Billy Mays wrote: Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:21 pm
So I'm just going to take the opportunity granted by the lull in notable deaths to assume I won the abortion is obviously murder debate given the lack of opposition here.
Nope, not a chance. "Murder" is generally defined as "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice, or where the proximate cause of the death was the commission of a felony." The latter covers the "felony murder rule," if someone dies as a result of the commission of a felony anyone involved can be charged with capital murder in jurisdictions where the death penalty is in effect or 1st Degree murder where it isn't. If a customer has a heart attack while you're robbing a bank, or the bank manager kills one of the robbers, the manager's killing is justified, but the other members of the crew can be charged with murder.
But that's not what we're dealing with here. The killing of a fetus has never been considered murder until recently. Consider the following: a woman decides to hire a doctor to kill her 3-day-old child. Both of them could be charged with felony murder. But no matter how harsh the punishment is for a doctor performing one, I've never heard of any place wanting to charge the mother with murder for procuring an abortion, in fact every place that has an anti-abortion law exempts the mother from any criminal penalties for procuring an abortion. For a good reason: While committing infanticide clearly is murder, nobody seriously considered abortion to be murder. But that might be changing.
So much for the belief that abortion is murder. At least now, according to
this article in The Guardian, Texas is being consistent, it does want to declare abortion to be murder, thus allowing women who procure abortions to be subject to the death penalty.
As the article points out, even before
Roe v. Wade, abortions were never considered murder. This is a radical departure from hundreds of years of legal precedent, because there weren't even laws against abortions until the 1800s. If we go by original intent as the Founding Fathers had written the Constitution, there should be no laws against abortion since there were none then, and the ability to cause women to have abortions was known since the original Hypocratic Oath was established in the 5th Century B.C.E.
As
this article points out, back in 1992, legislators in Utah were pissed off because the ACLU ran advertisements pointing out under the state's laws, a woman procuring an abortion could be charged with the death penalty and executed by firing squad (unless she chose lethal injection). Pissed off because it was true, and they had to make changes to the law so doctors could only be charged with a felony and women could not be charged at all.
Why? Because you people know in your heart of hearts that abortion is not murder. Your Bible even says forcing a woman to have an abortion is right and good (Numbers 5:11-31), and injuring a woman such that she has to abort her fetus only requires paying compensation to her husband for the value of the property destroyed (Exodus 21:22-25), meaning a fetus is just property, even your God doesn't consider it a 'baby' until it is born.
