The fact is that honestly believing that abortion is close to murder on the scale of evil, regardless of whether or not it is actually murder, does NOT suggest immediately that pro-lifers should go out and kill the perpetrators, be they the doctors or the women. Quite frankly, a (small) majority of the American public disagrees, which also includes a large majority of the political class. Slavery is rather unseemly, and for most of the country’s early history, few people cared very much, and those who agitated against it were considered busybodies and Quakers. (I am not making the bad analogy between slavery and abortion per se, only in the response to it.) Does this mean that abolitionists not only would be justified in going around killing slaveholders (like Thomas Jefferson), but would be hypocrites if they didn’t?

Women who have abortions are told from the beginning that it’s their God-given right and that a fetus is a clump of cells. They then go and undertake a procedure that has explicit legal sanction. It is obvious that these women should not be executed or imprisoned for this. They have simply been lied to and in many cases suffer for that lie. (There are also those who simply have no problem having multiple partial-birth abortions/infanticides–a procedure that, pace conrad, is sanctioned in many states and that most pro-choice advocates defend vociferously–and as I said, those women simply strike me as sociopathic.

In a different setting, in the abstract sense, I see no real problem in subjecting a woman who contracts for the killing of her unborn child to legal penalties. What those penalties should be is an interesting question that is addressed by discussing what the nature of the crime is. Start with full-blown infanticide (the kind that is considered murder now, not the kind that is legally protected) and work backwards. What does conradg think the penalty should be for for a woman killing her child one hour into the child’s life?

You can blather on all you like about your moral superiority …

No irony there, eh?

You’re the guy who can’t see the difference between court-sanctioned executions, soldiers fighting in battle, abortion, and murder.

That’s not true at all. Of course I see “the difference” (or differences, really) between such actions; all that I said was that they are, at least approximately, the moral equivalent of murder. (Though obviously not all court-sanctioned executions or actions of soldiers in battle have this characteristic, and I made as much quite clear in the comment you’re so happily misconstruing.) And then the point is that the same moral equivalence clearly isn’t present between whatever violence might be involved in a person’s being jailed by a legitimate authority and that same person’s being assaulted by a private actor. “Senseless and incoherent morals”, indeed.

As to the incessant charge of inconsistency, I’m also in favor of serious leniency in the sentencing of women who e.g. kill or attempt to kill their infants after they’re born, and that conviction has nothing at all to do with a belief in the less than full personhood of such children. Women in such a position are, I think, overwhelmingly likely to be acting out of desperation or hopelessness rather than malice (and indeed it’s been shown that the impulse to kill one’s own children is strikingly endemic to humans), and as such the law ought to treat them with mercy. That’s not to say, as I made clear above is also my position in the case of women who procure abortions, that I think there should be no penalties in such a case, but only that it seems entirely appropriate for these killings to carry sentences less severe than do others.

Say what? You’re the guy who can’t see the difference between court-sanctioned executions, soldiers fighting in battle, abortion, and murder. But now suddenly it’s me who is creating moral and legal equivalence? Sorry, you continue to make no sense. I can see why you are forced to leave the conversation. It would require you to actually face up to the contradictions in your views, and that’s clearly too much to handle.

Sending people to jail is an act of violence, just of a lesser degree than executing them. To prove the point, ask what happens if you refuse to go to jail. I guarantee the state will use violence to put you there. You who claim to be against violence have no problem putting abortion doctors in jail, and yet won’t put mothers in jail for paying doctors to perform abortions. This is selective punishment that makes no moral or legal sense. You can blather on all you like about your moral superiority, just leave alone the legal issue of using state violence to enforce your particular senseless and incoherent morals. Because that is what you advocate – using state violence to enforce your version of morality.

Pardon my language, but I really don’t need any longer to have some anonymous internet asshole declaiming on the true nature of my beliefs. You’re wrong. Bye.

