Quote:
Originally Posted by Blade
And that "determination" has always been, and remains arbitrary. So fetuses are to live or die based on a completely arbitrary "line"?
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Almost all legal lines are arbitrary -- that is, they could have been drawn somewhere else. Nearly all political and legal debate comes down to where to draw lines.
Take murder, for instance. Seems like a slam-dunk, right? Murder is wrong.
Except we have not one, but multiple arbitrary lines regarding murder. What's the difference between first- and second-degree murder? And between those and manslaughter? And self-defense? And involuntary homicide? And so on. We recognize many shades of culpability when it comes to killing. And deciding where a given case should fall is not always easy.
In abortion, drawing the line at "viability" is no more or less arbitrary than drawing the line at "conception" or "birth".