So why do all those surgeries? To keep people alive, because keeping people alive is good. You try to minimize pain in the pursuit of keeping people alive. The idea that anything that's painless is justifiable is nonsense you would not apply to any other situation but abortion.
The actual reason to perform those surgeries in our societies is to make money-- to satisfy the surgeon's desire for more money. And the reason to pay for the surgeries is to satisfy someone's preference of being alive (or heal a wound or cure a disease or whatever-- oftentimes the objective of a patient is purely to reduce suffering in the long term and has little or nothing to do with being alive). Not many are putting effort into staying alive because it's arbitrarily "a good thing" only. Those that are tend to be people who are indoctrinated against suicide who otherwise would want to die. Most people expend effort or money on staying alive
because they want to be alive; they have that preference. By and large they couldn't give less of a shit whether being alive is "a good thing" outside their own point of view except to the extent that they imagine their own point of view is a universal morality.
Fetuses do not have preferences, so there is no preference related to their being alive to satisfy except those of other entities. You might prefer some fetus stays alive, but this is mostly an abstract exercise for you: in the vast majority of cases, your opinion is not very relevant. The one carrying the fetus is the one who is most affected, and that person most likely has preferences assuming they're not brain-dead. Given that the one carrying the fetus has preferences and the fetus does not have preferences, it is pretty clear which preferences should govern: the ones that actually exist. If the one carrying the fetus wishes to regard it as a person, that is their prerogative. If they do not, that is also their prerogative. And so we can have a morally consistent position that abortion (or any other action that results in the termination of the pregnancy) can be murder (or some other criminal homicide) if it is performed against the wishes of the one carrying the fetus but also that it is not if it is performed at the request of the one carrying the fetus.
And to preempt a common objection, I'll note that not only do fetuses not have preferences, they
never have had preferences either. There is no particular reason to consider them as part of our moral community unlike e.g. coma patients who have had an opportunity to express their preference about living in the form of having or not having a DNR-- or indeed not having already killed themselves.
Fetuses also have no meaningful relationships with other people apart from the very one-sided expectations of parents and grandparents and so forth. These might be described better as hypotheses than as relationships-- and these hypotheses can exist without any difference regardless of whether yet the fetus actually exists. No one in the world's entire history has "gotten to know" a fetus. No fetus has ever shared its thoughts. So if someone carrying a fetus doesn't want it or doesn't want to be a part of making a new person, it should absolutely be regarded as that person's prerogative to terminate the pregnancy. If you want to make new people, find your own willing breeder and leave the unwilling out of it.
www.nytimes.com
