Obviously women have the right to decide whether they want to continue to be pregnant or not. Everyone has an absolute right to bodily self-determination. Obvi

Obviously women have the right to decide whether they want to continue to be pregnant or not. Everyone has an absolute right to bodily self-determination. Obviously a fetus, like any other human at any age, has an absolute right to life. This right is not subject to the approval of the mother. It is arguably less strong than the right to life of a postnatal child due to the presumably more limited nature of the fetus's subjective experience, but if you think there is a moral difference between killing a newborn baby and killing a fetus a day before it is due, the forces that hold you in that position probably have more to do with cultural commitments than reason. Nature puts two individuals' most fundamental, absolute rights into conflict with one another. It's a tragedy. At the moment, the least worst resolution available to us is to try to find the line before which the mother's right to bodily self-determination outweighs the fetus's right to life. This is an impossible task, because it's impossible to know the subjective experience of another sentient being. Virtually everyone in the modern US responds to this situation by favoring either the mother or the fetus and discounting or outright denying the rights of the other party. I think it's time for us to move past that and seek to remove the rights conflict by developing technology that allows women to choose to end their pregnancies, without also ending the lives of their fetuses. I mostly talk to liberals, and most of them push back on this idea at first. I point out to them that replacing abortion with access to technology and services that make it possible for women to end their pregnancies without killing the fetuses inside them would take much of the wind out of the sails of the American right. I also point out that, politics aside, it would actually be morally preferable to universal access to abortion, because it would not require killing fetuses, which actually do have a right to life. Finally, I point out that liberals are unlikely to win the abortion issue in any other way. Their opponents aren't just going to get old and die. Young people choose to be pro-life all the time. This is because fetuses actually do have a right to life.