The first arrogance, or insensitivity, displayed here is the denial, by both sides, that there is a moral quandary to be faced. (i) The “pro-lifers” are in favor of young women putting children into the world without consideration of whether they can be provided for, either in terms of emotional dedication or in terms of sustenance. This qualifies such “pro-lifers” as lacking the moral maturity to see ahead and weigh up what is otherwise incommensurate. (ii) The abortion advocates seem to have no quandaries about ending the life of what is recognizably an incipient life of their own species and indeed an offshoot of themselves.
Before the medical procedure of abortion was refined and partially legalized, there was widespread infanticide with newborns being exposed to the elements or having their incipient lives ended by other forms of neglect. At a stretch this might be termed baby murder, as the pro-lifers would have it, but terminating the incipient life of a foetus is not murder: the proper expression is abortion, or late abortion. Weaponizing evaluative expressions by pretending they are descriptive is an abuse of language.
The litmus test is how in earlier centuries and millennia, and in other cultures, miscarriages have been understood. Is it the case that formal funerals were, or are, held? If not, then the extremist pro-lifers are refuted.
The pro-lifers claim that once there is heartbeat, there is a fully fledged human life; that is, a person, whose continued life must be protected by law. They refuse to leave anything to the judgement of the woman, or even of the woman and the putative father. They refuse to content themselves with arguments addressed to the individual adults concerned, but take it upon themselves to defend, with legal coercion, a being which cannot yet perceive of itself as a separate entity. At the very least, such pro-lifers must be willing to adopt the newborns, but they may find there are too many for them to cope with.
These are mostly people who identify as Christians, seldom people of other faiths, where debate about such matters seems to be scant. They delegate the determination of whether there is a new person to their deity, whose word they impose on non-believers too. Not that there are long-standing scriptural injunctions on abortion. One may therefore query their credentials as Christians.
There is an alternative approach, and it is that persons are created not by divine, but by human love. In the case of a newborn, human love consists of sustained (persistent) attention, i.e. over months, from one or two or several people (including older children), but not from many more. Infants who are provided for (like being fed and having their nappies changed) by perpetually changing people (e.g. nurses) die. They give up the ghost. Infants need an anchor, a small handful of faces and voices which become familiar. This is the one true meaning of family, i.e. that small group of people the infant comes to recognize as theirs. So it would include the unrelated hired help or maid, but not the absent aunt.
If the pro-lifers were swamped by adopted infants they would, of course, find themselves unable to provide focussed attention for all of them, so the infants left out would soon give up the ghost.
The caring parent makes an instinctive wager that the infant will respond to their attention with attachment. I maintain that it is this which gradually creates persons or, if you prefer souls, not animal heartbeat or a deity. The newborn is a creature of a specific species, a body, a potential person, but not yet a person in reality. A newborn may also be a potential tyrant or sadist. Conflating potential with reality is sinful.
Hence, to reiterate, the accusation I make of most Christian pro-lifers is that they put their faith in God, not in Man; that they implicitly reject human love, imperfect as it is, in favor of a divine ideal; that they seek arrogantly to impose their judgement and convictions, possibly ill-considered, on others.
As a footnote: the objection is made that supplying abortions has become an industry, driven by greed or at least the desire to make a living, or a good living, from abortion and its promotion. There is a simple remedy to this, and it is to prohibit any payment and to pursue aggressively any attempts to circumvent the prohibition. (This principle could be applied equally to other so-called industries, for example, pornography.)
It goes without saying that those objecting to abortion must be free (i) to refuse to participate in the procedure without threat to their employment and (ii) to give word to their convictions and arguments. This said, it would be desirable for them to engage with the nuanced morality of the issue as a whole.