Leglislating on moral values is incredibly dangerous. Remember that a lot of people want their religion to be the official religion because they have better moral values. Remember that a lot of people want gay marriage to be banned because of their moral values. Remember that a lot of people want black people to have fewer rights because of their moral values.
We constantly fight against legislation on moral values, because morals change dramatically over time. Legislation based on resolving actual damage is much longer lasting, and there are plenty of pro-choice arguments that are based on mitigating or eliminating actual damage.
You are confusing morality with "unreflected belief system".
Morality is the separation of right and wrong. There are of course different ways to build moral systems, but it's fair to say that pretty much all try to "resolve actual damage", whatever that means.
When I say "accepted moral values", I mean just that - the values that we as a society can agree on. Come on, that wasn't so hard.
In the early part of the 20th century, accepted moral values (the values that society could agree on) did not include voting rights for blacks or women. Our society does not always reflect absolute right or wrong.
Here is a straw man for you if you need the point made a little stronger and a little more ridiculous: what you're advocating for is that owning human beings, treating blacks as less than human, keeping them from voting, etc was right and was a completely moral act. I mean it was legal, and most everyone agreed with it. A lot of Germans agreed with the Nazi's treatment of Jews, too. Hell even Americans did when we locked the Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Was that morally right? Because society agreed on it?
Or maybe subjective moral opinions of the day aren't the best reasons to take away people's freedoms.
Yes, this is a complete straw man, as you say. Don't put words in my mouth I never said.
I don't think that's what "moral(ity)" commonly means. "The values that society can agree on" is all we have. The laws are just a codification of that. If they were not (at least in theory) an expression of the values that society agrees on, something would be very wrong. You seem to imply there was a magical way by which we can know right and wrong that was not "moral".
Again, you seem to think of "morality" as something connected with unreflected obedience to a (possibly outdated) belief system, or maybe even a fundamentalistic interpretion thereof. It's not.
You totally miss what I say (and you missed what your parent said, which is why I posted my first comment). I will make crystal clear why I posted that:
> You are confusing what the current law is, with what the law could, or should be, based on accepted moral values.
You claimed that abortion was some black-and-white topic, because there might be some law which draws a clear line at the time of birth. Nobody ever argued against that, but it was not the topic of discourse.
The discourse was not about law, but about how we should deal with abortion. There's a lot uncertainty, and all OP said is that it makes a difference whether abortion is 3 days before conception or 3 days after insemination. THERE IS A GRAY AREA. (Nobody disputed that, if you make a law, you have of course to somehow set a somewhat arbitrary limit by which it is allowed, given certain circumstances, to proceed with abortion).
There need to be (and there are) public debates on what's the right way to deal with abortion, given that there are good and widely accepted reasons both for and against abortion. It's not that simple with abortion - that's all OP said.
We constantly fight against legislation on moral values, because morals change dramatically over time. Legislation based on resolving actual damage is much longer lasting, and there are plenty of pro-choice arguments that are based on mitigating or eliminating actual damage.