"My body, my choice"?

I had linked to the above cartoon on my Facebook page. Being that our friends are typically of accord with us on hot button issues, most people responded positively.

However one friend, a homosexual man I've known since we acted together as part of the Drama department in high school and who I love dearly, responded by opining:

"The mother's get the choice to.........the country has nothing to do with the abortion......much like this cartoon should be aborted for it's lack of truth."

There was so much that could be dissected here, but I thought I'd go for the most egregious canard of all: That abortion is permissible because it's simply about a woman doing to her body what she wants.

It's as if she was clipping her toenails, getting a piercing or tattoo, dying her hair, ingesting huge quantities of alcohol, willfully engaging in genital mutilation surgery, cutting herself, clipping off one of her fingers or toes, engaging in S&M, or any number of other activities.

These all do entail what a woman does to/with her own body. That is not the case with abortion, however, as I wrote my interlocutor:

"John! Why does a mother of an unborn human being get to decide that she gets to kill that person? I defy you to find an embryology textbook that says that a fertlized ovum is anything but a human being. If so, then it is its own person, with all the inalienable rights due to persons. Nothing can take that away.

The womb is only that person's temporary home, not its permanent residence. Indeed, all of human life is a progression [I should have wrote "a spectrum"]. It starts at conception, it ends, ideally, in natural death. To consider this person a non-person is exactly what the Nazis wanted to do with Jews, gypsies, certain types of Christians (most particularly ultramontane Catholics), Jehovah's Witnesses, and, oh yes, homosexuals. It's exactly what the slaveholders and others did in countenancing the Dred Scott decision. Bottom line: An abortion is not a woman doing what she wants with her own body. It's her doing what she wants, most often, to not suffer the result of her own poor decisions. Why should a child have to die, though, because the mother wants to finish her education or because it would harm her career? And what's wrong with adoption? Finally ...

"What facts does the cartoon get wrong? The President has said those exact words (I happen to agree with him, btw). And our country does allow babies who exist through no fault of their own to be aborted. Dispute that, please. Furthermore, Pelosi's attitude is that attitude in that, ultimately, as a powerful lawmaker, she must accept and on some level condone abortion. Otherwise, why does she do nothing to stop this horrible crime that results in over 1 million horrendous deaths per year (don't believe me, Google "abortion procedures")?

"One last thing: What if they found a "same sex attraction" gene, John?

I'll give you the answer. Dr. Jerome Lejeune discovered the Trisonomy 23 (i.e., Down's Syndrome) gene, and this pro-life scientist's achievement is now used to abort 90% of in utero DS babies. What if that ersatz homosexual gene was known back in 1967 and abortion were legal or someone's parents highly motivated to ensure that their child not be a homosexual child? I would have been doing something else other than making an argument for the last 15-25 minutes."