Abortion: 10 years as an atheist and I still don't get it

[Mister Agenda]

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In modern times in developed countries, infanticide is illegal. The circumstances where an infant cant' be fed or cared for by someone are very rare in the world of people with easy internet access, so infanticide isn't different.

The obvious difference with foeticide is that a fetus is inside of a person and can't live outside of that particular person. That is a big and obvious difference from the other cases. Do we have a right to use force of law to compel someone to provide life support for the fetus and bring it to term? Should we imprison them to prevent them from obtaining the means of abortion? If we equate abortion with murder, do we investigate miscarriages as possible homicides? Do we treat the woman who has an abortion as a murderer and the abortion provider as a contract killer?

And all of those questions precede any question about whether a fetus is somehow a person with equal rights to the mother. Those are questions we have to access even if the fetus is considered a person.

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You may not like the connotation, but abortion is murder/killing/ending a life if we deem that fetus qualifies as a life, whether able to be independent or not. Someone compared a fetus to a leech. If you burn off a leech and kill it, is it dead. That is some flavor of denoted murder. I think abortions and miscarriages are investigated as some form of killing. It's usually done by medical professions, not lawyers, and usually doesn't fall into the realm of ethics, nor is it usually more than a shallow causal finding. Would it be so much worse if that were seen as potentially criminal and at least taken more seriously than a check on a clipboard? What's the harm in investigating the reasons behind an abortion or miscarriage to ensure irresponsible behavior wasn't a factor, and holding people more accountable. If I punch a pregnant woman in the belly and kill her fetus I should be punished with murder of the fetus and assault on the mother. If she uses a coat hanger or a chair why shouldn't she at least be looked at for self-harm and murder?

What to compel is the question you bring up. It's the difference between not doing something and doing something harmful. I don't think law should compel people to do something against their will. I don't think science should do something harmful to someone without their consent as well. I see the difference in euthanasia more clearly. Why is it OK to pull the plug on someone but not to inject them with morphine till they die? I would answer, because one is NOT doing something to sustain life and the other IS doing something to harm life. I feel the same moral impetus on abortion. If you're pregnant and you want to kill it, it's on you to do the killing. I'm glad there are safer methods in science now for women to support that choice, but I don't morally agree with them.

You seem to be using an idiosyncratic definition of 'murder', usually it's the 'unlawful killing of a human being'. It's never murder to kill things that aren't human beings, so 'life' is way too big a category and I don't think you really intend to include rabbits and paramecium in your category, you're just using language very, very loosely. If you really consider leeches to be murder, you're off the deep end and there's no point in having a conversation with you. If you don't really think killing leeches is murder, you're being so hyperbolic that I wonder if there's any point in having a conversation with you.

That's as far as I read, someone tell me if it got any better after the leech murdering thing.