Last year a pregnant woman was run over and killed by a truck in Chicago. Doctors detected a fetal heartbeat and delivered the baby.
According to pro-choice ideology, the mother and only the mother gets to declare, by fiat, whether her unborn offspring is a bearer of human rights or is merely a collection of tissue with zero moral value who therefore can be killed, dismembered, and thrown out with the medical waste (or sold for parts).
But in the Chicago case the mother was suddenly and tragically removed from the situation. At that point what was the moral status of her unborn offspring? He can’t have been both a human being and not a human being at the same time. Or a person and not a person at the same time. He must be one or the other. What, in the pro-choice view, should the doctors who detected his heartbeat have done? They had no way of knowing what the mother had decided. Had she declared her fetus to be a full human being and as such a bearer of human rights? Or had she decided he was a clump of cells with zero moral value whom she could plan to have killed if she no longer wanted him?
Anyone with any moral sense understands that the doctors took the morally right action after detecting the fetal heartbeat. But on the pro-choice account, what basis did they have for doing so?
Note that none of this is a problem for the pro-life position, which states clearly, without the slightest ambiguity or hesitation, that the child born in Chicago under these horrific circumstances was in fact a human being and as such was a bearer of human rights, just like you and me—and he was so before his mother happened to be struck by the truck and he was so before he happened to be delivered by the doctors and he was so completely independent of any declaration or subjective assessment made by the mother.