Time and time again we see people glom onto irrational reasons to consider abortion reasonable. These often involve 3 prongs of arguments, none of which hold water under scrutiny.

The first and frankly stupidest is age and size. To start off there is no viable metric for the beginning of life aside from when a fertilized oocyte becomes a zygote. This is when actual development and growth of an individual human organism starts. Any argument to the contrary is redundant, especially claims like “it’s the size of a grain of rice”. By this logic, as a 6’1 man, I could treat everyone shorter or smaller than me as viable to kill. This logic is also malicious in its intent because it does not argue the life of the fetus but instead that it is okay to kill at that size because it isn’t as developed or as aged as another fetus. This argument, even at its base, is a disgusting metric meant to normalize killing the defenseless.

The second argument, “my body, my choice” is frankly hilarious if it wasn’t used as a legitimate defense to murder. To put it blankly women always vote against bodily autonomy except when they are the ones impacted. On top of this is the notion that simply because another being is physically dependent on you then you have the right to end its life. To completely close the argument of “my body, my choice”, every woman who engages in willing sexual intercourse has made a choice. That choice doesn’t get to be changed because you don’t agree with the outcome of your decisions. This argument, again is not about whether a fetus is alive, but if women are allowed to kill an independent life because it is reliant on them.

The third and final argument is that we should allow abortion because the unwanted child is more likely to grow up in a broken home, be adopted, or in general a strain on societal resources. In this argument the “quality of life” aspect is erroneously utilized to say that a living being should have no say in its existence. Again by this argument we should kill all ugly people, all poor people, and anyone with a lifelong health condition as their “quality of life” is going to be lesser than the average person. Notice how again the argument over whether the fetus is a living being is never mentioned, but instead that we should kill it because they could have an unhappy life.

No where in any of these arguments are a rational defense of the aborted fetus being 1. Not a separate organism from the parent or 2. The fetus actually being a living organism. When considering abortion these are the only metrics that should matter, as they are the only metrics that create a rational, well defined argument over what qualifies an individual being.