So you say that war is murder, and executing criminals is murder, and abortion is murder. So would you send our soldiers to jail, along with the prison guards who carry out those executions, and leave the politicians and judges who order them to do those things alone? Of course not, because you don’t really think these things are murder, either legally or morally. In other words, what you say here is simply not believable, regardless of whether you say you believe in it or not. Your beliefs are incoherent and self-contradictory, and make no sense, either legally or morally. This is rather obvious if you break it down, which is why you resort to the oldest trick in the book, creating moral equivalence for every kind of violence, as if they really are the same, either morally or legally.

I have trust in God too, but I trust God not to be an idiot who is fooled by this sort of silliness. What you fail to realize is that you, too, are enacting a kind of moral evil, and perpetuating it through your own insipid moralizing, pretending to be the guy on the side of God and Good, but really just a pawn in a cynical game of political positioning. And talk about demonizing! My God, what nerve you have to accuse anyone of that. What you are expressing, my friend, is the simplistic evil of narcissistic banality.

I think that abortion is a heinous act that is, or is the approximate moral equivalent of, murder. I think the same is true, at least in many cases, of the execution of convicted criminals as a function of our criminal justice system. So is much of what happens in modern warfare. So is what happened in our prisons to detainees in the GWOT. So are countless other things that happen every day, both inside and outside of this country. Faced with such evils, those who recognize them as such respond in a host of ways. Some pray. Some protest. Some counsel. Some donate. That most prolifers don’t think further violence is an appropriate response to the evil of abortion is the function of a whole host of factors, including (as you suggest) sympathy for the women who seek it out, a general predisposition against violence, trust in the power of God to work things out, the hope that all is not lost in the cause for a political solution, the belief that such a cause requires changing hearts and minds who will only be lost through violence, the abundance of statements from church leaders and other figures of authority that claim that violence is unacceptable, and so on. Faced with all of this, and perhaps overwhelmed by the immensity of what is at stake and recognizing the obvious fact that violence and killing would do nothing at all to remedy it, preferring peaceful means to violent ones is an obviously appropriate course of action.

But you’re not going to acknowledge that, which is fine. I’m sure that demonizing those who disagree with you will serve your purposes just fine.

As for hitmen, the law does consider the person who orders or pays for a hit to be more culpable than the hitman. So women who hire abortionists would definitely be considered more legally culpable than the doctors. But we both know that an abortion doctor is not a hitman, and the entire comparison is just rheotical nonsense. They are someone carrying out a legal medical procedure. If abortion werre illegal, very few of them would do it. If they in any sense thought it was murder, they wouldn’t perform it either, legal or not. Hitmen don’t much care who they kill, but an abortion doctor will only kill fetuses, which seems like a strange preference.

The point is that hitmen only exist because people want to kill each other, but can’t or don’t want to do the act themselve, because they don’t want to get caught. Women would be more than happy to kill their fetuses themselves, but it’s just safer to have a doctor do the trick, because they’re trained in the medical aspects of it. With the abortion pill, or the morning after pill, they can and do kill fetuses without the help of doctors, other than a prescription. Why not go after pharmacists? So the doctor is just there to ensure that the woman goes through the procedure safely. Without the doctor present, there’s a lot more risk involved. But clearly women did go for abortions before it was legal, with unqualified abortionists. The point being that the doctor is not the responsible party in this case, because the woman can go to many, many doctors for the procedure, but only she can actually go through with it. She’s present at 100% of the abortions, not far from the scene like most murder-for-hires.

Now, it’s true any individual woman is going to have very few abortions in her life, probably just the one (though I personally know several women who have had multiple abortions, and they don’t fit the profiles of serial killers), whereas abortion doctors have many. But that is only because they specialize in this procedure, and can give the best care to women for that very reason. Their primary concern is the health of the mother, not the fetus. So targeting the best abortion doctors means eliminating those who can give women the best health care, which means the best doctors, not the worst. This is like going after the best prison guards, or the best soldiers, or the best plumbers. It’s a dirty job, certainly, but these are just professionals.

