There are circumstances in which abortion should be condoned. But most abortions are done out of convenience. The resort to a woman's right is a weak argument. Rights are inventions that sometimes stand for justice but at other times are just excuses for doing what we want. More magical thinking. We would like to be able to conveniently and safely do away with unwanted children so we invent a "right" especially so that it may be condoned. Silliness on stilts.

We conveniently forget the father of the child. He has skin in the game but he is rarely mentioned in all this. It is his child that is being killed.

The child also has grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and possibly siblings.

I can also quote John Dunn "No man is an island unto himself."

JP:

Why did you need to go and look it up? Should not it be obvious? Many anti-abortionists just ‘know’ that abortion is wrong. They do not appeal to medical science. How do they know this? Long before embryology they declared it to be wrong. It has nothing to do with science.

Haven’t just quoted opinions of various people? Opinions are not proof. No matter how hard you try you can never prove when life begins.

Sells:
“magical thinking”, “silliness on stilts”. Can’t you present your argument without ridicule? Or is that a sign of no argument?

What makes the destruction of bodies most times wrong - be they young or old, others' or one's own, born or unborn, human or animal, etc. is the selfishness of the act.

Selfish acts are sinful because they reinforce the illusionary conviction as if we are separate entities or bodies with separate interests, other than of doing God's will.

Humans are not sacred and the destruction of bodies, including human bodies, is not the destruction of life because life itself is eternal and cannot be destroyed.

Our body is just a vehicle by which we interface the world. It took us many years to nourish, educate and prepare this body to become as capable and suitable to carry God's good work, so killing it jeopardises all this effort, forcing us to start all over again in a new body. For someone to selfishly sabotage the efforts of another by destroying the body they worked so hard to raise and educate, is therefore a grave crime.

However, a foetus or a young baby have not yet invested significantly in the education of their bodies so they would not suffer significantly at their loss, hence killing them is a lesser sin. Comparatively, killing a grown animal whose brain/mind is more developed than that of a foetus/baby can be a greater sin, especially if done with the selfish motive of eating their flesh. On the other hand, killing a foetus, born or unborn, whose education efforts are still close to zero, unselfishly for the sake of using their tissues to heal others, so they remain alive and not lose their own education, is a good act.

Yuyutsu,
I hope you are not planning to teach Christian ethics any time soon. Your post is amazingly convoluted. The human body is never just a way of interfacing with reality, it is central to Christian thought. As for getting a new body that does not even fit into any heresy that i know. Can I remind you that there is no life outside of the body, that the incarnation raised the body to be of ultimate consideration, that Jesus died in the flesh and was raised in the flesh and ascended in the flesh.

Dear Peter,

Being a Hindu by religion, teaching Christian ethics has not even crossed my mind.

Your article raises important moral questions, but it nowhere suggests that its conclusions depend on the Christian view of life or apply only to a Christian audience (in fact, the word "Christian" does not appear in it even once, nor "Jesus").

It is a common teaching to Christianity and Hinduism (as well as many other religions) that selfishness is an obstacle in reaching God - and that was the crux of my response, that what matters most is the spirit of the act, that is its intention, rather than its physical effect.

Perhaps a less emotionally loaded analysis:

http://www.cruxnow.com/life/2015/07/24/the-hidden-ethics-battle-in-the-planned-parenthood-fetal-tissue-scandal/ ?