Sorry, I just have to point out your very erroneous description of what pro-choice people believe. It’s almost comically offensive.
Thousand times this. To say pro choice people think it's ok to kill babies is like saying our entire society thinks murder is ok, just because *under certain circumstances* we do not criminalize killing another human.
I mean, seriously.
Read it again. My comment says "Pro-Choice people typically either believe that before delivery it's a fetus and therefore not murder or they believe killing a baby is OK for the greater good". The OR is important. I think (correct me it I'm wrong) that most are in the first camp.
Lol. I can’t believe you repeated it.
You’re wrong.
OK. I'd like to learn. How would you describe it?
Siiigh.
1) "Pro-Choice people typically either believe that before delivery it's a fetus and therefore not murder."
Well first of all it
is a fetus, that's not a "belief" it's a fact. Or perhaps its a zygote if it's not yet a fetus. What it's not is a "baby", not by any dictionary definition I've ever seen, nor by common usage outside of the pro-lifer side when specifically talking about abortion.
And regardless it doesn't follow that killing it would be "murder". Murder is a legal designation for an
unlawful premeditated killing. Abortion is definitely not murder in the US. Maybe you'd like it to be, but factually it's not.
But to finally wind our way down to addressing the meat of what you're saying, you are claiming that pro-choicers are okay with abortion because they view a fetus as a qualitatively different thing than a baby.
A more correct way of viewing this is to say that pro-choicers understand development of a fetus to be a spectrum, ranging all the way from a single cell with no brain all the way up to something that is characteristically indistinguishable from a 1-minute-old baby. Which is factually true, and indeed something that pro-choicers generally acknowledge. And you will indeed find people who are more morally okay with ending the life of a fetus at the brainless stage than you are at the negative-one-minute-old stage,
because it is a spectrum. So I suppose that is part of it.
2) "or they believe killing a baby is OK for the greater good"
What greater good are we even talking about here? Life/health of the mother? Life/health of the fetus with soon-fatal deformities? Greater good of a rape victim to not be forced to bear her rapist's child for 9 months? Greater good of society to not have unwanted babies born homes where they can't / wont be taken care of? All of the above?
I suppose regardless you will in fact find people who do believe that abortion is the lesser of those two evils. But it's obviously not that they "believe that killing a baby is OK for the greater good", because they
don't believe that for already-born babies, do they?
The
huge reason that you completely miss here is that of the woman's right to self-determination / body autonomy. In
no other situation do we
ever tell a human that they
have to donate blood, or they
must donate a kidney, or they
are required to get a vaccine. The closest thing I can think of is schools requiring kids to be vaccinated
if they want to attend there, but that's very very different from requiring it flat out. Never, even if it means other people will definitely die.
So the more correct way to phrase this is as a conflict of rights. Fetuses ideally would have the right to life, sure. But also women have the right to body autonomy, which is something so critical - so essential to being human - that we even grant it to corpses that didn't want to be organ donors, even if people die as a result. And when those two rights conflict what is to be done? Pro-choicers say that it's unfortunate, undesirable, sad, but that the woman's body autonomy must take precedence, just as it would in every similar situation. To do anything else would be to strip her of something essential to being a human and reduce her to nothing more than a breeding sow.
There is no pro-
abortion side. There is a pro-
choice side, because the ability to choose is the essential part. The ability to choose for themselves whether they
want to bear their rapist's child, or whatever. No one would be upset if everyone chose to not abort, perhaps because of all the
actual support they received from their pro-life friends.
Finally let's loop back around to talking about your language. I have never met an ardent pro-lifer who couldn't help but keep on using incorrect, dishonest, and intentionally-incendiary language, like "baby", "murder", and "genocide" (you have not used this one yet, I know). Why is that? Why - in this post where your ostensible point was "try to understand the other side at least so you can at least have empathy with their logic" - did you simultaneously display a complete and utter lack of understanding and empathy with the other side? Why the explicit appeals to emotion in a post that is ostensibly talking about logical arguments?
Everyone understands why pro-lifers are pro-life. It's not complicated. But that seems to be almost entirely one-sided. Virtually no pro-lifers seem to have made an honest effort to understand why pro-choicers are pro-choice.