"My side thinks the fertilized egg does not approach human status until much later in the process, which means the mother's prerogative supercedes any rights it has."This way of looking at the abortion debate is, I think, wrong. Admitting that fetuses, even very young ones, constitute "human life" does not commit you to viewing abortion as murder, or to wanting to criminalize it. The reasons why not are somewhat tricky, but they're also, I think, pretty solid.
So let's stipulate that, as soon as an egg is fertilized, it is human, and alive. This, honestly, strikes me as reasonable. A fetus certainly isn't anything other than human; it is biologically a member of the species Homo sapiens. And it certainly isn't dead, so if it's not alive then it must be either inanimate, which is plainly wrong since it, you know, grows and develops and stuff, it does all the stuff that living creatures do, or it must be simply a component of some other living organism, i.e. the mother. But the whole point of a fetus is that it isn't the same creature as its incubating host; there is a deeply symbiotic relationship but, well, they have different DNA, and will shortly cease being physically connected. So in a very literal, materialist, biological way, a blastocyst is "human life."
So what?
Well, for starters this might force us to classify abortion as homicide, i.e. the killing of a human. This seems kind of linguistically unavoidable. Notice, however, that "homicide" is not a crime as such. Murder is a crime. Manslaughter is a crime. But which homicides constitute murder, or manslaughter, or some other kind of criminally liable homicide (negligence, vehicular, etc.) is a matter of social convention and choice, a matter of law. So sure, we've admitted that abortion is homicide. But is it/can it be justified homicide, or should it be treated as criminal? Answering this question requires some moral and political philosophy. The former, in my opinion at least, handles the "easy cases," which probably includes the vast, and I do mean vast, majority of actual abortions that happen. The latter is required to deal with the remaining hard cases, and/or to deal with the whole problem if one does not accept the ethical principles behind the "easy case" concept.
So, first, the easy cases. They exist if and only if one accepts a basically welfare-consequentialist view of ethics, i.e. that actions should be judged good or evil on the basis of their effects on the welfare, i.e. happiness, suffering, pleasure, pain, etc., of those they affect. This intrinsically limits the scope of ethical considerations to the effects of actions upon sentient beings, since only sentient beings have welfare in the first place. If, therefore, I take a gun and shoot a deer, or a dog, or a person, that action has immediate negative moral consequences, namely, the suffering and probably death of the deer/dog/person. There may also be ancillary consequences, such as the suffering that the person's loved ones feel from that person's death. But if I take a much, much bigger gun and shoot a giant rock, and blast it to pieces, there are no immediate consequences because the rock is not sentient. There might still be ancillary consequences: if it was a nicely-shaped rock, sentient beings might have gotten enjoyment from looking at it, which they will now be deprived of, or some such. But that's a much subtler ethical question, and in general inflicting destruction on non-sentient objects will be much less troubling than inflicting destruction on sentient ones.
This makes the abortion question much, much easier, because here's the thing: most actual abortions in this country happen well before the point at which scientists seem to think a fetus first starts having the capacity for anything resembling sentience. Obviously the sentience or lack thereof of another object/being is extremely difficult to measure, but we can make a good guess based on the development of the nervous system. Two sources I found on a cursory Google search gave an estimate of some time around 18 to 30 weeks as the point at which the relevant nervous capacities start developing. That's a very broad range, but given that, according to this post from Dave Weigel, around 88% of all abortions in this country take place before twelve weeks, it's actually quite a powerful statement. If we accept that estimate, even putting 18 weeks as our threshold for sentience, which is probably over-generous but it's always better to err on the side of assuming that things you're damaging are sentient, then it appears that in over 90% of American abortions, and probably more like 95%, the fetus is simply non-sentient. That makes it like blowing up a boulder. The fetus' interests don't weigh in the ethical calculus because it has no interests, not of its own, not yet. It would develop interests in the future, but at that point it really is the same as saying that every decision to use birth control, or even just a decision by fertile persons to not have sex, denies future existence to a potential sentient being.
Or, to put it somewhat more concisely, if you accept both the basis tenets of welfare consequentialism and the estimate I found of fetal sentience, nearly every abortion in this country is completely non-problematic. Well, non-problematic except in its ancillary effects, but since those are mostly on the mother herself it makes every kind of sense to let those abortions just be up to the woman, and to be okay with it when such women make the decision to terminate their early, pre-sentience pregnancy for arbitrary or whimsical reasons. She's the only sentient being in the room, her interests are the only interests in sight. For various pragmatic reasons it's not preferable, but ethically there would be no problem with early abortion as birth control. If that's correct, almost the entirety of the abortion problem in this country is a non-problem. Any stat you might hear about a million abortions every year, or whatever, just stops being troubling, because almost all of those are the abortion of a pre-sentient fetus, i.e. the moral equivalent of birth control, even though those fetuses are human lives and even though aborting them constitutes, in a very literal sense, the killing of a human being.
Now, that's a highly radical conclusion, and it depends on a potentially very contentious conclusion about the neurobiology of fetuses. And the key thing is that if the factual conclusion that a 12-week fetus is just plain not sentient turns out to be wrong, the ethical analysis above becomes wrong, too. And like I said, one should always err on the side of assuming things are sentient if one is considering hurting/killing them; this is a large part of my ethical argument for a vegetarianism that includes all animals, even jellyfish. But that's okay; even if we want to reject the conclusion of the preceding argument, that just means that those ordinary, early abortions join the category of hard cases. And in those hard cases, there is still a very good political theory reason why abortion shouldn't be viewed as murder, or made a criminal offense.
