Abortion Thoughts

While the primary moral concern of abortion is bodily autonomy, pro-life supporters see it as secondary to the taking of an innocent life, which they view the fetus as being.
 
From the standpoint of persuasion - if one is so inclined - deflating the life issue would seem to me to do more to establish the violation of bodily autonomy perspective. 
 
Most abortion supporters have a very different view of how we ought to sacralize the fetus than pro-lifers do.  To step into the shoes of the latter, a pro-choicer might have to imagine a fully formed, thinking fetus – a kangaroo-child maybe, who could talk, cry, etc., but requires its mother for some sort of specialized sustenance.  My guess is nearly no one would be OK with the right of the parent to kill this child. 
 
OK, I realize that is preposterous.  But you can maybe just look at polling on late-term abortions, where if the child is viable and healthy, the parent ought not be allowed to terminate.  (I have complex thoughts on this personally, but I’ll save that for another day.). There is something to the notion of considering what stage of development grants the child protected status and a “right to life”.
 
This line of argument necessarily diminishes the absolute right of bodily autonomy, and given that most of the abortion debate is about non-viable babies, in a practical sense – given the ethical dance between parent and child rights - bodily autonomy would seem to lead. 
 
Maybe something like an ethical spectrum exists, with these two poles of the argument panning the distance: At moment of conception, the parent easily trumps a clump of cells, but then at moment of birth, the right of the child to life takes on far greater weight against parental autonomy.
 
This is all well and good if we take a developmental, sociological, scientific and non-religious view and design our moral concerns around when and how much the child can be sacralized.  But for most pro-lifers, the rubric is a highly religious and abstract structure.  Surely buried beneath this perspective is traditional hierarchies and patriarchal misogyny – at least as far as putting some very old fingers on the scale of reason.
 
But is that not fertile ground to tread?  By stepping past the autonomy argument – which itself rests to some degree on sacred considerations – we take the pro-life perspective head on.  Should they not be pushed on the assumptions behind their seemingly rock-solid stance that “all human life is sacred”?  One might then propose thought experiments, such as a burning clinic and you have to choose between a rack of 1000 frozen embryos and a 3-year-old child.  The clear answer to the question is the child, not the embryos.  The reasoning obviously following from developmental, sociological and scientific assumptions.  A fair rejoinder might be that while all life is sacred, when faced with a choice like that, it is reasonable to consider other means by which to establish the sacred which would include social, etc. elements.  Of course, the experiment is designed to bring these elements back into the picture and establish their moral weight as a legitimate consideration.
Another tack would be to examine the assumptions behind the pro-life view of sacralization.  What, beyond the social, developmental and scientific gives the fetus (or anyone for that matter) sacredness?  If it comes from a particular religious tradition, free speech comes into question, because in a pluralistic society we must agree on basic premises beyond religion for the obvious reason that we are not a theocracy and have religious (or non-religious) freedom.  How can you make a moral case for something that rests on your religious text when I don’t share the same text?  For this reason, religious pro-lifers tend to avoid direct argument from religion and focus instead on appeals to a vague sense of innocence, or social obligation.  Yet bringing it back to their religious assumptions, and foregrounding the social-scientific assumptions sheds a lot of light on the playing field of infant sacralization