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Notes -
The bailey is "killing a unborn child if its birth is too inconvenient for the mother" the motte is "it's a medical and complex decision to end a pregnancy".
This bailey IS defensible, there are definitely arguments that can convince me there, such as the lack of universally agreed upon distinction between a fetus and a baby and the start of life, edge medical and criminal cases, etc...
But I can certainly imagine there'd be a whole lot more deserters if that side was forced to always fight in the bailey.
I would have more intellectual respect for some pro-choice activists if they came out and said "Yes, I support killing the unborn child on the mother's request even if it is a child and not just a fetus, because I value the mother's choice over the child's life". And I would have more intellectual respect for some pro-life activists if they came out and said "Yes, one of the main reasons why I am pro-life is because I am against female promiscuity and/or I am religious, not just because I actually care about the life of the child". Alas though, we are where we are.
I believe this is known as the Violinist Argument.
As I've written before here, the Violinist Argument does a very poor job, gets intentionality exactly backwards, and mostly serves to trigger people's disgust response at a secret cabal of shadowy figures being allowed to kidnap innocent, unrelated individuals in order to strap them to a machine and 'suck the life force out of them'. Zero percent of people are capable of suspending their disbelief enough to actually imagine that you "just wake up" one day and some random process of the universe put you in that situation. As such, it actually tells us very little about how people view bodily autonomy.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman. This should be an easy bullet to bite for any people who think they genuinely hold an extremely strong view of bodily autonomy.
I'll be stealing that analogy; it is much stronger and more relatable (and has probably been actually realized at some point!) than the violinist.
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