What's the most basic, common kind of justified homicide? That's easy: self-defense. Why is self-defense justified? Well, basically because there's a life interest on the other end of the scales, counter-balancing the life of the person who was killed. Okay, it's more than that, it's not just a crude utilitarian calculation about net lives saved or something: the fact that the "victim" of a self-defense homicide was the very person who was trying to violate someone else's life interest. I could go into more detail, but there's no need for this purpose. So let's break hard-case abortion down in the following steps:
1) Is there another life hanging in the balance beside that of the fetus?
Yes. Emphatically yes. This would be the life of the mother. Now, a lot of right-wing anti-abortion statutes will put exceptions for cases where pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother, basically conceding the relevance of this point. But the idea that those cases are the exception is flat-out wrong. Giving birth is dangerous. In fact it's a lot more dangerous than having an abortion, by about a factor of 14 in the mortality rate according to this post from Matt Yglesias, but the basic fact is that they're dangerous. In this country, which is one of the best in the world at preventing deaths from childbirth, though not as good as we should be, the rate is around 9 deaths per 100,000 births. That's an 0.009% chance of dying any time you give birth. Now, that doesn't sound very high, but it's a genuinely non-trivial risk. Requiring a pregnant woman to give birth is requiring her to risk her life, not to mention the much higher chance of some sort of adverse health complications from childbirth.
2) Is a pregnant woman justified in choosing to protect her own life at the expense of that of her fetus?
This is a more complicated question. As alluded to in discussing self-defense homicide, the simple fact that there is some life interest on the other side of the equation isn't enough to answer the question, and this is where the political theory part comes in. And it's at this stage, I think, that the real question about how the law should treat abortion arises, not, as Chait would have it, at the stage of deciding when a fetus is a human life. I think the answer to this question is "yes," for the following reasons. We do not, as a rule, require people to risk their own lives, health, and safety to save another person's life. You are not required to rush into a burning building to save someone in there. We might think it morally admirable for you to do so, but the law does not require you to do so. Unless, of course, you've signed up to be a firefighter. And, indeed, one of the strongest ties of responsibility for the welfare of another is that of the parent. If your infant child dies of hunger because you didn't feed it, you're deeply and criminally liable for that, whereas if some random stranger dies of hunger because you didn't give them food you aren't. So, does that parental responsibility extend to pregnancy, and require pregnant women to sacrifice their own life interests for the sake of their fetus? (Keep in mind that this isn't relevant for the easy cases, if we accept that those exist.)
This is the central question, and it's not one with an obvious answer. What I do know is that criminalizing all abortion requires both denying the existence of the easy cases and holding that parental responsibility attaches at conception. That's the key: not when life begins, but when parental responsibility begins. I think this is an unreasonably strict standard. People have sex a lot, and in particular people have "safe" sex a lot, and they do so without the expectation of pregnancy. Now sure, there's always a non-zero chance of pregnancy, so in theory you could hold that anyone who ever has sex (with someone of the opposite sex) should be on the hook for that risk of pregnancy. But, and this is a relatively subjective opinion, I don't think that's consistent with modern sexual culture, and I think modern sexual culture is a very good thing, at least insofar as it consists of people being free to have sex for pleasure.
So if not at conception, when does responsibility attach? I don't think it can possibly be earlier than the point at which a woman becomes aware of her pregnancy. I don't know this for sure, but I would imagine that most abortions that are motivated by a simple lack of ever having wanted to have a child happen pretty promptly upon this initial awareness. In such cases, parental responsibility simply never attaches, in my view; of course, it's also true that these are typically the "easy cases" I identified above, if we accept that logic, so they're not even ethically troubling in the first place. It might make sense to me to say, however, that after a woman has noticed her pregnancy and made an initial decision that she wants to bear it to term, and after we're outside the bounds of the "easy cases," then in a certain sense she oughtn't get an abortion unless there's some new development. Probably that would have to be a health thing, and not just the general fact that childbirth is dangerous but some newly-discovered specifically elevated health risk.
Now, I also don't believe that women get a lot of abortions after the immediate aftermath of discovering their pregnancy without some particular new reason to do so, simply as a matter of human psychology. I'm also not sure that it makes sense to legally adjudicate the question of whether a woman's justification for an abortion during this period of parental responsibility is sufficient, so I personally think the right approach is to just leave the whole thing up to the individual women and their doctors, and trust them to grapple adequately with the difficult moral issues of late-term abortion. But I'm not necessarily absolutely opposed in principle to the idea of some regime that asked women to accept parental responsibility early in the pregnancy and then held them to some standard of justification for an abortion after that point, and after the point of possible sentience.
That was a lot of detail, and probably more than was necessary to make my basic point about Chait's argument. But note how very far I went after admitting that human life starts at conception. In fact, having conceded that most basic of "pro-life" points I proceeded to basically make a thorough philosophical case for the most ambitious form of the pro-choice agenda, and while it isn't 100% ironclad it's at least eminently defensible. Not all homicides are murders, and not all of them ought to be illegal. There are very good reasons for thinking that abortion should not be illegal even though it does involve killing a living human being.
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