Of course I don’t expect anything better from someone like Simon, but this article is absolutely idiotic. The central analogy is between a woman getting an abortion and a man who mutilates braindead bodies for fun, with the implication that both are seriously immoral even if the “victim” in each situation isn’t a person. But of course the unbelievably obvious disanalogy here is that the man mutilating braindead bodies is doing so for literally no reason other than self-indulgent sadistic pleasure, which is a motivating factor in ~0% of all abortions. It’s extremely plausible, arguably obvious, that the wrongness of the mutilation scenario comes from the use of a human body to satisfy a shameful and disgusting urge, not from the bare fact that some sort of damage is being done to it in the abstract.

Meanwhile, if Simon was actually interested in making the analogy even remotely insightful, then you’d have to imagine a man destroying a braindead body for the sorts of reasons women generally do get abortions, alongside a stipulation that the braindead body has never at any point constituted a person. (Also, you’d probably have to make it so the body in question was literally inside the guy.) But in that case, the intuitive judgment would obviously be that destroying the braindead body was totally permissible. And I imagine Simon has to be aware of that, or else he wouldn’t find himself compensating for the fundamental incoherence of his argument with edgy pictures of aborted fetus heads or whatever.