Originally Posted by raytri

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".