And since when is it considered okay to kill just one person? Isn’t the real problem here, that women feel that it’s okay for them to kill just one person, in part because the pro-life movement focuses its moral indignation on the doctor, and not the woman? They propose criminal penalties for the doctor, but not the woman, for the same specific act. In that respect, it doesn’t matter who has had or performed more abortions in the past. This is like having drug laws against the sale of drugs, but not the possession or use of them. Why target drug dealers, when it’s the users who create the industry?

The problem here is that women are just more sympathetic than men, and it’s easier to target the doctors because they are in one place. It makes no actual sense as far as criminal or moral justice goes, it’s just easier to make targets of them. Yet no abortion doctor has ever gone around trying to convince women to have abortions. The women come to them. If anything, they make sure the woman is sure she wants to do this. The only reason for this incoherence and qualms about going after women is that most pro-life people, like you, don’t really consider fetuses to be human, and they don’t consider abortion to be murder, so all these comparisons to hitmen and executioners are just bunk. And they know this deep down, which is why they simply avoid really looking at the logic owhat they say, since the logic is there to hide and deflect what is really going on, not explain it.

What we are arguing about is the incongruence in the pro-life movement between the blame and hatred they direct at the doctors, versus the lack of same directed at the woman after the “murder” has taken place. Again, this incongruity makes no sense whatsoever if one considers abortion to be murder, since it is the woman who has planned and decided and ordered the murder of her fetus. The doctor certainly bears some moral responsibility in this, but much less than the woman – at least that’s what the logic of calling it murder ought to imply.

That certainly doesn’t seem like part of the “logic of calling it murder” to me – again, the hitman is no less (and perhaps more) morally culpable than the person who orders the hit. But anyway. Has it occurred to you that another factor here might be that most abortionists are involved in many abortions, while the same obviously isn’t true of most women? Or how about the recognition, which is quite widespread among prolifers, that many women who seek abortions are under a huge degree of pressure from many different sides, that they aren’t aware of the full scope of what they’re doing, and that for these reasons and a host of others they’re deserving of sympathy and – here’s a Christian concept for you – forgiveness even if what they are doing/have done is very deeply wrong?

And by the way: the average prolifer doesn’t “go after” abortionists, and indeed is likely to regard the kind of harassment you describe in that last paragraph as quite wrong. But it seems that creating cruel, irrational, rage-filled bogeymen is a favorite trope of yours, so best of luck with that.

But this isn’t the subject of our argument. I’m sure anti-abortion protestors will try to persuade women not to have abortions, since they are the only one who can decide that. We are talking about abortion as murder, however, and who should be blamed for the murder of these fetuses. Once a woman takes the next step, and actually has her fetus aborted, she is now the primary murderer of her child, not the doctor, who is just the legally and medically qualified person who performs the act. What we are arguing about is the incongruence in the pro-life movement between the blame and hatred they direct at the doctors, versus the lack of same directed at the woman after the “murder” has taken place. Again, this incongruity makes no sense whatsoever if one considers abortion to be murder, since it is the woman who has planned and decided and ordered the murder of her fetus. The doctor certainly bears some moral responsibility in this, but much less than the woman – at least that’s what the logic of calling it murder ought to imply.

“if the sentence or the regime is illegitimate then obviously – assuming that there are rights at all – such a person DOES have such a right.”

Yes, and in such a case – let’s say Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany – who would you go after, the guy whose job it is to carry out the execution, or the people who ordered it? Obviously you have to go after the people who are genuinely responsible – the people who run the regime, issue the orders, who set it all up, not the grunts who just do their job, nasty as it might be.

Of course, we all know why you don’t go around calling women who have had abortions murderers, throwing blood on their houses, harrassing them after the murder has been committed. It would mean going after some very sympathetic people, like Barry Goldwater’s daughter, who had an abortion with his blessing (and help) when it was still illegal. So he’s an accessory to murder before-the-fact. Good luck persuing that kind of prosecution, morally or legally.

But instead of targeting mothers, the pro-life movement essentially absolves them of responsibility, and instead goes after the doctors.

