Is Abortion Murder?
NOTE: This will probably be a controversial post. Before we get too far, I’d like to remind you that I’m not trying to judge anybody here. I’d especially like to remind you that what’s in the past is in the past, and this post is not intended to make anybody feel vilified in any way. But I do hope that if you ever find yourself in a position where you need to make a decision about abortion in the future, you will thoughtfully consider these ideas.
I know that most people who are for abortion contend that it is not murder, because what’s being removed is a fetus, not a baby.
It’s my personal opinion that that answer is a cop-out, and here’s why.
Let’s say there’s an old abandoned building.
Over the years squatters have come and gone, and it is well known that occasionally children play games in the building or people sometimes take shelter in it during inclement weather.
But as the building has aged, it has become unsafe. You’ve been tasked with the building’s demolition.
Would you blow up the building without checking first to make sure no one was inside?
You could proceed under the very reasonable assumption that no one is inside. After all, usually no one is there, it’s not a rainy day, and signs have been posted warning people to stay out.
But there’s still a chance that someone might be there.
Is that a chance you’re willing to take?
If you’re wrong, you’ll have innocent blood on your hands.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think most people wouldn’t want to set off those explosives unless they felt confident that they weren’t killing anyone.
The risk, however slight, that they might be responsible for another person’s death, outweighs any perceived convenience of going ahead without being certain.
Here’s another example.
Let’s say there’s a cardboard box.
The box has holes punched in its lid, but otherwise there is no indicator of its contents. An expert in cardboard boxes hands you a shotgun and assures you that the box contains only trash. He asks you to trust him, because he is an expert, and he tells you to fire on the box.
But why are there air holes in the box if nothing living is inside?
What if something is alive in there?
Maybe you feel uneasy about trusting the expert. Maybe you don’t want to fire right away. But the longer you hesitate, the more you begin to hear sounds that seem suspiciously like life. Is that breathing? Movement? Even…crying?
“No,” the expert reassures you, “there’s nothing important in the box. It’s only trash.”
So you fire.
The sounds immediately stop and scarlet oozes out from underneath the cardboard.
The expert applauds you for taking control of your life by making the choice he hoped you would. How liberated you must feel, he says. He goes home and never has to think about you or the contents of the box again.
But what about you? Do you go home and sleep peacefully? Do you really feel so liberated?
Or do you lie awake at night, haunted by the possibility that maybe you were right and he was wrong, that maybe if something sounds like a human, acts like a human, and bleeds like a human, it could really be a human?
When you plant a watermelon seed, it will produce a watermelon.
Sometimes things don’t work out as they should, and the watermelon grows deformed or inedible. Sometimes the watermelon doesn’t grow at all. But no matter what happens after you planted it, the fact remains that the thing that you planted was still a watermelon seed, and nothing less.
When an alligator lays an egg, a baby alligator will hatch out of it.
Maybe something will go wrong and the baby alligator will have problems, hatch improperly, die, or fail to develop in the egg. But it doesn’t change the fact that when the egg was laid, it was an alligator egg, and nothing less.
When it comes to abortion, we take something that is obviously identifiable and willfully misidentify it to justify doing something that we know is wrong.
Here are a few other examples of people in power deciding to pretend that other humans aren’t human so they can get what they want:
- Imperialists, when they stole other people’s land and slaughtered or enslaved them
- Slaveholders and whites, when they pretended non-whites were not people, or were only 3/5 people, or were separate but “equal” (read: not equal at all)
- Hitler, when he exterminated the elderly, the infirm, and millions of Jews
Speaking of justifying murder by pretending its victims aren’t human, that brings us back to our original question: Is abortion murder?
I would contend that taking a life is still taking a life. And a life by any other name is still…a life.