—The Ethics of Abortion—
Abortion is the termination of pregnancy, the killing and removal of reproductive tissue, i.e. a developing fetus or embryo within a uterus, to end a pregnancy.

Abortion can be performed in different ways and at different stages in a pregnancy.
During the first few stages of pregnancy, most commonly the pills mifepristone, misoprostol are used to induce a miscarriage and medical abortion, by causing the fetus or embryo to detach from the uterus.

During middle and later stages of pregnancy, the dilation and evacuation methods are often used, the fetus is removed via suction and other specialized instruments, sometimes special forceps are used to remove the fetus in multiple pieces rather than all at once, along with the placenta and other tissue. Sometimes instead, medications can be given to cause the uterus to contract and expel the pregnancy, somewhat like inducing labor.

Abortions in a well-regulated medical setting are usually very safe for the mother, almost all abortions are done during much earlier stages of pregnancy, later-term abortions are often done to protect the life of the mother or as the result of serious and fatal birth defects.

 

—Pro-Life Arguments based on Semantics—
Some condemn these various practices as murder, there are various arguments in favor of this position. The first one is that a fetus or developing embryo is 'human' because it will develop into a human baby, not an elephant or pig or anything else.

Therefore, abortion is the killing of human life, which is definitionally murder.

Another argument is that humans have human rights, thus the fetus as being human, must inherit the same rights. Another is that after the moment an egg is fertilized in the womb, it gains unique DNA which makes it a unique human individual, thus inheriting certain rights.

The problem with these arguments against abortion is they use the word "human" incorrectly. A pile of skin cells is human, a cancerous tumor is human and has unique DNA to an extent, conjoined twins have the same DNA but are different people. Being human and being "a human" are two different things.

When someone says something is "a human", linguistically this implicitly refers to a person, which is why saying "all humans have human rights" is intuitively true. As such, to say something being human makes it a human is begging the question, you are assuming the fetus has personhood or qualifies as a human being with rights, before you even start talking.

"Human being" is another flawed term, used most of the time NOT to mean "any human organism that is alive" but rather a person that is human, or a living, sentient organism that belongs to the human species.
If someone already does not accept that any organism with human DNA is automatically a person deserving of rights, these arguments will not suffice.
 

—The Pro-Life Argument of Potential—
Besides relying on semantics to give an intuitive point, some pro-life arguments focus on the potential of the fetus to becoming a person in the future.

The argument is roughly, imagine you're baking a cake. You get all the ingredients together, mix it, and put it in the oven. Someone comes by, opens the oven, and smashes the dough with their boot. You say, "You destroyed my cake!". They respond, "It wasn't a cake yet!".
You then respond "Maybe, but it was gonna be!".

The point is clear. The cake-in-progress, if left alone in the oven, would become an actual fully-fledged cake, to destroy it prevents that cake from actualizing.
To kill a fetus then is to prevent that future person from ever coming to be. What if someone went back in time and gave your mother an abortion? Would that not be your demise?

To kill someone at all, is bad because it deprives them of their future experiences. To kill a fetus deprives a future person of their experiences. If the fetus isn't sentient yet, the future person is deprived of ALL of their experiences, this could imply that it is grossly worse than killing an already sentient fetus, or even a newborn baby, at least by this logic.

This reasoning would imply abortion is horrendously bad.
 

—Sentience and The Coma Patient—
One of the key arguments in favor of the position that abortion is ethically permissible, is that if the fetus is not sentient yet then there is no personhood because there is no preference at all, so nobody is actually being harmed or can be said to be losing out as a result of the abortion.

This would imply abortion before the fetus is sentient is, in an ideal case, ethically equivalent to choosing not to conceive in the first place.

The pro-life argument against this position is the coma patient example. Imagine a person stuck in a coma, not sentient, they are instead stuck in a dreamless sleep. They have a chance of waking up in a month.
Is it ethically permissible to kill them before they wake up? The intuitive answer is no, and indeed they were referred to as a person at the outset, but if they are not sentient right now then there is no preference, nobody is being harmed.

Therefore the pro-life person argues that the pro-choice position is wrong, because it denies coma patients a right to life and justifies murder of people in a dreamless sleep.
 

—The Rock Machine Dilemma - Why Potential leads to Absurdity—
There is a massive problem with this argument against the pro-choice position, however.
Imagine a machine that can turn rocks into people and people into rocks. When a person becomes a rock they enter a dreamless sleep, not conscious at all. If the rock gets turned back into a person, they are the same person they were before.

