Abortion and the SPCA

Matthew Yglesias is typing about abortion. He states the following:

One is that if you believe, as I do, that a fetus does not have the moral standing of a person then it really is, just as current law states, an unjustifiable invasion of a woman's privacy to say that the state will regulate the manner in which she handles matters pertaining to the contents of her body.

Now this may surprise some of you, but I agree with him that a fetus shouldn't have the same legal standing as an infant. I think biblically and morally the life of the mother is much more important that the life of the unborn child. There are many longstanding legal and religious traditions that support this (like Jewish Law).

However the second half of his screed does not actually follow from the first. In fact the rest is just a typical slippery-slope over-reaction and Yglesias knows it. He even acknowledges "The logic of the anti-Roe view is either that there's no right to privacy, or else that for some reason the right to privacy does not extend to this particular matter."

If the fetus is not human is it bereft of all rights? No, it is certainly not. We're the fetus even of the same legal standing as a cat, I submit to you that many abortions would be considered illegal in this country. Just because a puppy is not a person does not prevent us from having cruelty to animals laws.

So I end with this illustration. A woman has a puppy. For whatever reason, she does not feel she can properly take care of the dog. Perhaps she has fallen on hard times and doesn't have the money. Perhaps prior commitments prohibit her from properly taking care of it. She then has two choices:

1. She can find someone, either an agency or individual, to care for the puppy.
2. She can take it to the vet and have the puppy put to sleep.

Which do you think is the right choice? Good. Now draw the proper parallels considering that most abortions have nothing to do with the health of the baby or the mother and everything to do with this sort of haphazard convenience.