently have abortions, may have worse mental conditions than usual. Social evaluation of abortion can also impact women’s mental health, with any range of negative evaluations of women who have abortions, such as them being ‘slutty’, ‘unable to take care of themselves’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘murderers’ or any other list of adjectives (Just within this thread, there are numerable examples to this effect). These factors are not included in the controls of the linked study (Which I get – both because it’s not the purpose of the study, and because it’s incredibly hard to do well), which means we cannot know to what degree these adverse mental effects from abortions are biological or social in origin.
Regardless of whether mental effects are biological or social, however, they are a large part of the social discourse. Condemnation of abortion as an evil act, and hyping or overselling the medical, mental and social impacts of abortions, have been repeat offenses by the anti-choice advocates, even in this thread.
That does not invalidate the impact, though. A non-zero risk, whether medical, mental or social, is better avoided when the ‘gain’, as here, is reverting to a status quo that could be achieved without taking the risk. In other words, between staying non-pregnant and having an abortion to re-become non-pregnant, staying non-pregnant is preferable. The question on how to achieve that is not the primary subject for this debate, as it’s about family planning and contraception rather than abortion per se, but I would offer two points for consideration:
First, that abstinence-only is an abject failure in every way, shape and form [5], and the proponents of abstinence-only are directly promoting teen pregnancies, teen abortions, social ruination, adverse economic effects and more. Abstinence-only is directly responsible for more abortions, more teen pregnancies and higher STD spread rate.
Second, that while comprehensive sexual education is a right way to go, it is not the only right way to go. Colorado had a huge success with its IUD programme, which lead to a dramatic fall in unintended pregnancies, which in return lead to fewer abortions of said unintended pregnancies [6]. Offering free IUDs to women around the onset of sexual maturity is also economically viable, as the savings offset the health-costs. Furthermore, one has to assess the empowering factor of giving women control over their own reproduction, and the process of family planning that starts already when taking the IUD out, when a woman desire to get pregnant.
To sum up: For women, abortion is associated with fewer health risks than pregnancy and birth. It is comparable to birth in mental health risks, though some as-yet unaccounted-for factors may show abortion to have fewer mental health effects than birth. Social condemnation is substantial and at times dangerous. Meanwhile, to prevent abortions, one has to prevent pregnancies through comprehensive sexual education and free IUDs, while abstinence-only proponents fail at every level.

Concerning Contraception.
Not all anti-choice advocates are in disagreement with the assessment above. Some would claim that they try to empower women to avoid unintended pregnancies exactly because they want specific anti-abortion policies, so fewer or no unintended pregnancies would offset the consequences of illegal abortions. This attempted compromise-argument rests on a particular foundational falsehood: That contraception always works, and that not using contraception is blame-worthy.
Contraception failure is a wonderful example of double-think among some anti-choice advocates. The argument goes that because the number of abortions due to contraception failure is so small, we oughtn’t make abortion legal for all those who do not use contraception, or only uses it infrequently (Because, some reason, they chose not to use contraception, and thus their own carelessness got them into the mess). However, any ‘small amount’ argument would also work on the exceptions due to “rape, incest and life of the mother” that many anti-choice advocates want to allow for (And which I will address in depth later), and it counters the anti-choice advocates who decry the moral failure of late-term abortions. It also follows that if contraception had a much higher failure rate, we ought to legalise abortion for that reason, which runs counter to the argument anti-choice advocates try to make with contraception failure statistics.
Furthermore, unless an anti-choice advocate also wants to make contraception free for all forever, they need to grapple with the fact that access to contraception is not universal, and that many women, especially young or from ethnic minorities, can’t afford contraception entirely on their own [7], leading to women being blamed for not using an option they never had.
By focusing on contraception-use, anti-choice advocates sometimes try to make “sex without contraception” mean “consent to pregnancy”. There is no logical step from A to B here; the argument is a complete non-sequitur.
I would also argue that we should not limit rights by such an arbitrary punishment mentality. This doesn’t happen anywhere else; with rights to free speech, voting, search and seizure etc. Limiting e.g. rights to free speech happens mostly of concerns for other people’s rights, and not because you didn’t care enough to buy a megaphone before attending a rally. Abortion ought to be legal or illegal regardless of contraception and the efficacy thereof.
The most damning argument regarding contraception, however, comes when we consider the way contraception works, more specifically hormonal birth control like the Pill, Patch, IUDs and other. While these may influence how the egg develops and how likely sperm is to reach it, they all prevent implantation in the uterus, meaning that a potentially fertilised egg will fail to implant, and be removed with the next menstruation cycle. If one is of the opinion that “life begins at conception”, or, to put it in legal terms, that embryo have personhood, then each such failed implantation is a dead person, which merits investigation, and each use of the Pill is potentially a homicide (Legal or not). I will get back to the question of personhood and contraception; until then, just be aware that one cannot consider embryo persons if one favours contraception, and anyone arguing for personhood for embryo is implicitly arguing for convicting anyone using the Pill, Patch, IUDs and all other hormonal birth-control of murder.

