The Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics of Abortion, in a nutshell

Your metaphysics determines your ethics, and therefore your politics.
Everyone has axiomatic, basic beliefs which are not able to be argued for, but from which all reasoned argument proceeds. For some people--especially those in the 21st century West--the nominalist belief that "only particulars, not universals, are real" is basic. For others, especially premodern and Eastern cultures, the realist belief, "Particulars participate in universals, and real relationships exist" is basic.

The autonomy principle ("a woman has a right over her own body") is based on a basic belief in nominalism--that ultimately, only particulars are real, and thus will (not the intellect, which depends on the existence of universals) rules. For several centuries, it has been increasingly the case that what is human is particular. But then, how to understand pregnancy? If autonomy is the ultimate value, then whose will should be the ground for autonomy: the mother's, or the embryo/ foetus/baby's? Since it is easier to determine the will of an adult woman than an embryo/foetus/baby, hers is taken to be determinative. Thus, a woman's autonomy is elevated above the life within her, and it becomes critical not to view that life as another particular human person, but rather as parasitical tissue growing inside a particular human person--as Judith Jarvis Thompson has argued.

Because nominalists only recognize the reality of particulars, and not universals, the concepts of participation and real relationships are incoherent for them. Thus, it becomes impossible to see the woman in a real relationship with her embryo/fetus/baby, or the embryo/fetus/baby participating in the life of its mother, muchless the two of them in any real relationship with a father. For nominalists, we are all billiard balls on the pool table of life---discrete individuals, on our own paths; sometimes knocking INTO one another, but never participating IN one another.

Heather Goodman Mashal is calling for people to listen to one another, and that's certainly commendable. But IMO--and Alisdair MacIntyre's, and Stanley Hauerwas's--even if we DO listen to each other, we will ultimately come to places where our basic beliefs contradict each other. At that point, our perspectives are incommensurable. Then one or more of the following can happen:

1) we stop talking to each other, and retreat into our separate worlds
2) we kill each other
3) we evaluate our position and our interlocutor's position for internal coherence, resolution of imaginative dilemmas and epistemic crises, and achievement of fruitful results.

IMO, I do not see how the modernist/nominalist perspective is consistent with the teachings and Person of Jesus Christ. But that is a whole 'nother thread.