Pro-Choice argumentation seems to be a little underrepresented on the web.  I found an insightful article from the Pro-Choice Action Network that provides some useful argumentation against the anti-choice arguments.  I will include the main section of the Fetus Focus Fallacy in this post.

“Anti-choicers insist that the key question in the abortion debate is whether a fetus is a person or not. If so, abortion is murder, they say, and therefore obviously immoral and illegal. That is not the key question at all, of course – anti-choicers are committing the “fetus focus fallacy.” The practice of abortion is unrelated to the status of the fetus – it hinges totally on the aspirations and needs of women. Women have abortions regardless of the law, regardless of the risk to their lives or health, regardless of the morality of abortion, and regardless of what the fetus may or may not be. On average, abortion rates do not differ substantially between countries where it’s legal and countries where it’s illegal.[2] Which reveals a more pertinent question: Do we provide women with safe legal abortions, or do we let them suffer and die from dangerous illegal abortions?

Some anti-choicers argue that even though women will have abortions regardless, that doesn’t mean we should make abortion legal, since we don’t legalize murder just because some people will commit murder anyway. This analogy fails because everyone in society agrees that murder is wrong and must be punished, but there is no such consensus on abortion. Second, very few people commit murder, but a majority of women will either have an abortion, or would have one if they experienced an unwanted pregnancy. As we learned from Prohibition (of alcohol), criminalizing behavior that large numbers of people engage in has disastrous consequences for public health and law and order.

The real key question behind the legality of abortion is: How much do we value women’s rights and lives? Because focusing on the fetus always has dire legal and social consequences for women. It’s also insulting to women because it usurps their moral decision-making, as well as their bodies and wombs. The best way by far to protect fetuses and children is to help pregnant women and mothers. When women have the necessary support and resources to raise kids, we can trust them to be good mothers. If women have liberty and equality, their mothering will also be willing, happy, and confident, which further benefits children. But as soon as we bestow special rights on fetuses, we separate them from their mothers and create an adversarial relationship that hurts both. For example, pregnant drug abusers tend to forego prenatal care entirely rather than risk arrest and prosecution. By protecting the interests of fetuses, we sacrifice women’s rights and autonomy, and end up harming their children in the long run. Furthermore, it’s logically impossible for two beings occupying the same body to exercise two competing sets of rights – one or the other has to go.

To shed more light on why it’s wrong and inappropriate to focus on the fetus, let’s examine several aspects about abortion. I’m going to clarify some misleading anti-choice language around the fetus, weigh the claims that a fetus is a person and has a right to life, and consider a woman’s ethical reasoning behind an abortion decision. Thinking about these issues will help us understand that assigning moral value to fetuses steals away a woman’s sacred right to resolve this question for herself, and her right to decide how much it will factor into her private decision to have an abortion or a baby.