Is abortion murder, or not?

By Dan Popp

The law...does not enjoin that which pleases a weak, frail man, but, without any regard to persons, commands that which is good and punishes evil in all, whether rich or poor, high or low. 'Tis deaf, inexorable, inflexible. On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder, to the clamors of the populace. – John Adams

Pro-lifers were quick to "correct" Donald Trump when he told Chris Matthews that "there has to be some form of punishment" for a woman who procures an abortion – were abortion hypothetically made illegal. The candidate backtracked. But in my world, 2 plus 2 still equals 4.

If abortion is the murder of an innocent human being, as we pro-life advocates have always said, then by what mental gymnastics do we allow the murderer to escape justice? Barbarians can merrily point to all the "compassionate" conservatives on TV this week and say, "There goes one of us; a person who thinks with his feeler."

If a certain drug is illegal, then who should be punished when that drug is traded: the seller, the buyer, or both? If prostitution is illegal, who should be punished: the buyer, the seller, or both? If it's against the law to hire an undocumented foreigner, who should be punished when that law is broken: the employer, the employee, or both? There is only one rationally consistent answer. Any two people knowingly engaged in a criminal act are both guilty. And if we still punish the guilty in America, that means that both are deserving of punishment.

Some have said, "We believe that the mother is a second victim of abortion." That's certainly true. She's a victim of the lies of the pro-aborts. She's a victim, let's say, of pressure from others. But that doesn't prevent her from also being a perpetrator. A person who gets cheated in a business deal, and who then shoots and kills the other party, is a victim of fraud, but he is also a perpetrator of murder. The two roles are not mutually exclusive.

And why is the woman called a "mother?" This is abuse of language to the level of propaganda. A "mother" is exactly what she refused to be. She can't wrap herself in the apron of Motherhood after she has chosen to murder the one who would have made her a mom.

A woman who procures an abortion is analogous to a person who hires a hit man. Yes, the professional killer actually pulls the trigger, but it was his client who set the whole crime in motion. Such a monster should go free?

We pro-lifers have said that there is no moral difference between the life of an unborn human and any other human. But I know that the mother who drowns her toddlers in a bathtub won't get the same "victim" treatment as the non-mother who kills her children in a clinic. So when push comes to shove, maybe some pro-lifers don't see born and unborn lives as equally valid. What other conclusion can we reach?

"You'll have to jail millions of women," comes the objection. But the fact is that punishment deters crime. We won't have to deport all 11 million illegal aliens, for example; we can visibly pursue justice and watch the criminal behavior diminish. You don't make abortion illegal so that you can have the same number of abortions, but lots more prisons. You outlaw abortion to save millions of babies. And the more serious you are about stopping it, the more severely you punish it. As George Savile said, "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen." Here is another case of Conservatives arguing badly.

As far as I can tell, it is not logically consistent to say that yes, abortion is murder, but no, we will not punish the person who caused the murder because we don't like how that would play to the viewers of MSNBC.

© Dan Popp