If a person is charged with double murder when he murders a pregnant worman, then why does the same prosecuter fail to charge the woman with murder when she kills the same fetus (child)?

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Do you expect consistency in our flawed judicial system? The crux of the matter is that it should not be up to the government to decide when a fetus becomes a human. The government has no right to interfere in that matter. This leaves it up to the mother, and so in an ideal world it would be up the mother whether to determine if the fetus was a human or not and therefore whether or not a double murder was commited. Unfortunately the mother is dead, so we assume the mother would consider the fetus a child and don't really care if we aren't giving the murderer the benefit of the doubt.

"Mack" gave as good a logical explanation of the inconsistency as is likely to develop. A political view would be that politicians don't have the guts to take on abortion directly but still need the support of anti-abortion activists to win elections. They seek out related matters which are less controversial, pass laws on those, and then present the results as progress. In this case, charging the murderer of a pregnant woman with double murder is something that will not be strongly opposed while allowing the politician in question to lobby support from anti-abortion activists.

In other words, the answer to your question is "political cowardice".

Very good point. I use that in abortion debates all the time. I will tell you why this is so. Abortion is murder. And the Supreme Court somehow found the right to privacy in the Constitution. (I will give you a clue. Privacy is not in the Constitution) But the right to life is in the Constitution. Abortion is illegal and murder. Plain as that. There is not one single argument to justify abortion.

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Here's an argument: People should not be impeded by non-people.

The fundamental philosophical argument in favor of abortion is that reproductive cells are not people. The argument is over the extent to which this is true and the duration over which it is true. The fact that it is true to some extent is taken as given by almost everyone.

Very few in the modern world call male masturbation an act of genocide, in spite of the death of millions of sperm cells.

Some people argue that at conception, there is a dramatic change and the clump of cells deserves moral rights beyond those of reproductive cells. At the other extreme are those who argue that the moral status of the unborn changes at birth and no earlier, since prior to birth the fetus lives a parasitic existence within the mother's body and is aware of nothing beyond the womb.

More moderate folks declare that an unborn child cannot be a person before it is conscious, and debate at what week consciousness is most likely to develop, intending to bar abortion after that point.

I am in that third camp. I don't feel that a 'soul' (and therefore personhood) can predate consciousness and I don't believe a soul is set out for every child at conception. On a metaphysical level, I don't feel that there's anything for the soul to 'attach' to prior to consciousness - any soul that was set out at conception would be disappointed, but not harmed, if that child were aborted. On the other hand, I think consciousness probably predates birth, making the debate relevant. It would be a very disappointing existence if one were only around for a few days or weeks before dying.

That's a great point. I think the difference is this: While the woman is still pregnant, the fetus is a sort of possession. I think that because it cannot live without her, she sort of can choose to stop keeping it alive. Kinda similar to that whole life support thing that happened a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, if someone kills a mother while she is pregnant, he has made a decision to prevent a life that was not his to make.

I think also that it's kind of an excuse used to give murderers a more severe sentence.

I know that these reasons are a little sketchy. I think that these are just the justifications, if you like, for what goes on. The bottom line is that this is a hard choice:
-Does the government have the right to prevent a woman from getting an abortion?
-Is abortion the same as murdering a post-birth child?

Frankly, this is just a topic that is to evenly split. About the same number of people are pro-choice as are pro-life, so a law going one way or the other will upset half of the country. That's too close for the government to say one way or the other.

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A fertilized embryo is not a collection of reproductive cells. It is the union of two sex cells. It has its own DNA

And of course masturbation is not a genocide. The sperm needs an egg to create life. Human cells die everyday, that is not genocide

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Up to 30% of fertilized eggs end in spontaneous abortion by the 12th week. This is a natural process that occurs on a continual basis, and in many instances, women are not even aware that they are pregnant.

So tell me...do these spontaneous abortions have souls? And do tubal pregnancies have souls?

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So why cant the mother also determine if her 2 day old newborn is human?

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Who is making the claim that a million sperm cells are human? They don't feel pain. They will never develop a consciousness. That is not true of a fetus.


Technically speaking, it isn't parasitic, since the fetus performs a function; it allows the mother to reproduce her genes. The relationship is therefore symbiotic, not parasitic.

I am unwilling to take your word for it that the fetus is unaware of anything while in the womb.



On what do you base that assumption? How do you know anyone has a soul at all?


Does that argument work for conjoined twins as well? Which one "owns" the other?




Yes. Because the child has human rights, including the right not to be killed for no reason.


Yes.

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