Abortion

As Dr Bo points out, "choice" here refers to the decision to get an abortion, rather than the decision to have sex.

You mention that getting pregnant isn't a choice - it's a consequence. That's right; it's the decision to carry on with the pregnancy that's the choice, and that's what pro-choice advocates are referring to.

You haven't committed any fallacies as far as I'm concerned; you're just mistaken about what pro-choice people argue for.

P) People should be able to decide what happens  to their own bodies

P) Pregnancy is a matter concerning what happens  to  a woman's  own body

C) A woman should be able to decide whether she gets an abortion

We can question the first premise (and it's probably this one you take issue with) - perhaps there are some things regarding people's own bodies that they shouldn't be able to do. For instance, should we allow people to self-harm? 

We can question the second premise too - abortion is a matter concerning a woman's body, but also another 'body' - that of the foetus - and arguably, it deserves equal concern.

You could also object to the inference between the third premise and the conclusion - just because people have a normative right to decide what happens to their bodies, and just because pregnancy falls under 'what happens to your own body', does not imply abortion is moral; there may be other rights that need to be balanced against the right to bodily autonomy - e.g. the right to life of the unborn child.

I think there is another issue apart from rights which is that we are animals and females of other species control their fertility according to the conditions that young will be born into. Whatever species, young are born into a particular environment and a potential mother is going to be concerned about that environment (at a conscious level or not) whether human or non-human. Do we think it's legitimate for a pregnant woman to think along the lines of, "The potential child I'm carrying will not be born into an environment that will be good for it." Of course, one can always argue that a child can be given up for adoption if the mother feels she is not able to care for the child as she'd like but the mother has no control over that situation. I was pregnant once to someone about whom I had a strong feeling I didn't want his child - not that I felt there was anything wrong with him - he already had a child who seemed a perfectly nice child but it was a strong feeling. I didn't really want a child at all but perhaps if I'd felt differently about who the father was going to be I may have at least considered going ahead with the pregnancy. Do our instincts with regard to reproduction have no weight?

This is a fascinating answer to the question in Quora:
Are humans the only species that intentionally abort pregnancies?

On the contrary, humans are one of the few species in which our own fetuses have evolved a means to try to prevent us from aborting them at will. Only great apes, some bats, and elephant shrews share this trait with us! It’s called an invasive placenta — our offspring grow a placenta that digs its way into our uterine wall and firmly attaches itself so we can’t shed it readily. This is the reason why we menstruate, shedding the entire lining of the uterus — to rid ourselves of non-viable implanted embryos each month. We got into an evolutionary war with our own offspring!

But, we won this one — the evolution of huge brains and other characteristics has allowed us to selectively abort our offspring using tools and medicines. This allows us to do through ingenuity what most species can do automatically. We win.

(In other mammal species, when conditions are adverse, and the mother feels very stressed and physically or mentally unable to cope with rearing young, she may absorb the fetuses or spontaneously abort them. ‘Intent’ may be hard to assign with non-human animals, as we can’t yet read their minds).

Is this an appeal to nature fallacy?

Possibly although I'm not saying abortion is good because it occurs in nature, I'm just saying it occurs in nature, we can see sensible reasons for the phenomenon occurring in nature and we are, after all, animals and we exist in nature even if we exercise a lot of control over nature and don't always have to behave as nature "dictates" - so far though we must all die, we haven't "defeated" nature there. The thing is in humans because of our "invasive placenta" it's not so easy for abortion to occur as in most other species - I'd be curious to know if in the other species that have an invasive placenta they still manage to make abortion happen. Abortion is always going to be a fraught subject just as euthanasia will be if for no other reason than it involves a continuum - even where they're legalised a line needs to be drawn to determine when it is sanctioned and when not - I have to say I tend to be on the side of a less sacrosanct feeling about life but I respect that others have a more sacrosanct feeling about life.  

Talking about the sanctity of life.  I worry about the subconscious lessons we are teaching our children by legalizing abortion.  Are we teaching them that it's okay to end a life when the consequences of their bad choices are an inconvenience?  Are we nurturing narcissistic, antisocial personality traits within the population?

Possibly but then so many other things about our society nurture that kind of thing too, don't they? It's the way we live generally.

We dont see that anywhere abortion is legal.  what we do see is less people living below the poverty line, less women being trapped in the mother role when they could have gone on to higher education and more equality for women. Taking rights from women to control their own bodies tells our children that women are not to be trusted with their own choices over something as basic as their own bodies. 

The crux of the argument lies with the second premise since whether or not the fetus is sentient enough to participate in the decision-making process is central. Clearly it is not, hence the woman must decide for the lifeform residing in HER womb. It then becomes more a question of "good vs bad' decision-making, and less that she has or does not have the right to decide for the fetus.

In the same way, does the second premise also concern the male who inseminated the female in the first place, along with the female & the fetus, since he is the first cause of the pregnancy?

Can the female unilaterally decide that the male will participate or not, since THEIR resulting lifeform resides in HER body (rape, incest or pedophilia clearly pre-decides the qustion)?

'If you can't wrap it, slap it" becomes a good rule of thumb to avoid a lot of this.

These are good points, especially the question of scope, i.e. "does the second premise concern the male who inseminated the female in the first place ... ?"

I appreciate all of your even-headed, educational replies.  Thank you, all

Re the 3rd conclusion:  Where is the fallacy in this line of reasoning, and/or is this even an argument? 

You lose your right to bodily autonomy when you choose to engage in sex with another body.

Hi again! There's no fallacy here as far as I can see, because there's no argument - the statement's an opinion. The person thinks 'bodily autonomy' is not a sufficient reason to have an abortion. 

I've been thing about what I wrote.

"You lose your right to bodily autonomy when you choose to engage in sex with another body."

I think that's pretty good reasoning.  An orgasim is an involuntary muscle contraction.  Both, males and females, literally lose their bodily autonomy when they climax. 

I'm not saying bodily autonomy is not a good enough reason to have an abortion.  My reasoning (refined a bit) "one loses their right to bodily autonomy when they consent to sexual engagement" would protect the right to abort if a woman is raped.

It depends on how you're defining body autonomy, but it's typically taken to mean that someone has the choice to do certain things to their body, despite the consequences. So if a woman has sex with a man, obviously a consequence of that will be an orgasm - but if the woman was free to make the choice to perform the action that led to that consequence, her body autonomy is considered intact.

Denying this would be like saying someone is 'unfree' because they don't have the 'freedom' to live without breathing. It's simply not how the term is used.

If you're making the argument that, should a woman  choose  to have sex and should one of the consequences be pregnancy, she therefore shouldn't be able to get an abortion, that's a different matter altogether.