Unpopular Opinion: I don’t see how abortion can be considered anything other than premeditated murder.

brothersintheimpalaarchive:

Well, it’s pretty simple to understand “how”. The term “premeditated murder” functions on the acceptance of a few premises. Here’s two that are important in this conversation: 

1. It requires that a person is killed

2. It requires that the killing is wrongful

Many pro-choicers would disagree that abortion is premeditated murder because they don’t think either of these clauses applies to a (generally nonviable) fetus.

Not everyone defines life (or perhaps sentient and therefore considerable life) at the same stage of fetal development. Therefore, some pro-choicers would disagree with your labeling because they don’t agree that abortion is the killing of a person. Instead they understand it as the killing of the biological precursors to a person.

And it’s definitely not as simple a situation as a mother who um “premeditates the murder” of her fetus because she has some evil (‘wrongful’ if we’re looking back to the two premises I outlined earlier) ulterior motive. Reasons mothers have for opting for abortion that are arguably better than bringing the baby to term:

1. The baby was a result of rape.

2. Mom knows she won’t be able to provide adequate emotional/financial support for baby. She knows she won’t be able to give baby an even relatively good or healthy life.

3. Mom knows she won’t be able to provide and she doesn’t want to inflict a life of foster homes/homelessness on a child because of the pretty much infinite list of shitty things that are known to happen in the foster system.

4. It is unsafe for the mother to carry the baby to term because of health reasons and doing so would most likely kill her in the process. 

5. The baby is anencephalic or otherwise in almost complete certainty of being unable to function or remain alive outside the womb for any period of time.

Regardless of whether you think these motivations and understandings of abortion are valid or not, you have to accept that if you choose to define abortion as “premeditated murder” and leave no room for any other view, you’re implying that even for the cases in which the child would be unloved/unsupported/brought into poverty/abuse/incapacitating sickness/abandonment/etc… or potentially kill the mother if brought to term, the mother who makes the decision to opt for a more humane/safe option of aborting the fetus should be considered not only a murderer, but one that is thought to have wicked motivations. I feel that this conclusion is fundamentally wrong.