It is really quite simple. Rather than letting the baby starve on a table, keep it alive for three days in consideration of the mental health of the mother. One hour or three days; what is the difference now that it is agreed that only the mother’s mental health is important which justifies abortion and infanticide.
Lets get all the subjective societal justifications first and then see if perhaps there is value in opening to soul knowledge and allow ourselves the experience of objective conscience even if it opposes political correctness.
If you think a law on the books which is a permissive law (not a law of restriction) must pass a bar of "justification", I have some really bad news for you.
Abortion is an ethical question of colliding rights. In the ethical framework of Social Contract Theory, its greatest weakness is in those situations in which two rights conflict. This means, you could scream
"rights of the unborn" until your face turns blue, and it makes no progress on the ethical question. SCT cannot resolves those questions until at which it references something outside its framework. You are invoking Rights as a basis of your ethical and moral argument, but then trying to use the ethical system of Rights to uphold your position of the illegality of abortion. But in a world of conflicting Rights, there is no resolution from Rights-based ethical frameworks.
The point I am making is that by definition life has no objective value in secular society. Value is strictly a subjective decision without an objective basis. You seem to agree.
In a Republic, the right to life is legally and politically protected by the entire society. A Republic can be totally secular and many of them have been, even going back to ancient Rome. Your repeated references to "value" and "objective value" sounds like some brand of Utilitarianism.
Genocides are justified in this way. Certain people are believed to need killing and if the stronger side declares the weaker lacking any value and just gets in the way, why shouldn’t they be killed?
First of all genocide has no justification. That's why it is recognized as a crime against humanity by the entire Western World.
the stronger side declares the weaker lacking any value and just gets in the way, why shouldn’t they be killed?
What you are describing here is an extreme , radical form of Utilitarianism. In a more academic context, you would be called out for engaging in a slippery slope argument. I would say you slipped violently into one, by taking its logic to its "ultimate extreme". This type of polar thinking at the extremes is already known in ethics. So for example if you take any ethical framework to its complete pathological climax, you get really disturbing results.
For example -- If a society were not a republic, and there were no "Human Rights" to speak of, utilitarianism would engage in scientific experimentation on live humans. The ethical calculation goes : about 200 young adolescents must be irradiated on purpose, so that we can watch how cancer forms in their lungs. We need to do this to 200 people to get "good statistics". While those 200 people suffer and die, the medical knowledge we gain will help cure millions in the future. Oh an while we are at it, we are going to strap live humans into cars and then smash them into walls and drive them off cliffs. While it may kill and maim a few, the knowledge we gain about accidents will save many in the future. Hey! The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, right?
Right?
No. You recoil in terror. Everyone does. Human scientific experimentation is banned in the entire civilized world. You can't strap people into cars and smash them into walls. You can't give people cancer on purpose by irradiating them. You can't dump toxic chemicals on a city to "see how people react." The reason you can't do this legally is because human beings have Rights. Those Rights are protected from the government taking them way, willy-nilly for the "greater good". Long story short, you can take an ethical stance and take it to an extreme and get repugnant results.
The decision made in
Roe vs. Wade was that you had multiple states with differing abortion laws. And the wealthy would jump on a midnight plane ride to got get a secret "operation" in upperstate Wyoming. Because the Federal Government deals in interstate stuff, they had to weigh in on the case which was appealed up the ladder to the SCOTUS. The SCOTUS considered Rights against Rights and handed down a split decision. That is what happened. Historically this is what happened and that's where we are.
Bottom line. Americans did not sit around contemplating the "value of life" and decide "life has no objective value" and so "lets kill the infants." That is insanity. What you are posting on this forum is not rational.