[quote=Protagonist]I must disagree, it's not a crime without criminal intent. A fetus didn't choose to be formed inside of someone who didn't want them. It has no agency to choose its mother and what it does to it. So, it's not the fetus that's committing any crime other than simply existing. You're not really asking a women to go out of her way for the infant, you're simply asking her to not endanger someone else's life.

Also, keep in mind that the current legal system does require parents to give up a certain amount of autonomy for their children. Child neglect is a crime, after all.[/quote]

I wasn't saying a crime is being committed by a fetus existing, I was using the crime examples to broaden the point to real examples of how the legal system currently works and then showed how that same logic would work if applied to this situation. Extrapolating the logic of rights in regards to crimes is not the same as calling fetuses criminals. However, I'm now imagining a baby being born wearing something like [url=http://www.spirithalloween.com/images/spirit/products/interactivezoom/processed/07087943.interactive.a.jpg]this[/url] and now I'm highly amused, so thanks for that.

Actually, yes, you are asking a woman to go out of her way for the thing growing inside her. Saying that someone isn't going out of their way, and thus not having their rights infringed upon, just because they don't have to actively do a specific task is foolish. Letting someone take your blood wouldn't require you to actively do anything, you'd just have to sit there and let someone else do the work and it wouldn't even be very taxing on your body, but you've still got the right to say no to that even at the cost of someone else's life. You could also make a similar but more extreme comparison by saying (disclaimer: I am not accusing you of thinking this, just using hyperbole) that rape doesn't really infringe on a woman's rights because she can just lay there and let it happen without having to actively do anything, so she's not going out of her way and it's all good. Telling a woman she has to do a certain thing with her body that she does not want to, no matter what it may be, is indeed infringing on her rights regardless of how passive or active following that command would be. Say there was a law passed today that said women cannot cut their hair any more. Even though they wouldn't have to go out of their way to follow this law, and in fact you could argue that this would reduce going out of the way in general by way of no longer needing to get haircuts, it would still infringe on their rights to do as they wish with their body. Rights is what this whole thing is about, and whether or not someone has to go out of their way to do a thing is largely irrelevant when it comes to rights.

By the way, calling a developing fetus an infant is awkward and incorrect as that's the term for the phase of life between birth and being able to walk. Once you get to the point of the term 'infant' actually applying you're quite a ways past things pertaining to abortion actually mattering for that child. Speaking of children, yes, parents have a special set of rights and restrictions applied to them come parenthood. Different categories of people have differing rights and restrictions, which can be seen throughout the life of a person in the United States. From birth through death they have the basic human rights that everyone else has, unless they commit crimes that we have deemed worthy of punishment by infringement of some of those rights; somewhere in ages 16-18 (depending on the state) they are granted the right to have consensual sex; at 18 they lose those childhood restrictions that come in the form of parental rights and acquire some new ones of their own, like the right to vote; when/if they become a parent they acquire those parental rights and restrictions and the cycle begins anew with their offspring. There are different stages and levels of rights applied to different people in different circumstances, and my argument is that one of those divisions is found in fetal development, specifically at that ~20 week old point where they actually have a chance to live outside the womb and their brain begins to actually work like a human brain (though it doesn't truly reach semi-functioning human brain status until ~24 weeks). My model of differing levels of rights would alter the above one I gave by setting conception to ~20 weeks through fetal development as a period of having no rights because they aren't yet a viable living thing, then from ~20 weeks through death they have all the basic human rights.

[quote]On the topic of whether or not the unborn are people, defining them as 'parasites' is not entirely inaccurate if you use the term loosely enough (they are organisms that live inside another organism). However, dependency doesn't define life. Born infants are still dependent on their parent's for survival, but are still considered to be people. For that matter, a premature infant is nearly identical to an unborn fetus.[/quote]

If you want to talk definitions, defining all fetuses in any stage of development as parasites is 100% accurate based on the strict definition of the term: "an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense." They live in another organism and derive nutrients at the woman's expense. This is no stretching of the term, it fits exactly. The only difference between the parasitism of a fetus and a tapeworm is that the fetus will eventually develop past the point of needing the parasitic relationship to survive but a tapeworm will not. Just because fetuses are not permanent parasitic entities does not mean they are not parasites for as long as that phase of their development persists. You might as well argue that it's "not entirely inaccurate" to call newborns infants because they don't remain infants for their whole life. Anyway, parasite definition quibbling aside, time to move on to other things like quibbling about what defines a living thing.

There are different kinds of dependency, some of which do define life. All living things have some kind of dependence on their environment to provide for their basic needs to remain alive. Almost all mammals require assistance from their parents to make it past infancy. Fetuses past that ~20 week mark depend on their mother to live in the same way that fetuses before that point have this same dependency to continue existing. The whole abortion thing is not just a question of dependency, it's a question of rights and what constitutes a living organism.

Living organisms that are not humans do not have anywhere near the same level of rights as humans (you could argue they have some right to life maybe, but not much else), and things that are not even living organisms have no rights in and of themselves; these are basic logic things that should brook no argument. One of the core pieces of the biological definition of a living organism is that the thing must be self-sustaining, not as in it can provide for itself, rather this means that it is capable of maintaining the other criteria of life (including homeostasis, metabolism, growth, and reproduction) if it has sufficient nutrients. An embryo or a fetus removed from the womb before 20 weeks of development (and quite a while after that too if you rule out mechanical assistance to keep them alive, but let's assume that stuff is on the table) and given the necessary nutrients but no other support would still die because it requires the mother's womb support system to regulate a lot of those things that are needed to remain alive due to things like various not actually working or maybe not even existing yet. Embryos and fetuses before ~20 weeks are "alive" in the same way that a virus could be called alive by the technicality that they aren't inorganic or dead things, but they do not meet the criteria to be considered a living organism, thus they have no rights.

That's the kind of dependency that actually does define what is living or not from a biological point of view. You can argue it from other angles, but as far as biology and the definition of life is concerned it's pretty clear that things aren't actually counted as living organisms until they can actually survive as they are. This is sort of getting off topic, but a common counter to this idea tends to go like "what about people who need to be on a respirator or other machine to live? Are they not counted as living things because they can't survive without it?" Yup, that's exactly what it means. The difference there is that they passed that threshold to actually count as living organisms at some point, their living thing rights are not immediately revoked only because of social reasons, and their continued existence doesn't infringe upon all sorts of rights of another person (which is the main sticking point for the abortion thing). However, fun fact, if physicians say that someone in such a condition has no chance to recover and the person is incapable of making their own medical decisions (such as if they're comatose or in a vegetative state), it's perfectly legal for whoever has power of attorney over their medical decisions to decide to pull the plug and let them die. This isn't a perfect analogy to abortion, because given time a fetus will "recover" from its non-viable condition, but it works as an example for how in one circumstance it's legally and ethically okay to terminate the existence of a human thing that can't viably survive on its own. It's okay in this circumstance, so perhaps it's okay in another circumstance. I and other pro-choice people would argue that it is, though for rather different reasons because of the differing circumstances.

I kind of lost track of where I was going with that and I require sleep, so I'll just tl;dr it to reiterate key points. Before a certain stage of development a fetus isn't a viable life and thus fails to meet the criteria of what constitutes a living organism, things that aren't living organisms don't have rights, ergo abortion before that certain stage of development is legally totally fine because no rights are being violated. Even if you call it a living thing, see previous post about why the woman's rights utterly trump any rights possessed by the fetus.