RE: Is "Pro-Life" an Accurate Label?
Have you looked into the arguments provided by Ayn Rand? They're not easy to accept for most people, but I think they carry the most weight as they get down to principles of autonomy.
In other words, only an autonomous individual able of reasoning has the natural ability to adhere to morality. As such, only they - as potentially moral individuals - should be given rights.
Once a person begins to act immorally, others may rightfully choose to take away his rights in specific areas relating to the initial neglect. This in turn leads to social constructs such as the Non Aggression Principle.
Other arguments, such as that of the unique DNA, separate body, mutual understanding that sex may lead to pregnancy, the slippery slope of rights etc all of course carry some weight of their own but are incomparable to the above argument, because just as the NAP they are social constructs.
That makes lot of sense, but doesn't that mean babies are the "property" of their parents? Animals are, but even then our society doesn't allow for animal abuse. There's also the very real consequence of abuse/neglect and what that doesn't to our psyche. If we have a society okay with abusing/neglecting non-autonomous consciousness living creatures, will that be a society with higher or lower wellbeing?
No actually. They are rather 'more, or less than, or average autonomous invididuals' and to the extent that they are autonomous (they appear, show signs of or otherwise communicate this) they should be treated as such.
The same as I've written about human beings also apply to animals in general, but context decides if you actually have to kill or otherwise harm a lower standing animal in order to survive. Here also other factors, such as the previously mentioned "potential", time aspects, selfish reward etc, come into play.
Neglect, is an ethical issue that only an otherwise able person can consider. If you happen to be the victim of natural disaster and get caught in an emergency, it may well be that you are unable to save a fetus, baby or an older child. But it is only if you choose not to, even though you actually knew that you could, that you have comitted an immoral act.
As always, even if we had no state we would still need a standard of ethics.
In my Cooperative Agorist framework there is a lot of room for the establishment and even contractual agreements of such standards for any number of people that would make up a society -- or for any number of different groups with varying ethics within the larger society, should there be differing views on the matter.