>A government that does not respect the bodily autonomy of women isn't going to respect privacy for too long if it enables the former.

For the record, I don't have a problem with abortion. Obviously I think it should be a last resort, but the impression I get is that most people who get abortions view it that way too.

That said, framing the debate around abortion purely as a question of bodily autonomy always seemed to be a very dishonest way of engaging with the debate. The issue at stake for most people(again, I don't care!) who oppose abortion is not that women are getting a medical procedure done to themselves, but that, in their view, a 2nd and entirely different person is killed as the result of this procedure.

But, many people who bring up the slogans of bodily autonomy already know this. By ignoring the core debate and taking this alternate tack, they get to:

    1.) Smear their opponents' position as purely misogynist and obfuscate the core of the debate, and

    2.) Signal their own loyalty to their political tribe, by demonstrating their unwillingness to even engage with the "other side."

The real question at the center of abortion rights legislation is not "should women be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies," it's "at what point does a fetus become a person, entitled to the same legal protections that other people have."

The inverse of this question is actually very interesting:

"What is it that makes a fetus NOT a person?" Maybe it's the lack of consciousnessness/low brain activity? Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily? And anyway, we don't even know what consciousness is to begin with.

Or maybe, they just don't look like people, so we don't have to treat them that way? Well, that opens up a pretty ugly can of worms.

Or maybe it's the fact that the fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother's body? That's an interesting proposition, but then again, so is every baby until just days before it leaves the womb, and almost nobody is arguing the morality of ultra-late-stage abortions.

So you immediately end up with all these (admittedly) edge-cases that demonstrate some of the moral and legislative complexity of this issue, not to mention its entanglement with the federal-state-local American legal system, which is what Roe v. Wade really addresses to begin with. I'm not doing this as some kind of "gotcha!" or takedown of the whole concept of abortion. Just asking that on this forum we don't trick ourselves into believing the sound-bite version of things.

Yet again, I don't really care either way whether people get abortions or not. In general it seems like something that's impossible to legislate out of existence anyway. But I always fail to see how this is a simple question of women's bodies and evil government overreach.