Clearly, if someone is turned into a rock and the rock then broken into bits, that is murder. The person has lost consciousness and can no longer be revived.
If a rock is turned into a person and then back into a rock again, and then broken to bits, this is again murder because they were a person and then lost consciousness only to never come back.

The question is this, what if a rock that has never been a person is broken into bits? Does the mere existence and usability of this machine somehow imply ordinary rocks have moral value? Does it imply it is unethical or murderous to destroy a rock that has never had sentience before?

The pro-life position of potentiality implies the answer is yes, as the rock has the potential to become a person and by destroying it that person never comes to be and "is deprived of their future experiences".
The obvious problem with this is that it is absurd, how can someone who never existed in any way be deprived of anything? Well, how can they?

Not only does this dilemma break the potentiality argument, it also solves the coma patient argument. A coma patient being killed before they can wake up is analogous to a rock that used to be a person being destroyed, it is murder because you are preventing that person from ever coming back into existence as a conscious, sentient person.
 

—The Asymmetry of Creating vs. Depriving—
Before the 20th week of pregnancy, at least before the 18th week, modern science as of the year 2026 (12,026 Holocene Calendar), suggests that such fetuses are not sentient.

The above examples and intuition that it is not wrong to not conceive, show an asymmetry between creating and not creating new beings, and depriving existing beings of experiences.
To create new beings is fine, to not create new beings is neutral and not a deprivation.
To deprive existing beings of things is bad.

To take a being and make it not a being anymore, and then make it so its being-hood (or personhood) can never be brought back, is bad.

Thus similar to the rock example, to kill a non-sentient fetus is not murder because the potential of it to become a future person, doesn't actually matter for the same reason the rocks that were never persons, don't suddenly gain value just because it became possible to turn them into people.

This can be true while it is also true that it is wrong to kill a coma patient even if they are not currently sentient, because doing so prevents that person from ever being brought back.
 

—Gradual Rock Machine—
One objection to the rock machine dilemma is to say that it is not analogous to pregnancy, because the machine acts on a binary. The rock goes from not sentient at all, to an entirely sentient person.
This is a fair criticism, the real point of the dilemma is to show that potential alone does not suffice for an ethical claim against someone.

Let us imagine instead, a machine that you can load a rock in, and have it slowly be transformed into a person over the course of 9 months. Let's also assume that in the first 3 months at least, the rock stays non-sentient.
In this scenario, there is no actual reason to say that potential comes into play. To destroy a rock in the first 3 months still does nothing to anyone, and it isn't meaningfully different from just breaking a rock next to a river that hasn't started the transformation at all.

What about destroying a rock one day into the transformation? What about one hour? There is no measure whatsoever of the difference. What if the rock in the original problem is sitting on a conveyor belt slowly moving to the machine that will turn it into a person? Does this suddenly make that specific rock but no other, unethical to break or even remove from the belt?
It also leads to another absurd conclusion. Imagine for the sake of argument that we figure out how to engineer a sentient robot, a robot that when the appropriate parts are manufactured and added to its body it gains consciousness.

You have the blueprint to this machine, you begin building it. You're a few days away from adding the necessary parts to give it consciousness when you change your mind and decide to stop building it. Is that murder? Is this unethical to stop half way through, even if the robot never gained consciousness?
This would seem to imply a regular toaster could be unethical to break because it "could be made sentient with a few extra parts". This is nonsense.
 

—"Every Sperm is Sacred"—
One possible argument against a lot of this is that fetal sentience is a gradual process, that consciousness is on a spectrum and a fetus before even 18 weeks may still have some very low form of subjective experience.
The problem with this insistence is that any subjective experience would toil in compare to the extremely complex consciousness, emotion, thoughts and feelings, and preferences, of a pig, goat, sheep, camel, alligator, or any other developed animal.

As explained already, potential alone need not suffice for an argument here. To say a fetus is valuable because it has potential AND it is already to some extent sentient, thus it is being deprived of future experiences, runs into yet another even worse problem.

Why must conception be the start of this experience? Egg and sperm cells are both already alive, and a sperm cell on route to an already alive egg cell moving into position is a scenario where both egg and sperm are both alive and have the potential to develop into a person.

Just as an already developing fetus in the womb may not be sentient but still alive and perhaps have some low level of experience, though unproven, has potential.
Therefore the logical implication is the "every sperm is sacred" absurdity, and as an easy strongman of this argument, if a sperm cell is on route to an egg cell and an implanted IUD, a birth control device, blocks it, that is then murder.

