Perhaps, if you were to try doing it, you might become amazed by how impossible it is to define murder. Try it, and see how arbitrary a thing it is. Is murder the killing of the innocent? Then abortion is certainly the very definition of murder, as countless people have long maintained. Try to define "human" while excluding the conceptus, and you will exclude yourself, unless (as we do currently) you should depend upon some arbitrary shenanighan to find protection. Try defining "viability" and you will be forced to allow the destruction of very many neonates. And when medical science gets to a point where it allows a foetus to survive outside the human womb from conception to birth, the meaninglessness of the term "viability" will be made manifest to even the dullest amongst us.
The solution is not to define the term "murder" as long as the term allows for the legal acceptance of abortion. Such a definition is by necessity flawed at its core. The solution is to recognise our inextricable link to the conceptus, and not lie to ourselves and to our children that it is not one of us. Whatever it is we mean by the term "human," one thing is as certain as gravity and the motion of the planets; and that is that the biological essence of what we are, exists at the point of conception.
But again, there are folk who simply do not want to get bogged down by facts, and who would rather just claim the right to kill certain defenseless members of our race when convenient (--my friend coey claims men are evil, but she should give honest consideration to the profound evil in her own species). I ask why not let them kill at will, even after their children are born? I do not see any respectable principle by which we might allow them to kill up to the point of birth and forbid their killing afterward. Let them kill if they desire it, but only on their own nickle. |
