Is it just me, or does there seem to be a more developed line of reasoning within pro-abortion rhetoric? I have come up against it a few times now and even seen it slightly baffle a TV talk show host.
It goes something like this: women’s rights cannot be arbitrarily removed or even “balanced” with fetal rights. It is impossible for two beings in the same body to exercise competing rights and imposing a duty of care on a pregnant woman towards her fetus would result in extensive and unacceptable intrusions into her bodily integrity, privacy, and autonomy. (paraphrasing Joyce Arthur from her Huffington Post debate.)
Obviously, this has been articulated many times before, in various ways and by various people including Supreme Court Justices. There is always a conflict of rights in these important social issues (slavery, for example).
But the crux of the abortion issue is this: the woman stands to lose some of her rights to bodily integrity, privacy and autonomy to a lesser or greater extent during her pregnancy. This loss is temporary. However, the child stands to lose his or her ENTIRE LIFE. It’s an absolute, complete, unmitigated loss of existence, including all of the rights that are predicated upon life, including bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy etc.
The argument needs to be made, often, that women do not have an absolute right over the lives of their children (as recognized in law by almost all of the countries in the Western World except Canada). A woman’s temporary claim of her right to autonomy cannot trump the absolute claim of life itself of the unborn child.
In fact, society can and should make demands upon the woman to bear her temporary loss for the sake of the very life of the child. Life is worth so much that we have no qualms about asking people to risk their lives daily for its protection from such things as the ravages of war, injustice, and crime.
Life is a precious. Period.
by 
I agree that life is precious, period. And that’s really the most important argument. But there are other problems with the pro-abortion argument as well.
As you state, the argument is that “the woman stands to lose some of her rights to bodily integrity, privacy and autonomy to a lesser or greater extent during her pregnancy.”
First off, let’s remove the “right to privacy” as justification for killing someone. Has that ever been used to justify homicide? “Your honor, I had to kill him. Otherwise he would have told the press about [insert private matter].”
Autonomy is also something that is usually balanced against the consideration of another’s life. “Your honor, I had to kill her. Otherwise she would have taken my job.” I would also like to point out that loss of autonomy during pregnancy usually has more to do with social circumstances than pregnancy itself. If pregnancy is used as the justification for cutting off relationships, jobs, or other support, it can reduce a woman’s autonomy, but this is not a necessary result of the pregnancy itself.
The only one of the three that is uniquely present in pregnancy is a possible loss of bodily integrity. And whether that occurs depends on at least two things:
1. Whether we see the relationship between the unborn child and the woman as parasitic or symbiotic.
2. Whether the pregnancy is healthy or not.
We often state that pregnancy is a natural state, not a disease, but we don’t always go further into the implications of that. As a natural state, pregnancy is not only NOT a disease, but is actually healthy for women. At the very least, it protects against certain forms of cancer. I’d be interested in seeing the mortality and morbidity rates of women who have healthy pregnancies vs women who never get pregnant (probably need to control for contraceptives). I would predict that women who have healthy pregnancies live longer with fewer diseases than woman who are alike except for never getting pregnant.
The dangers of pregnancy to bodily integrity are the dangers of an unhealthy pregnancy. The obvious answer is to expend every effort to make the pregnancy healthy, not to remove it.
In fact, it is abortion that attacks the bodily integrity of a woman, not pregnancy.