system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
I've got an admittedly odd take on this but I think it holds water.

When we consider who we have moral accountability to, they actually don't have to be alive at all.

Wills, burial wishes, desecration of corpses, grave robbery, etc. are all crimes against people who aren't alive because we acknowledge that these people who were alive would not have consented/wanted this.

This gets broader when we deal with unconscious people like with DNR's and  ot molesting anesthetized people.

So all this discussion about brainwaves, heart bears, etc. is all missing the point.  Consciousness seems important but how do you square that with people who are unconscious/dead?

Well, it seems like the best question to ask is "did this person ever have or currently have a desire of any kind?"  If the answer is "no" then society is under no obligation to respect nonexistent desires.  If the answer is "yes" then it's up to society to figure out if those desires are reasonable and obligation.

In terms of a fetus, they don't have a developed brain stem required for higher level thinking until the 3rd trimester.  This doesn't necessarily mean that they can form thought out desires, but it means they could have the hardware for it.

In this sense, I think that first and 2nd trimester abortions are on par with varying degrees of killing sentient animals and 3rd trimester should have high requirements since it gets very very difficult to tell.
gpt
Why should we respect the desires of a newborn any more than the desires of a border collie under this model?