The degree of punishment, yes.
But not the fact of illegality.
There are some parallels that are worth considering.
The only case where taking a life is justified (well, the only case where a citizen has that right, goverments exercise it through war, execution, justifiable police shootings) is in self-defense. And nobody that I know of has denied the right to abort to save the life of the mother, which is the self-defense justification. So that's taken care of.
There is accidental homicide. There, there is no pre-planning or intent. This would be equivalent to a woman having an unplanned and spontaneous abortion, which does happen. The purist could argue, i suppose, that the mother is to some degree culpable for the death, but I think that would be a silly argument.
Then there is negligent homicide -- where you don't intend to kill the person but are reckless or irresponsible and cause a death. That is punishable in real life, only, as you point out, with lesser consequences than murder. This might be equivalent to a mother acting irresponsibly in what she drinks or drugs she takes and causing an abortion or causing the fetus to be killed.
Then there are manslaughter and murder, where there is a degree of premeditation and intentionality. This is the equivalent of abortion. Abortion is intentional, deliberate.
I don't know of a single instance of law where a person premeditatedly kills another person when there is no issue of self-defense involved and where the victim has done nothing at all to the perpetrator, but where there is a factor solely affecting a third party which causes the perpetrator to kill the victim, in which there is not guilt to some degree. That is the equivalent case.
So perhaps you can argue that in the case of rape there should be a lesser penalty, but I don't think, unless you are prepared to create an entirely new principle of law, that you can claim there should be no culpabilty.
But what you're saying is that one can intentionally, deliberately, and with pre-planning (all of which are the case in abortion) take the life of a person
Well, there are circumstances where it's legal -- war, police officers shooting people, self-defense, |
