Final-Fan said:
Well said.
I would say that, morally speaking, a woman's right to abortion should be unquestioned until the period you mention, and after that I think that if a woman made a conscious, considered decision to continue the pregnancy, she ought to continue the pregnancy instead of changing her mind. I acknowledge that this still leaves room for edge cases where the mother was unable to make that decision for whatever reason, or to obtain a desired abortion, until it was too late.
To answer the question of what to do if a pregnancy is highly dangerous to the mother but the fetus cannot be killed as it is considered a person: fortunately, science has, unless I am mistaken, advanced to the point where premature births are not necessarily fatal to the infant about as far back as the brain activity measurement we agree on. Therefore, it's not murder to induce premature childbirth for the sake of the life and health of the mother, and just hope that the baby lives too. And before then, it's okay to abort anyway. (I admit that the described situation has a little bit of Sophie's Choice in it, but death is not guaranteed—I'm not fully aware of current moral thought on this.)
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If you say the fetus is a person at 5 weeks, I don't know how you could get around it being murder, or at the very least, manslaughter to remove a potentially viable fetus from the mother if it doesn't survive.
Premature birth is not necessarily fatal, but it often is. There is a huge difference in survival rates between 24 and 26 weeks, which is part of what makes that area so gray. Premature birth also can potentially have long term negative consequences.
