Conundrums for Pro-Choicers?

I used to tell my Philosophy 101 students that they shouldn't allow themselves to become too agitated by professors who criticize their traditional worldviews (remember, I taught in Salt Lake City, Utah). I would remind them that, in the end, there is no air tight cosmology - all cosmologies can be criticised effectively. In the end, the only philosophical school that seems perfectly defensible is skepticism and, as a general practice, Philosopher's essentially ignore the skeptics (because we can't answer them).

In that spirit, I'd like to acknowledge that many pro-choice proponents (the people who favor keeping abortions legal) face a conundrum similar to the one faced by pro-lifers (the people who want to criminalize abortion, or prevent abortions from being performed). A good many of those folks say that they could never have an abortion personally. When pressed to explain why, many concede that they think (they usually say "feel") that "abortion involves killing another human being."

They perceive that their disagreement with pro-lifers is over their unwillingness to force their beliefs on others. They reason that it should be the woman herself who decides, in consultation with her physician, not outsiders.

But that makes no sense at all. If you would never have an abortion because you think it amounts to the murder (wrongful killing) of your child, it is pretty clear that you also think that that the choice to have an abortion is an utterly illegitimate choice. No one should be free to chose to murder somebody else, no matter where they are located. And we have never been squeamish about imposing this view on dissenters. To the contrary, we enforce this view with the harshest social sanctions imaginable (capital punishment in many jurisdictions).

It will not do to say that one personally opposes abortion because it involves killing another person, but others should be free to make that choice for themselves.

And thus, it turns out that there are conundrums on both sides of this issue.

Any thoughts?

Joe H.

BTW, a version of this confusion has been exploited by torture partisans who argue that we shouldn't criminalize "policy differences." Legitimate policy differences only include those acts or policies that we have not already criminalized.