As I said, this is not true. I for one have spent hundreds of hours volunteering in pregnancy centers and standing on freezing sidewalks trying to persuade women not to have abortions, and I can assure you that the number of prolifers who do this far exceeds the number who attack or murder, or even protest against, abortionists.

And, of course, someone who has been sentenced to death does NOT have a right to life anymore.

In the legal sense, of course, but if the sentence or the regime is illegitimate then obviously – assuming that there are rights at all – such a person DOES have such a right. This is elementary moral reasoning, really.

Yes, but until then, the appropriate comparison is to a legally sanctioned murder, such as an execution. If abortion becomes illegal, then it is closer to the hitman comparison – but even then, only if the fetus is legally considered a person with rights. Otherwise, even if abortion is illegal, it’s more like someone who is guilty of any ordinary violation of the law that carries comparable penalties (depending on what those penalties are in anti-abortion legal regime).

As for the present situation, I don’t mind you putting some blame on the doctor performing the abortion. I don’t think concentration camp guards are innocent either. But if I were opposing the Nazi holocaust regime, I don’t think I’d concentrate my hatred and moral indignation and violent reaction upon the prison guards. They’d be the last people in the chain of responsibility I’d be targetting. Rather, I’d be going after the people who ordered these killings. In the case of abortion, those who consider this a second holocaust, a mass murder of innocents, the primary people ordering these murders are the mothers, and of course the legal regime of politicians and judges who make it possible. But instead of targeting mothers, the pro-life movement essentially absolves them of responsibility, and instead goes after the doctors. This seems, might I say, morally idiotic?

“So there’s only a right to life if the killing in question is murder? Hardly. I’d argue that given the state of our criminal justice system anyone sentenced to death has clearly got a right to life,”

In the first place, yes, any intentional killing of a person is murder, unless their right to life has been legally terminated by a court. Self-defense is the only exception I can think of, and that too is determined by legal means, and is of course inapplicable to most abortions. I don’t see how one can find fetuses to be legal persons with a right to life, and yet kill them without it being murder, unless, of course, one can get a court to condemn the fetus to death for some reason. Maybe you geniuses out there can enlighten me.

And, of course, someone who has been sentenced to death does NOT have a right to life anymore. That right has been abridged by legal proceedings. The same way all kinds of rights are taken away from criminals on a daily basis. Heard of prison? So rights can be taken away by a court, but the right to life is only taken away under the most extreme of circumstances, after lengthy trials, appeals, and all sorts of things, none of which could, I imagine, be completed in the short span of a pregnancy. So if the fetus has a right to life, I have a hard time imagining almost any abortions being allowed, except in the most dire health circumstance (which could be likened to a kind of self-defense).

1st, just because an executioner (or anyone else) does something that is legally sanctioned and ordered by an authority, it doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. A mob lawyer is employed by a Boss in a way that is perfectly valid legally so that the Boss can evade justice. The lawyer’s actions are regardless ethically dubious and morally reprehensible.

Secondly, while it’s true that the claim that a fetus is a person is somewhat problematic does present some difficulties, flat-out asserting that it isn’t is not without its own problems. A doctor delivers a baby, slaps it in the rear and makes it cry. The mother, annoyed by the noise, promptly instructs the doctor to chop the baby’s head off. Monstrous! One ward down, a mother instructs an abortionist to abort the fetus at roughly the same stage of pregnancy except that the fetus is still positioned in the womb and the cord hasn’t been cut. Just before the birth is complete, the procedure called abortion (the crushing of the head of the fetus) takes place. Now it’s not monsterous, but a God-given right of the mother over her body!

Preposterous, one might say, but then if that action is criminalized, how to draw the line from that to terminating the pregnancy the week before? Biologically, little has changed. And so on. Furthermore, simple infanticide has not been without legal sanction and social currency. Reasonable people HAVE disagreed over this. Perhaps conradg wishes to return to that state of affairs?