Handing out memberships.
Thus far I have gone through arguments related to abortion from a viewpoint agnostic to potential rights of the foetus, because apart from the specifics of hormonal contraception and arguments regarding embryonic personhood (A point I will come back to), only the woman is a person. To argue for abortion at any time after conception, however, will quickly get the anti-choice crowd shouting “Think of the [foetus]!”
The word a philosopher would use for the group to which we ought to have ethical consideration and include in our ethical community is ‘personhood’. The term a legal scholar would use for the category of beings who has rights and obligations is also personhood. The vexing question is who are included. So, let us consider who have memberships to the personhood club.
The reason why I develop my criteria for personhood in a somewhat roundabout or abductive way is because there are several competing claims for deserving recipients of our ethical consideration. If we grant memberships one way, it may exclude some categories, and if we do it another, we may be overly inclusive. It is not necessarily the best way to present it in more formal philosophical terms, but I hope that in showing the logic at work, anti-choice proponents’ stances can have the highest possible chance of being included and thus shown why their criteria will lead them astray.
First, we might consider whether it is just human DNA that makes you included, but while this would include all humans, it would also include skin-cells, cancer-cells, corpses and atrophied limbs or organs. Meanwhile, it would exclude a hypothetical intelligent evolved or alien race who live, work, form social communities and become citizens. When we take fictional works set on Earth, say Guide to the Galaxy or Superman, we would not view Ford Prefect or Superman as non-persons, entities upon whom we can place no ethical obligations, from whom we can expect no reciprocal consideration and whom we allow no rights. They are not human, but we would be hard tried to find the criterion by which they ought to be excluded from the club. Clearly, human DNA is not a meaningful metric for inclusion in the personhood club.
Second, what about a whole human? This would solve the issues with individual cells or dead organs, but it would also exclude humans who are not whole, so loss of limb meant loss of personhood, and it would still exclude hypothetical evolved and alien races. Depending on what is meant by “whole”, it may also exclude any children under the age of 13-20. In both considered cases, we see that defining persons by their human biology is excessively restrictive to entities we would recognise as people in any social setting and any work of fiction, that is, people we (may) want to include. It may also be excessively inclusive, to the point where our cut-off hair has the same right as we do.
Do we even need a biological definition of personhood? If we develop an AI so powerful it really becomes conscious and separate from its’ programmers, would we deny it rights and obligations because it is still an electronic machine? Is it ethically justified to turn off the electricity to a conscious machine in a way that we would never allow for the forced starvation of a human? Thus, any subsequent considerations have to allow both non-human and non-biological entities as persons, so long as they are conscious.
What is distinct about being included in the personhood club? Why do we expect something of the beings we include in our ethical consideration and ethical community? I hinted at it before: We expect some measure of reciprocity; that when we ought to consider the concerns of other beings, they too ought to consider ours’. When we include a being in our ethical community, we place them under both the protection of our community, and we expect them to follow the rules in that community. Personhood requires enough self-awareness to see oneself as a part of an ethical community that provides both rights and limitations.
We can then go to a criterion that is on the right path. Sentience, the ability to experience, and especially the ability to suffer. We do explicitly confer some rights to any being we recognise as sentient, through animal cruelty laws, but do we see them as part of our ethical community? Do we need to feel obligated to afford the same rights to all animals as to humans? I would argue not; the ability to feel pain gives us an obligation to protect that being from undue pain, but merely feeling pain is not, in itself, sufficient for personhood.
The capacity for reason is another such option that, while on the right path, doesn’t give us the full picture. If we are literally unable to reason with a being, that being cannot be explained ethical considerations, and is unable to understand the concepts of an ethical community. Like sentience, however, reason alone is not sufficient, as we would lose out on why those rights would matter to a being e.g. unable to feel pain or suffering.
Lastly in our list of criteria, we need a being to be able to communicate in some way, and to be capable of self-induced activities. A being unable to communicate will also be unable to be made aware of other persons in their ethical community, and will be unable to learn of other persons’ concerns, thus be unable to take their plight into ethical consideration. Neither will they be able to express their own concerns, thus make the rest of us able of reciprocating. A being incapable of self-induced activities, whether because it is only capable of other-induced activities or unable to perform activities at all, is either a puppet, a machine or a lump, neither of which are meaningfully entities we might want to include.
Before I go over how this impacts any discussion about the ethics of abortion, I would like to take a last concept under consideration: Whether this is a yes/no or a degree discourse. Can you be more or less self-aware? Can you have more or less capacity for reason? Can you be more or less able to experience pain? Yes, so clearly each element of the admission process can be graded. Should personhood likewise be? Gradient personhood solves some problems: A baby and a toddler are not fully self-aware until between 1 and 2 years of age, and the ability to reason can be under-developed for longer. If each degree is simply better inclusion, more consideration, more voice in our ethical community, we would not have to decide when a baby becomes a person, but we can see that it is a person with fewer obligations and rights than an adult.
Thus, a sensible list of criteria for personhood are the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason, self-induced activities and ability to communicate, but in a gradient approach. This list is agnostic towards biology or human DNA, so any sufficiently advanced AI, any evolved animal and any alien would also be able to fit into this definition of a person (Some animal activists would argue that great apes already do).