If a blastocyst is prevented from implanting into the uterine wall that is also murder.
To use a condom during intercourse is also murder for similar reasons. Not all sperm have the potential, only a small few can succeed, but if those few have a definite potential and are stopped, that is thus murder.
This is clearly another absurdity, and it implies that a machine that can turn plants into people makes all plants everywhere suddenly have rights. This is again nonsense.
 

—The Yoggist's Solution—
Under Yoggism, interests can only be frustrated if they exist or have existed, or are guaranteed to exist. For someone to poison their fetus with the intention of eventually giving birth to a child with a defect, the act of poisoning the fetus does indeed frustrate the interests of the future child.

This is true even though the fetus itself may not have value nor interests.
To kill a non-sentient fetus though, may be ethically neutral, as there are no interests present or future being frustrated, as the future child never comes to be in the first place.

Similarly with the rock examples, the same logic works well. A rock does not have interests and thus has no value intrinsic to it, but if a rock used to be a person then destroying the rock frustrates the interests of that person because it prevents them from ever being revived.

If a rock has the potential to become a person in the future though, it frustrates no actual interests to destroy the rock. To instead slightly damage the rock, and then turn it into a person though, would be to frustrate the interests of the resulting person if the person suffers as a result of the damage to the rock.

As such, our asymmetry from earlier stands strong under Yoggism, to create new beings is fine but not an obligation, to deprive existing beings is a frustration of their interests.
To start building a robot with the potential to gain consciousness once a few extra parts are added, and then change your mind, is also not murder for the same reasons.

As such, we conclude from all sides including Yoggism, that abortion before the 20th week, and certainly before the 18th week, should be ethically permissible.
 

—Bodily Autonomy—
Under Yoggism, Justification Ethics dictates actions that effect interests have a justificatory burden. To resolve a given conflict, you identify the actor and non-actor or active party and passive party.
This distinction of action and inaction then allows you to apply the justificatory standard to the actor, to check if it violates the Anti-Abuse Principle, that being whether the actions are intrinsically frustrating to the other party's interests.

The question is, what happens if abortion is performed against a fetus that is already sentient? This is more clearly the killing of a human being, of a person, but it is also a bodily autonomy problem because forcefully restricting such abortion prevents someone from acting on their own body and from stopping oneself from giving their nutrients to someone else without their consent.
The question here is who began the conflict? Because whoever did not begin the conflict has the right to defend themselves from it.

The clear answer here is that a non-sentient fetus could not have began a conflict, could not have acted against a mother because it is not a moral agent, normative claims cannot be prescribed relative to it at all.
But, an already sentient fetus is initiating conflict against the mother, by taking and using her nutrients without consent in the even where the mother wants the abortion.

In the event where the mother does not want the abortion and someone forces it on her, that would just be murderous.

For the mother to instead have an abortion in a later term, on her own accord, is for her to refuse to give nutrients to another being. The fetus intrinsically frustrated her interests by taking nutrients, the mother is merely stopping that.
 

—A Conclusion of Evictionism—
Two questions remain. One, how can the mother have a right over her nutrients if the sentient fetus or baby is not her body? Two, what counts as proportionate defense?

The answer to the first question is simple. The fetus is not her body but is taking nutrients from her body without her consent. The fetus not knowing what it is doing does not matter for any self-defense claim because bodily autonomy under Yoggism simply has nothing to do with intention and everything to do with what is necessary to prevent frustration of inherent interests over your own body.

The mother thus should have the right to, at any time, revoke permission and capacity to take her nutrients, by whatever means is necessary to protect that right.
The answer to the second question is where the problem starts. If the fetus is the initiator of the conflict, the one who begins acting, taking nutrients, and the mother is merely defending her right over those nutrients, the question is what counts as proportionate defense.

The real answer is essentially, philosophical evictionism, the idea that abortion may be permissible in later stages but only if necessary to remove it; in later stages at least, the fetus ought be removed in the least-lethal way possible.
 

—The Conclusion on Abortion—
Therefore, abortion is ethically permissible before the 20th week or at least the 18th week, for any reason by any means necessary to remove the fetus, and if the fetus truly is not sentient then the manner of removal is ethically irrelevant as long as the person getting the abortion consents to it.

Later-term abortions are only ethical if they are performed in a manner necessary to safely remove the fetus, in the least-lethal way possible assuming the fetus is sentient, and if the person getting the abortion does not consent to the operation then it is murderous and unethical.