The problem is what's called "ideological non-congruence." When people argue about certain issues from different worldviews, you can get situations where no amount of rational argument on that issue can sway the other side, because all the facts can fit into either viewpoint. Obviously, abortion is one of those issues, and the worldview difference at play on the issue is definitions of personhood.
The pro-choice camp uses what I characterize as a quantitative view, while the pro-life camp uses a qualitative point of view. Essentially, the qualitative view says that once a human being is formed, it is human, and has human rights. It is wrong to kill a human because their survival jeopardizes your plan in life, or has disabilities, etc. It's wrong to kill them to alleviate their parents' mental distress, too - even if their mother was *****. Generally speaking, the only justification for deliberate homicide is self-defense. So pro-lifers on average don't have a problem with medically necessary abortions, but view it as a tragedy, to be use only in the last resort.
The pro-choice camp measures personhood differently. For them, an individual is a person if they have the faculties of a person; in essence, if they have undergone enough neurological development to have a recognizable mind. So a fetus, or blastocyst for that matter, is not a person yet, because it has not yet achieved that level of development. For this reason, many people who are generally pro-choice will draw an obvious line at late-term abortions, with the same caveat as the pro-life crowd: only to protect the life of (or prevent serious health risk to) the mother. Not all pro-choicers take this view, but it's not uncommon if you talk to people who describe themselves as pro-choice.
Depending on which worldview you take, all of the available facts logically support one or the other of these general positions. So arguing on the basis of those facts alone is useless - you end up talking past each other, assuming your own worldviews and becoming more and more frustrated with each other's apparently unreasonable obstinacy. So in order avoid turning the debate into a kind of Sorting Hat for worldviews, you need to address the fundamental issues in play and make both sides support the
real opinions involved.
This has been happening in apologetic circles, and the pro-choice movement seems to have lost that particular argument - or at least decided that they weren't getting anywhere. This is why the bodily autonomy argument is being preferred in pro-choice arguments. I have... opinions... on that argument too, but here I'll say that at least this new tack moves both sides into debating the fundamental philosophical issues involved, rather than assuming worldviews and seeing who can shout
the loudest most convincingly at the other.
Edited by Void Angel, 01 November 2022 - 11:26 AM.