Those people all have guardians, whether assigned by default by virtue of family relationships, or assigned one by a court. Their rights are defended by their

Those people all have guardians, whether assigned by default by virtue of family relationships, or assigned one by a court. Their rights are defended by their guardians. An abusive guardian can deprive their wards of rights if they so choose, and this is why we have procedures established and criminal codes specific to faithless guardians--child abuse, elder abuse, even cruelty to animals. The ward can't be expected to prevail over their own guardian, so other people with moral agency have to be prepared to remove and replace a bad guardian. Without guardianship and advocacy by others, those people could be abused at will. A bad guardian could prevent abuse from everyone except themselves, assuming a monopoly over the abuse of their wards. But you can't exactly replace a mother in the middle of a pregnancy, can you? Certainly not without doing harm to her. Thus, I am unwilling to advocate for a fetus to the detriment of its mother. It's pointless. You can't help that fetus until after it's a baby, and it won't ever become a baby if that's not something the mother is willing to do. When the state forces a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term by prohibitions and threats of force, that is itself an abusive relationship with a large imbalance in power. A fetus has no inherent value. It is worth what its mother says it is worth, anywhere from zero to one whole person. That's why a battery that causes a miscarriage can be considered a murder, but an abortion is not. Once that baby is born, it will likely be considered a whole person from then onward, because there's probably always going to be a potential guardian around that's willing to bid that high. But when you find a class of person like homeless folk unable to manage their own affairs due to mental illness, that's when you see that they have fewer rights in fact, because there's a dearth of people willing to act as their guardians. They have no inherent value, and no value borrowed from others, so predators can beat them up and steal their stuff, and nothing happens to fix it. Giving value to those who have no inherent value--so they may live in our society as equals before the law--is virtuous, but in order for that to happen, someone with inherent value has to lend some of theirs. Not everyone is willing to give themselves for the sake of someone who will likely never be able to return that favor. Some people don't have enough excess to spare anything. Some people always need to turn a profit. If you oppose abortion, and don't already have some adopted children or an unrelated adult dependent, you might just be fooling yourself about how virtuous you really are. When you bid someone else's value up to a whole person, you must be prepared to pay that bid if you win, by becoming their guardian and defending them against anyone who would treat them as less than a whole person.