How personhood impacts abortion
With our list, we check if a foetus has the necessary traits. Before a nervous system develops, it is unconscious, unable to reciprocate, not self-aware, not sentient, incapable of reason, has only other-induced activities and is unable to communicate. Until around 20-25 weeks, a foetus has no single necessary trait. After 26 weeks, it has a nervous system and starts some movements, that means sentience some self-induced activities. After 31 weeks, those two traits become more defined, and after 36 weeks, it is technically capable of communication. Thus, the foetus at no point reaches personhood during prenatal development, but our gradient approach means that we ought to have an increasing concern for a foetus as it develops.
Meanwhile, the woman easily fulfils all 7 criteria, meaning that we ought to afford her full ethical consideration and membership in our ethical community.
This approach to personhood also means that in any case where there is scarcity of resources, or where we have to concern ourselves with two different entities, we can evaluate to what degree they are beholden to our ethical considerations. A foetus, being a non-person human, deserves less ethical consideration than a woman, being a person and a human. Without any need to invoke self-defence, we can safely say that the bodily autonomy of a human person trumps a foetus’ non-rights.

Personhood and exceptions
Some anti-choice activists allow for a single line of exceptions: “Rape, incest and life of the mother.” This seems to be from a political analysis that these cases are especially onerous, and it is hard to argue to an electorate that a woman has to bear a child forced upon her by a rapist. However, this quickly runs into an issue, namely that these same advocates also often proclaim life or personhood to start at conception. This means that anti-choice advocates need to square the rights of foetuses based on the method of their conception, rather than any criteria based on rights. For this exception alone, under their definition of personhood, persons can lose their rights based on the acts of their parents, and (Again under their definition of personhood) be legally killed without an investigation, something we do not allow anywhere else.
For any more sensible personhood definition, this is not an issue.

Personhood and contraception
If we decide to grant personhood as I do above, there are no issues with personhood and contraception. However, if we, as I explained before, grant personhood to embryo, then each fertilised embryo that does not become a baby, is a cause for a criminal investigation into the homicide of a person. Any fertile, sexually active woman who takes the pill will need to undergo up to a monthly investigation. The GOP, when championing “personhood-bills” that establish personhood at conception, are well aware of this and the fact that they would effectively outlaw all hormonal contraception, as well as make every miscarriage a subject of a criminal investigation.

