Human rights may be contested and violated in many ways around the world but it seems axiomatic in the modern era to affirm “human rights.” In other words we tend to affirm some legally functional if not ethically substantial sense of human rights. The basics therein are thought to be some combination of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and or pursuit of property.
Now there is legal precedent in Roe v. Wade denying preborn humans the recognized status of “person.” With abortion, however, if we are going to parse out which humans have/deserve human rights then we are drawing our ethical conclusions not from humanity–which the child and mother have in common– but instead on some other sense of “personhood.” Fetuses, adults, and toddlers are all human and none of them are more or less human, they are just human beings at their own respective stage of development. Yet their legal personhood is subject to legal redefinition and has been variously expanded and contracted over the years for example with various civil rights legislative actions like the Dred Scott decision, abolition, women’s suffrage, etc. Meanwhile, with all those individuals, their humanity has not changed.
Putting these pieces together, we might say, for the sake of consistency, that the case for keeping abortion legal is only tenuously identified as a human right. One would do well to abandon the term of “human rights” when the relevant distinction is over personhood and not humanity. We might call that position a matter of “personal rights” or “people’s rights” but as long as one class of humans is being killed by another class of humans that would be a human rights violation if anything.