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fta: agreed. so it's a question of what your default position is, I think. The possible potential of the fetus to become a person, or the possible potential of the woman to live her life without going through the physical and emotional turmoil of pregnancy. Since science can't prove one way or the other about the 'humanity' of the fetus, I fall back on respecting the wishes of the "clump of cells" that I can talk to. You and others fall back on the potential wishes of the fetus. I can understand your position, and in fact I don't know that I'd be comfortable with an abortion in my personal life. I'm sure I'd have doubts and worries and all the stuff that most people have when contemplating/undergoing abortions. But I default to "the facts are inconclusive, so I go with what I absolutely do know." And that, for me, tends to favor the woman who would be carrying the child.
Re: the question of 'souls' or however you like to put it, that seems to me to be the crux of the question...how do you define a person vs. an automated lump of meat?
As I said, my position on "father's rights" is completed predicated on these issues, as they seem to fall out of the derivation of one's position on abortion in a general sense. I don't think you can have a conversation about father's rights, without deciding the morality of abortion. Ergo, the reason that a discussion of "father's rights" will, I think, always be reduced to a discussion on abortion.
Now, this might change when/if we get cheap and easy test-tube facilities. If you could extract the fertilized egg from the woman in a relatively non-threatening/arduous procedure, push it through "pregnancy" on the bench-top, and then release it to the father, my position might change again. But at present, I default to letting the woman decide.
For all questions of "it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck," I defer to jinn's earlier post. Looking like a human, or possessing cells that will eventually become "organs" and other specialized human features, does not inform my position in the least. We're talking about the potential for humanity, I think, and whether that potential is seen on a seizmograph or postulated from mathematical models, it doesn't matter to me if you're talking about semen on a bedsheet or a fetus at 6 months...potential to be a fully-realized human doesn't equate to being a human in my eyes. At least not scientifically, although I think it's highly suggestive.
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