protection as a human being, and one professor holds that the interests of the fetus can already be protected because the government has the authority to protect the interests of animals (Ely, 1973).
Opponents of abortion further hold that the state has a compelling reason to regulate abortion for a number of reasons: 1) abortion is murder; 2) abortion devalues life; 3) it inflicts damage on the dignity and intrinsic value of human life (Ramsey in Baird and Rosenbaum, 1989). Another argument is that there is no constitutional right to privacy under strict interpretation of the constitution, a right used to decide the Roe v. Wade case (Dworkin, 1993).
The basic argument of the pro-choice side is that the fetus is not yet a person with interests and rights to be protected. Opponents of abortion deal with the question in religious terms, while proponents rely upon scientific and legal arguments. The pro-choice movement defines itself by its selection of a name -- it is pro-choice, and it is the choice of the woman that is seen as paramount by the pro-choice movement. The argument rests on two essential assumptions. The first is that the fetus is not a human being. The truth is that there is no way for either side to prove its case scientifically. The question is really whether human life begins and at what point, and this is a debate on faith for both sides. It depends on how one defines human and how one decides when that definition has been fulfilled. The second assumption is more to the point, which is that on
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