Utter, complete rubbish. All totally false equivalences. Incredibly big brain false equivalences at that. Your entire argument is based on the absurd concept that children and by extension the unborn are denied rights because they don't deserve them, which is blatantly false and completely excises the role of empathy. You either don't have children of your own, had an awful childhood, or are just a terrifyingly detached narcissist if you sincerely hold these views.
Children are a privileged class in society. They have more rights than adults do. They receive numerous kinds of positive discrimination due to their fundamental innocence and lack of development. The only times they are not allowed to do certain things or have certain things is because they are not yet ready for them mentally. This exact same argument could just as easily be used to argue for the removal of age of consent laws, as it attacks the same precepts that those twisted ideas do.
Your argument here is completely wrong. Children are not a privileged class in society; they're a dependent class, and it is because of their dependence upon adults that we do not grant them the same legal rights as adults. I'm not sure how this observation is supposed to excise empathy from the consideration; it's just a fact. It is possible to have empathy for children while also recognizing that extending certain rights to them would be inappropriate; you know, like the right to enter into a legal contract on their own behalf, the right to live independently, the right to get married, etc?
How you could possibly conclude that this recognition is some sort of slippery slope towards the abolition of age of consent laws I do not know. On the contrary: it supports precisely the opposite view.
In fact, your argument contradicts itself. Since children are a privileged class whom adults go out of their way to protect and shield from harm, then the unborn should be even more protected. Your comparison regarding the right to life of a coma patient is equally ludicrous on multiple counts.
First of all, every person has the right to choose in advance how they will be treated in that very situation. I carry around a card with me that states I am fine with my life support being terminated if there is no realistic chance of me regaining consciousness in the event of an accident. Others have a different stance based on their informed beliefs. These rights have been successfully defended in a court of law multiple times.
Others may have different beliefs, but the fact remains that we still have plenty of cases where doctors have managed to win appeals from judges to have life support removed from patients who had no hope of regaining consciousness, and in the absence of any prior preferences being made known by the patient, it is often up to families to choose on their behalf, and frequently, this results in them pulling the plug.
Ask yourself this: if the availability of a hospital bed (or even, just the financial convenience of the next of kin) is able to take precedence over the life of a comatose patient, then what does that tell you about our already established limitations to the right to life, specifically with respect to consciousness?
A certain person on Youtube who I greatly respect has a saying; 'do not accept the premise of an asshole.' So instead of accepting your premise, I'll ask you defend yourself. Why shouldn't the right of an innocent being come before the rights of a guilty person? We've already established in this thread that well over 90% of all abortions are elective, so why should a convenience supplant the fundamental rights of a person to have a chance at a healthy life? You can reasonably argue that abortion might be acceptable in rape cases, but again, those are such a minuscule number that it barely even qualifies as a statistic. We already have birth control that is so effective it works 99.9% of the time, even before compounding methods together. Why should women be allowed to simply disregard the rights of the life they knowingly, deliberately created by intentionally failing to take advantage of the incredibly common, publicly accessible and readily available methods of contraception available in our society?
A guilty person? What is a woman who elects to have an abortion supposed to be guilty of? Personal irresponsibility? Forgetting to use birth control? Because last I checked, neither of those are crimes.
The issue at hand here, is the question of which side the law is supposed to take when the right to life and the right to bodily integrity come into conflict with one another, and the problem for your position, is that the precedent has already been firmly set in the opposite direction.
I could provide many examples and thought experiments to illustrate this point, but for the sake of brevity, I'll limit myself for now to the famous case of
McFall v. Shimp, wherein, it was established that a man couldn't be legally compelled to donate his bone marrow to his cousin, even though there was a high likelihood that his cousin would die without it (he did, just a couple of weeks later). What this case clearly illustrates, like many others I could mention, is that one person's right to life does not take precedence over another person's right to bodily integrity, and without having to state the implications that this has for abortion, I should remind you that this case involved two, fully sapient adults; not something along the lines of an embryo or a fetus, who's claims of personhood are dubious at best.
"then we can logically say that a fetus has no right to life, can we not?" No, because under your logic a fetus (barring catastrophic circumstances) has a future capacity for consciousness because it will do so at some point. If we knew for a fact someone in a coma was going to become conscious again after say 10 months, would it be ok to unplug them now?
The difference is that a comatose patient was once conscious, and may have had wishes which ought to be respected. A fetus never did, so they are not tangibly losing anything in a way that they would ever have been able to recognize.
For the five billionth time: "right to life applies only to those with consciousness" precludes infants. I'm not aware of "consciousness" being used as some kind of qualifier anywhere in any actual laws, since you are trying (very poorly) to go for some sort of legal angle.
In what way does an infant lack the capacity for consciousness?
There is no legal precedent for a right to abortion. Other than Roe v Wade I guess, which is going to go bye-bye any day now.
There is a legal precedent that one person's right to life does not come before another person's right to bodily integrity, and it is this precedent which causes the legal basis of your argument to completely unravel.
