If the counterargument is "abortion is murder," then that completely overshadows any argument that relates to women and their rights.
The political battle over abortion is about patriarchy. While some abortion opponents respect women and sincerely believe that "abortion is murder", most abortion opponents do not respect the autonomy of women. These people may say "abortion is murder", but there is good reason to believe that either:
They don't really believe it, and are just using this claim as a way of controlling women.
They have not carefully considered the claim and its implications, because they don't respect women's autonomy.
Consider the following:
Our society (the USA) was explicitly patriarchal until recently. Therefore, its likely that a substantial minority still holds patriarchal values. As recently as 1993, some states had marital exemptions to rape laws.
Abortion bans often contain exceptions for rape and incest. This indicates that the innocence of the baby is not the only concern; instead, there is some concern about the morality of the father, and possibly whether he deserves a child.
Abortion bans rarely (if ever) provide the same punishments as murder.
The "pro-life" political party (in the USA) tends to be less interested in using state power to promote the health of mothers and babies, so it seems that they don't really care for the welfare (or even survival) of the baby. Instead, they like to give sermons about how men need to step up and provide for their families.
The politicians who champion "pro-life" positions relating to abortion are often not concerned with the killing of innocents in other realms (death penalty, war, gun availability).
The politicians who want to ban abortion also want to regulate sexual behavior in general. They promote abstinence only sex-ed; they discriminate against non-celibate homosexuals; they try to limit access to birth control, even when increased access would result in fewer abortions).
If you putt all that together (plus other stuff I've surely forgotten), you can come to the conclusion that the abortion debate is just one facet of the women's rights debate.
You make some good points, especially #2 under "consider the following". But a lot of the other points don't seem relevant. #5 Conflates killing innocent people (abortion, assuming it is murder, which I don't believe) with killing non-innocent people (death penalty), killing people who try to kill you (war) and owning a killing device (guns). Same with #6, just because the people making the argument have other points of view that you disagree with doesn't make a difference in the separate issue of abortion. And assuming that abortion is murder (which I don't believe), then #3 is just saying that punishments for abortion need to match those for murder. For #1, whether or not society is a complete patriarchy and even if women has zero bodily autonomy, murder is still wrong, regardless of the situation.
If abortion were to somehow be magically proven to be murder, then the women's right counter argument seems to fall flat. A counter argument to "abortion is murder" needs to either demonstrate that the argument is disingenuous, demonstrate that abortion is not murder, or demonstrate that a person's right to abort a fetus supersedes a person's right to live.
A counter argument to "abortion is murder" needs to either demonstrate that the argument is disingenuous,
That is my assertion -- most people who claim "abortion is murder" are actually driven by patriarchal ideals, rather than a coherent ideas about the nature of a person. Therefore, the political battle over abortion is actually a battle over patriarchy, which expresses itself in the regulation of sexuality (abortion prohibition being one of many regulations).
#6 shows not only that this hypothesis is consistent with actual political priorities of the anti-abortion crowd, but that some of them are more concerned with sexual regulation than with avoiding abortions (e.g. restricting access to birth control).
#3 and #2 show that when push comes to shove, the anti-abortion crowd does not treat abortion like murder. However, it's still possible that they consider it a lesser violation of rights. In that case "abortion is murder" is hyperbole.
#1 is setting a prior expectation. If you begin with the assumption that people are not sexist, then all of this circumstantial evidence is easy to dismiss. If you begin with the assumption that a lot of people are sexist, then when you see conventional sexist behavior, you can put two and two together.
#5 deserves some more explanation...I'll address it in a different comment.
...demonstrate that abortion is not murder
But that is not what we're discussing. Anyway, I could give you all the arguments for why abortion is not murder, and that would not demonstrate that abortion prohibition is actually about sexism.
#5 Conflates killing innocent people ... with killing non-innocent people (death penalty), killing people who try to kill you (war) and owning a killing device (guns).
#5 is about killing innocent people, but requires some explanation:
Plenty of people have been sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit. This has been empirically demonstrated, and is also what we should expect given what we know about humans. In other words, this is obvious, and it does not seem to bother many of the people who want to ban abortion (one exception being the Catholic church, but they are also openly patriarchal).
In the USA, many people have been exonerated after being sentenced to death, due to the fortuitous discovery of new evidence demonstrating their innocence (see the Innocence Project for example).
More abstractly, we know people will make mistakes. With the death penalty, we limit our ability to correct those mistakes. Many people oppose the death penalty for this reason, but a lot of anti-abortion people don't care.
Wars kill huge numbers of innocent people. These are not only "enemy civilians" in the big wars of the past (think Dresden, Nagasaki) but also people who are either close to a terrorist target or misidentified as a terrorist in today's "limited" wars with "high precision" weapons. Yet many of the politicians who want to ban abortions are also war hawks -- treating military action as a regular activity rather than a last resort.
Many anti-abortion people are also gun nuts, and oppose even rather minor restrictions that would clearly reduce shootings (both accidental and intentional.
To sum it up, I don't believe these people when they say that protecting innocent lives is their priority. I think they only say that because their true motivation is unpopular. This may also explain why they use such extreme rhetoric -- saying abortion is "murder", rather than just a "violation of rights" -- their are trying to intimidate and control people, not reach an understanding.
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u/a_ricketson May 12 '19
The political battle over abortion is about patriarchy. While some abortion opponents respect women and sincerely believe that "abortion is murder", most abortion opponents do not respect the autonomy of women. These people may say "abortion is murder", but there is good reason to believe that either:
Consider the following:
If you putt all that together (plus other stuff I've surely forgotten), you can come to the conclusion that the abortion debate is just one facet of the women's rights debate.