Whose Unborn Baby Is It?

I recently received this in correspondence on the subject with a friend, and I appreciate the chance to address it.

, eric writes:
.....a woman's right to abortion is legal. That is not my problem with it. My first problem is that taxpayers should not have to pay for abortions. My second problem is that I believe the law does a disservice to women. If women have a right to choose, what are they choosing?

If it is a disservice to give someone a choice to do something you think they should not, then you do them best service by taking such choices away from them, and ensuring they only choose what you know is right, right? If she has a right to a root canal, why should any health care program refuse to cover it? What makes the abortion procedure different, if not the moral judgment prohibitionists would presume the power to enforce? I think government should not pay for cosmetic procedures, nor for the pharmacopoeia of Dr.Feelgood drugs, but if abortion is called a medical right (and it is hundreds of times less expensive than the alternative, providing pre-natal, birth, and adoption services), then who should say it should be excluded from the services covered, particularly on moralist grounds?

Your question demonstrates the apriori presumption of authority to define what is so immoral as to warrant prohibition. "What are they choosing?" you ask. The answer implied is, "something too bad to permit." Whose business is it to judge her choices so as to take them from her by law? In a sense, she is choosing to call abortion a justifiable homicide, as homicide it unquestionably is. Those who admit an "incest rape" exclusion to permit the victim mother a merciful abortion are doing exactly that, claiming the right to declare that particular homicide to be justifiable, the right they will not give to her. Their issue is thus shown not to be the life of the unborn, but the moral circumstances of its conception, and their power to declare one homicide mercy, and another murder in accordance with their standards, and to employ the might of law enforcement to obtain conformance to their judgment.

However you define its physical, spiritual, or legal personhood, until you could take it from her and sustain its life yourself as in parturition, you have no rightful claim upon it at all, neither to protect, speak for, nor to vaccinate, assign an identity number, nor place into an institution of protective maternal custody for the unborn. Whoever you are, no matter how much you believe in your righteousness, no matter how devoted to God by any name, no matter how many of you vote, or if you use the guns and judges, that fetus is not yours to protect. It does not belong to you. It does not and certainly should not belong to the state as though a protected ward, and even its soul does not belong to the church.

Whatever I might personally feel about any woman's choice to submit herself to carrying a pregnancy or not, or whatever I think God thinks about it, I would consider it a self-righteous usurpation of her God-given right to the ownership of her own body for me to subject her to my decision and bend her to my control by using the power of law enforcement in God's name. As for morally judging her choice, that part is between her and God, and none of us has a right to intervene, least of all by force in God's name. Though it break our hearts, we ought bide.