Because the reality is that, like war, whether murder is murder or not, sometimes all we have is the lesser of two evils...the lines get very murky there, and I don't believe in telling someone who has been raped that she must now bring the child to term.
The very essence of war is reciprocal mass killing and destruction as a (hopefully) last-resort means of resolving who's going to get the upper hand in a conflict. And because that's the nature of war, when analyzing it ethically, we conventionally start from the assumption that each party to the conflict legitimately construes the other as a mortal enemy, wherefore the usual restrictions imposed (and enforced) on killing by civil society don't apply: even killings of innocents (civilians) in the course of strikes against the other party's organized combatants aren't classified or prosecuted as war crimes, so long as civilians weren't intentionally targeted and the customary precautions prescribed by the laws of war (e.g. Hague Conventions) to minimize civilian deaths were taken. Now, if you personally wanted to advocate a doctrinal-pacifist stance--that all killing, period, is and must be treated as 'murder' ; or that all killing short of self-defense against a direct, immediate threat to the killer's life is and must be treated as 'murder'--then fine, but you'd better be prepared to be consistent in applying that. To insist that, yes, all or most killings occuring in war must rightly be categorized as 'murders'--but then to turn around and say 'We shouldn't prosecute them though, because war's murky and I believe in giving soldiers the benefit of the doubt that those killings were the lesser of two evils'--would completely destroy the integrity of your argument. Either you really believe it's 'murder'--which
all jurisdictions, including ours, count among the most heinous of all crimes, deserving of the harshest available punishment--or you don't. (And yes, this applies to anyone who was blithely analogizing Iraq to abortion for rhetorical purposes, which would not include me.)
In any case, aborting a pregnancy is not analogous to killing in war; there is
no reciprocal mortal threat involved, save for cases where medical complications directly threaten the mother's life--and even that would be questionable as justification for 'homicide' in response, since the 'victim' in question (assuming you ascribe moral and legal personhood to fetuses) couldn't possibly have intended those complications, nor caused them through 'criminal recklessness.' A woman who tracked down her rapist after the fact and killed him would indeed be convicted of murder (or at the very least voluntary manslaughter) in our legal system, so what sense does it make to say that the 'murder' of a fetus conceived through rape--a crime in which it couldn't possibly have been a participant --should not only be permitted, but furthermore not prosecuted?
Again, you seem to be trying to create an absolute where none exists.
No,
you're creating an absolute by asserting that abortion is 'murder' and as such should be illegal--it's just that you're then undermining yourself by granting illogical exceptions (i.e., permissible in cases of rape or incest; not actually prosecutable as murder in any case) which call the integrity of your argument severely into question. Simply put, you cannot categorically declare some particular type of act to be 'murder,' but then turn around and say nonetheless it should not be punished as murder, and in fact should be openly permitted in some cases. That defeats the purpose of even having the offense type 'murder.'
I don't believe that sexual activity is only for procreation (I tend to agree with the Protestant perspective that sexuality is a gift for each other), but you can't ignore the reality that it's a both/and. Sexuality is both a gift for marriage AND a pathway to parenthood.
Yes of course it's both, but when you're specifically seeking to attach
legal implications to that, you need to be consistent in applying the principle thus given legal form and force. As I implied in my preceding post, it really doesn't make sense to begin with to take the precise circumstances of impregnation into account when determining whether a given abortion is 'murder,' since the 'murder victim' in question is inherently innocent of any crime, and in any case whatever crime might've been involved in the act of impregnation is over and done with by the time abortion is even a possibility.
But for the sake of argument, if I were to accept the premise that the mere fact of sex having a reproductive aspect somehow yields a legal obligation to accept the possibility of children as a consequence of all voluntary sexual intercourse, then logically that premise applies to contraception too, because the express purpose of contraception is the evasion of said obligation. I'm not saying that would logically make contracepting 'murder'--that would be a separate question, involving consideration of the precise means through which various contraceptives work--but it
would logically make it a crime. But, again, the fact that you're even trying to bring the circumstances of impregnation to bear on the question of whether abortion is 'murder' to begin with calls the stated motives and reasoning behind your case for criminalizing abortion into question.
Time to bounce -- on deadline, so looks like I'm heading back into the underground -- but thanks all as usual for a spirited discussion. Thought-provoking to be sure.
