Disclaimer: I am solidly Pro-Choice. What I am attempting to do is help other Pro-Choice people understand the viewpoint of the opposition. I believe that it is difficult to change minds if you don't fully understand where the other person is coming from.
The battle over abortion has stubbornly remained stuck in a sort of calcified trench warfare over the past 40 years. Roe v Wade was supposed to make safe, medical abortion a matter to be decided between a woman and her doctor. Forty one years later, we're still fighting for that goal and it seems we're losing ground, faster and faster.
I'm often discouraged by the way a woman's right to control her own body is treated as an extreme, liberal idea. Like most pro-choice people, I would fight to my last breath to prevent any woman who finds abortion morally repugnant from being coerced into an abortion. To my mind, that should settle it. The only women who should consider having abortions are women who are not opposed to abortion. If the pro-life side took that attitude, there would be no problem.
But the pro-life side simply can't possibly take that attitude, and therein lies the reason we can't put this argument to rest.
A lot of us in the pro-choice movement like to say that our reproductive rights are in jeopardy because conservative men want control of our bodies. I won't deny there's a lot of that out there. But that's not the main reason we're still fighting this battle 41 years after Roe v Wade. Those men who view women as baby-making livestock are joined by a lot of women. Do these women view themselves as baby-producing chattels? For the most part, I doubt it.
I've known a good number of intelligent, admirable, sincere women who believe abortion is fundamentally wrong. Some of them aren't even religious.
What separates pro-choice from pro-life is the basic definition of when life begins.
You can look at it as a continuum. You might believe life begins the moment a sperm burrows into an egg and fertilizes it. You might believe life begins when the fertilized egg attaches itself to the woman's uterine lining and begins dividing. You might believe life begins when the blastula starts to differentiate structures that will eventually become organs. You might believe life begins when the fetus's heart starts beating. Or when it has eyes. Or when it has developed far enough that it could theoretically survive outside the womb. Or, finally, when it is born and takes a breath on its own.
The dividing line between pro-choice and pro-life is somewhere in the preceding paragraph. The precise location varies from person to person. For myself, I'm of the opinion that a fetus becomes a child when it can survive outside the womb. Until then, it is a part of the woman who is carrying it. As such, she has absolute control over it.
I could give you my scientifically-based reasons for believing a fertilized egg is not a person. That a blastula is not a person. That an early-term fetus is not a person. But they don't really matter. What matters is I believe abortion does not destroy a human life. I believe that tissues that form the fetus are alive, but not that they are an independent human life.
If I were pro-life, I would believe that a fetus is an unborn child. I might believe it becomes a child at fertilization, at implantation, at X number of days, but the bottom line is, I would believe that a child is a child whether it is inside or outside its mother's body. That unborn child has all the rights accorded to children that have been born.
If I believed that, I would be morally outraged by every single abortion performed in the world. What cause could be more righteous than protecting children from murder?
This dichotomy is the root of why abortion is the social issue that will not go away.
We've seen marriage equality go from a wedge issue that could get masses of conservatives to the polls to oppose it, to seeing conservatives downplaying their previous opposition because as a wedge issue it's a big loser.
I wish we could attack opposition to abortion the same way. I don't think that's going to happen. When you oppose gay marriage, you are opposing an action that only truly affects the people who do it. If two men marry, it places no obstacles in the way of a man and a woman who want to marry. After getting over the initial freakout when people started talking about it, most people have come to see that it doesn't do anything to anybody who isn't gay and in love. At that point, it's easy to say, "My church tells me gay marriage is wrong, but it they want to do it and I don't have to participate, it's no skin off my nose."
However, if you try that argument on someone who is pro-life, you are asking them to turn a blind eye to child murder.
People get their beliefs from a lot of places. But the really basic ones come from your upbringing. My mother was pro-choice (militantly so). My maternal grandmother was pro-choice. I don't know how my paternal grandmother felt about it, because she died before I was old enough to talk to her about it. It should be no surprise to anyone that I'm pro-choice.
Changing as deeply personal a belief as the definition of the beginning of life is going to be a hard slog. The science here doesn't help much. Science can measure fetuses, analyze fetuses, quantify fetuses and determine exactly what is good for the development of fetuses. Science can't answer the question "is this a person?" in any way that a religious person is gong to accept.
It is a philosophical question, not a scientific question.
Once you accept the basic tenant, i.e., a fetus is an unborn child, the other steps are nothing but consistent. In cases of rape or incest, the unborn child is innocent, so why should it be punished with death? In cases of the health of the mother, why should one individual be valued over the other?
Those nuns who refused to sign a paper to allow their employees to have insurance under the ACA were not opposing a Democratic president, or the rights of women. In their minds, they are taking a stand against child murder. Somehow, they should be respected for that.
We've seen a lot of ignorant and stupid politicians shooting their mouths off. They make vapid statements about "legitimate rape," and display their total ignorance of the reproductive process. Rush Limbaugh calls Sandra Fluke a slut. But all that is just a side show -- sound and fury signifying nothing. The opposition to abortion that truly fuels the pro-life movement grows out of sincere belief that isn't stupid or venal. It's simply a different definition of life than I accept as true.
I'm not sure how to go about changing minds on this issue. I know we have to. Reproductive freedom is important. We can't simply step back and say "There's no way to agree on this so we'll let you have your way." It's easy for us to say "we don't agree that it's murder so please let us alone and let us practice our own beliefs," but that's never going to stop the march of anti-abortion legislation.
I wish I knew how to do it.