there are many, many things that drive me insane about the pro-life crowd - all of the above included. but something I think bears mentioning in addition is their absolute refusal to play by their own rules.
specifically: if you believe,100% truly and really believe, that a fetus at any stage of development is a person, and if, at the same time, you can acknowledge that a specific pregnancy, due to whatever heartbreaking set of circumstances, is 100% going to kill the person who’s pregnant unless an abortion happens - and that’s far from being a hypothetical scenario; it is, in fact, a very real one, especially in the case of ectopic pregnancies - logically, by your own argument, it should be morally impossible for you to decide which one of them gets to live. it’s a literal trolley problem: pull the lever to save one person, or do nothing and watch the other die? if both those lives are of equal weight, then morally, there’s no correct answer. saving the baby is not more “right” than saving the pregnant person, because your founding logical principle is their equal humanity. if both count the same, then whatever moral judgement might apply to abortion applies equally to letting the pregnant person die. it’s just a horrible, impossible choice a person or a family has to make, and in which outsiders should have no logical say.
but pro lifers don’t want to acknowledge the trolley problem, even when it’s one entirely of their own creation. they want things to be clear-cut. simple. absolutely without exception. and so they put their thumb on the scales, inflating the value of the fetus by ascribing it Moral Innocence. “the adult should die for the baby, because the baby is Innocent and the adult is Sinful and Imperfect” is not a thing they’ll usually come out and say in so many words, but they’ll yell and scream and shout about the Innocence of the Unborn as though it’s a trump card; as though the fact that the pregnant person whose life they’re willing to sacrifice is fundamentally unworthy in comparison goes without saying, even when that person is a terrified child whose pregnancy is the product of rape. because they absolutely cannot admit to the existence of any situation or context where the pregnant person’s life matters more than fetal innocence, because doing so would reveal the fact that their entire ideology is based, not on protecting innocent lives, but on control.
because when it comes to scenarios like the one I’ve described? very often, the pregnancies in question are not viable. ectopic pregnancies are not viable. a partial miscarriage isn’t viable. a near-term baby that’s died in utero and is slowly poisoning its parent with fetal mirror syndrome is not viable. a fetus with anencephaly is not viable. no scenario exists in which these pregnancies come to term and produce a living child, and yet pro-lifers will cling to the idea of Innocence to explain why, even though the “baby” they’re protecting can not and will never be born - might even already be dead, in fact - their Innocence still takes precedence over the real human life of the person carrying them. that’s not a trolley problem; that’s having to choose between accepting that one person is already dead and killing a second person, and choosing, in defiance of all logic, to kill the second person.
at nine weeks pregnant, the embryo is so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. the tissue removed during abortions or miscarriages at this level of gestation is so small, you can fit a five week, six week, seven week, eight week and nine week gestational sac in the same petri dish and still have room left over. THAT’S how small we’re talking. recently, a republican politician claimed - incorrectly - that fetuses begin to feel pain at 15 weeks; according to the american college of obstetricians and gynecologists, however, a fetus cannot feel pain until around 27 weeks. now, personally, I’m inclined to trust the ACOG on this one - but EVEN IF they were wrong, that 15 week mark is still five weeks after the point at which, even according to pro-lifers, 80% of abortions take place: namely, at 10 weeks or earlier. and even if an ability to feel pain was the deciding factor here - why? the pregnant person feels pain, too, and let me tell you, speaking from personal experience: giving birth HURTS, and that’s before you factor in the potentially lifelong health complications that can come from it. so, what - it’s morally wrong to inflict momentary pain on a fetus too underdeveloped to even be aware of its own existence, but morally correct to inflict, at absolute minimum, HOURS of excruciating pain on a fully sentient pregnant person? how does that make sense?
but what about that other 20% of abortions, I hear you cry! the ones that happen after the 10 week mark? if any of this data has swayed you to think that early abortion is maybe okay, but the whole thing has to be restricted because of those later examples, I need you to to consider two important things.
thing the first: free and easy access to abortion is pivotal to enabling early abortion. if you restrict abortion to only a handful of clinics - if you make it hard to access - then the limited number of appointments available and the distance many people will have to travel to reach them means that, even if someone decides to terminate at the early-as-possible 5-week mark, they’ll be forced to wait. if you think early abortion is fine, late abortion bad? then you need to make abortion easy to access, or you’ll always end up getting more of the latter than the former.
thing the second: remember that thing we discussed above, about pregnancies going wrong? yeah. even more than lack of access, that’s the reason for the vast majority of abortions happening later: because the pregnancy is a wanted one, but something bad happens. maybe the person has a partial miscarriage and needs a D&C at twenty weeks - aka, an abortion - to prevent sepsis from setting in. (this is what would’ve saved savita halappanavar.) maybe the excited parents find out their baby is died in utero at six months along, and they need to perform a D&C - aka, an abortion - to remove the body. (in a pre roe v wade america, actress debbie reynolds - yes, THAT debbie reynolds, mother of carrie fisher - was horrifically made to carry a dead baby to term. the poisoning from it almost killed her, and did so much damage to her body that she miscarried her subsequent pregnancy, too.) maybe the doctors do a scan and discover the baby is missing part of its brain or skull - aka, anencephaly - and can’t survive outside the womb. maybe one of a dozen, a hundred other tragedies.
but you, pro-lifer: you will stand before this person already facing an unimaginable loss, and you will call them a murderer. because magical, beautiful, unborn Innocence is somehow more important than a real, autonomous, living, breathing human. because deep down, the appeal to innocence is a smokescreen. what you REALLY want is to control women’s bodies (and the bodies of people you think are women, even when they’re children or nonbinary or trans men) by locking them into parenthood and taking away their autonomy.