Understanding the trade-offs in the pro-life vs pro-choice debate.

I generally stay out of the discussion of prolife vs prochoice because I have friends on both sides of the argument who are good people. And after all the debating, no one really succeeds in changing anyone else's mind.

But I will bring up one thing which has always gnawed at me and that is, the people who argue for or against without understanding the trade-offs. What are these trade-offs? Well the issue regardless of which side you're on, whether the mother has the right to kill her child while it's in her body for one reason or another, right?

So, the argument (outside of the life or health of the mother being at risk, which most prolife people concede) is whether the life of the child is worth any legal protections when it conflicts with the liberty of the mother.

What does this actually mean though? To me, it sounds like if the prolife people don't consider whatever kind of inconvenience the baby is to the mother's life, then they're acting in bad faith, and if prochoice people don't consider the life of the child, they're acting in bad faith.

So the natural deduction is who's life has greater value, and whether life or liberty is a more important value if both people have value as well as to what degree.

To me, that's the crux of the issue, and the one which introduces the idea of trade-offs. Pretending there is no trade-off demeans the argument itself because it ignores what is actually being discussed in favour of some kind of oversimplified fantasy that ignores what reality actually is.

Pro-choice people can, in good faith, argue that because of how underdeveloped the baby is, that they aren't deserving of any legal protections. I get that. But that's an argument that their lives matter less than their mothers, not that their lives don't matter at all, or that they're not actually alive.