In the same way that a state executioner is not responsible for the killing of a condemned prisoner, even though he is the one who actually does the killing. An abortionist does not go around trying to drum up business. They are simply the ones performing the legal act initiated by someone else. It would only be the equivalent of a hitman if murder were a legally sactioned [sic] act, and hitman were in the phone book like plumbers and carpenters. You don’t blame a contractor for tearing down a cherished building condemned by a legal process, not owned by the contractor himself, if he is only performing his job as required, and according to code. You could certainly blame the owner of the building, but the contractor doing the work? Not very sensible.

It’s comments like this that make my “idiot” remark seem entirely accurate, even if inappropriate (though it wasn’t much harsher than the language you’d gone in for). Pro-lifers are trying to change the law, which means that if they (we) had their (our) way, then abortionists wouldn’t be listed in the phone book.

More to the point, though, the idea that it’s not sensible to blame people for doing immoral things just because those things are legal and were requested by others is beyond absurd. Pro-lifers do try to persuade women not to have abortions, and also protest the actions of abortionists – this is because, if abortion is what pro-lifers say it is, then both parties are clearly responsible.

The fact that you, who seem a pretty stauch pro-life advocate, can’t defend the right-to-life argument, means that what we are really arguing is how extensive the pro-choice rights of the woman are, not whether they exist or not.

So there’s only a right to life if the killing in question is murder? Hardly. I’d argue that given the state of our criminal justice system anyone sentenced to death has clearly got a right to life, but nevertheless executioners aren’t murderers (though they are responsible, and I think their actions are demonstrably immoral and worthy of protest). In a society where fetuses were widely recognized as human, then abortion – or at least some abortions – could reasonably be classified as murder under the law and punished as such; short of this, there are other classifications that might be more appropriate. How is this so hard to see?

Calling me an idiot is a confession that you can’t make a good argument. The notion that someone is innocent of murder, because they deem the victim to be less than human is what is idiotic. Mothers seeking abortions are not insane people. If they consider their fetuses less than human, it is still murder if fetuses actually are, in reality (not just in your fevered moral imagination) human persons. Is killing a black person not murder, because they are deemed to be subhuman animals by lynch mobs? I would think the punishment should be greater for such people, not less.

“In what sense, pray tell, is an abortionist not “actually responsible” for an abortion he performs”

In the same way that a state executioner is not responsible for the killing of a condemned prisoner, even though he is the one who actually does the killing. An abortionist does not go around trying to drum up business. They are simply the ones performing the legal act initiated by someone else. It would only be the equivalent of a hitman if murder were a legally sactioned act, and hitman were in the phone book like plumbers and carpenters. You don’t blame a contractor for tearing down a cherished building condemned by a legal process, not owned by the contractor himself, if he is only performing his job as required, and according to code. You could certainly blame the owner of the building, but the contractor doing the work? Not very sensible.

“Even if such a thing were true, it wouldn’t prove the pro-choice point at all, since there are many things other than the killing of a born human being that deserve to be proscribed by law.”

Now, this is certainly true, and it’s something I’ve said many times elsewhere. There is no need to declare the fetus a legal person with rights in order to regulate abortion. We regulate all kinds of things, even basic human rights, setting limits on gun ownership, economic speech, protest permits, etc. We can also regulate abortion rights. But the argument you have been persuing here is that abortion is murder, and that leads to a whole bevy of idiotic problems that only tell us that this is a stupid, idiotic argument that should be abandoned by both sides. And yet the pro-life movement has fairly well staked its entire rationale upon this “right to life” for fetuses. So, yes, I should be more specific and say that the “right to life” movement is pretty well destroyed by your own tacit admission that you don’t actually see fetuses as legal persons. It doesn’t entirely destroy the “pro-life” movement, in that one can still argue for regulations on abortion. But one can’t sensibly argue for a total ban on abortion, in that the woman is clearly a person with legal rights, and hers tend to prevail in all but late term abortions when no health issues are present. The fact that you, who seem a pretty stauch pro-life advocate, can’t defend the right-to-life argument, means that what we are really arguing is how extensive the pro-choice rights of the woman are, not whether they exist or not.