Personhood and self-defence
Most jurisdictions have some circumstances where, if you are threatened, you are allowed to defend yourself. Some jurisdictions do allow for lethal force, some do not; some require you to seek out other avenues of disengagement, some do not; some require you do disarm the threat, some do not; some require you to use an appropriate scale of responses, some do not. Common for all self-defence clauses I know of, however, is that self-defence has to be established through an investigation. Some jurisdictions bring homicides to court on principle, some can decide not to bring charges based on justified self-defence, but either way, the self-defender has to face an investigation. Some jurisdictions may not convict for murder, but for assault or manslaughter, if the self-defender can be shown to have used excessive force.
If foetuses are persons, then each abortion and miscarriage is a homicide. Potentially, so are the periods of fertile, sexually active women who are on hormonal contraception. Even if justified self-defence, and thus no sentence, facing a criminal investigation each time will not be pleasant. However, that is the necessary result of giving foetuses personhood.
This is another reason why I invested a lot of time to lay out my arguments: When pro-choice advocates allow foetal personhood because self-defence still is a thing, the consequence is an investigation to determine whether it was justified. I would therefore issue this clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to refine your language and say, for example, that we don’t even allow other persons to infringe on bodily autonomy, so why would we allow a non-person to do so?

Life at conception
Since many anti-choice advocates use “life begins at conception”, I’d just point out that it’s nonsensical. All cells are alive, so the egg and the sperm were alive before conception, and bacteria are alive as well. To say that we ought to protect “life” from “conception” means we have to protect a lot of bacteria, some of which are very harmful to us. It’s either incredibly stupid or momentously meaningless.

Personhood and other laws
Personhood, as I have said before, is already a concept in law. It is how we grant rights and obligations. It is also how we distinguish between, for example, killing a pet in a cruel way (Animal cruelty), killing a pet at a veterinarian (Legal), killing a person in a cruel way (Murder with extenuating circumstances), accidental killing a person (Manslaughter) and so on.
It is also much of the legal debate about euthanasia and persons in a persistent vegetative state. If human DNA, or some other “from conception to death” definition, is our basis for personhood, then turning off life support for a PVS is murder. If the more sensible definition from above is used, that PVS may have lost personhood some time ago, and it no longer can be homicide.

Conclusion
I hope I have shown why a definition that establishes personhood at conception is unworkable, and why you ought to adopt my definition. Furthermore, I hope to have shown why contraception is not a reason to ban abortion, why abortion is safer in medical terms than going through with pregnancy and birth, and why abstinence-only is a failure in every way.


References:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
[2] http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Ab ... ed.20.aspx
[3] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3929105/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[6] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/ ... Report.pdf
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/ ... nbirthrate
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/scie ... ccess.html
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/report/contr ... 014-update

I don't think any of us came here to read a research paper. Too long.

It's only 4800 words, and only contains 7 references. That's not a research paper, that's a policy statement. The handbook I wrote for my university's elections 2017 was 10700 words. Compared to that, 4800 is short.
I'm not going to demand that anyone reads it; I wrote it as procrastination, and because I like writing.

[The New California Republic]

a mother's "choice" is irrelevant.

So it is irrelevant that, should abortion be banned, a woman who does not want to be pregnant will be enslaved to the fetus for 9 months as it leeches nutrients?? So the bodily sovereignty of women doesn't matter, then?

[Dylar]

I don't think any of us came here to read a research paper. Too long.

It's only 4800 words, and only contains 7 references. That's not a research paper, that's a policy statement. The handbook I wrote for my university's elections 2017 was 10700 words. Compared to that, 4800 is short.
I'm not going to demand that anyone reads it; I wrote it as procrastination, and because I like writing.

Teach me your ways, for I am struggling with writer's block!

[Dylar]

Abortion is a symbol of dynasty politics, it is wrong, last time, we had family planning lot of people were forcefully aborted.Indira Gandhi made a mistake by abortion and people are against it. Abortion needs to banned as it leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more problems. Abortion is nothing but an evil scheme of the Nehru -Gandhi family and is against Hindutva

Banning abortion willnot reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and if anything will lead to even more ‘problems’.

Wait, so what happens if we enact Option 5(or 6)?