Because women who seek abortions usually have much more sympathetic motivations, and because, if we're being honest about what sorts of laws a decent society would or should actually tolerate, punishing them is simply impracticable to do in any way that's subjectively reasonable.
I guess, but I still think the people who want to ban abortion but don't want to punish the women should not call abortion murder if they don't intend to punish the woman. It's hypocritical. Why call it murder if you don't intend to treat it like murder?
You're right, actually. This is a good reason to prefer a word like 'homicide'. There are all sorts of types of homicide with all sorts of types of consequences. Unfortunately, 'abortion is homicide' comes across as the sort of technical statement that makes most people's eyes glaze over and makes for terrible copy.
Placing you to the right of Thomas Aquinas there
(who would have considered it ‘something less than homicide’)
Ultimately Christian religious objection to abortion is increasingly pseudo-scientific in nature, not religious. Original Christian thinkers made very obvious distinctions, and rather advanced arguments of that distinction between the ‘formed’ and ‘unformed’ foetus (in part because the Bible is peppered with such inferences) Their positions, extrapolated to fit the framework of embryonic development of which we are now aware, are not particularly far removed from the contemporary general position of pro-choicers. As with everything however, the Church shat the bed a few centuries later and we are all having to pay for it.
Like many issues (LGBT matters being another obvious out) we have to deal with religious groups 'opinion forming' without reference to or input from the actual groups affected. What women or gays, think, feel, experience or want is a 'nuisance' to position forming.
For what it’s worth I’ve been pro-choice since I first gave the issue any thought (And I suppose I’ve never shared this before, but taking the position almost got me suspended from the Catholic school I attended but for the fact 14 year old me was able to argue effectively enough with the priest headmaster that he was impressed enough that I had actually put effort into it)
If anything, as a pro-choicer we have to wrestle the ‘ontology’ away from pro-lifers who are setting definitions against which we are measured and by which ‘life’ is defined. For many women, pregnancy is a ‘state’ which they do not wish to be in. Psychologically there is no ‘child’. They are in a state of a psychological and somatic state of which they wish to be relieved. As I argued with you at the start of the year, in opposing abortion by choosing an a priori definition under which to then bar it may satisfy
your theological or moral needs, that does nothing to address
her needs. Which are very real. There are women, right now who are pregnant. And it is hell for them. In are accepting that a woman has no right to take any action against the physical or psychological harm caused by pregnancy, then you do not have a response to the harm which she is experiencing because you see it as ‘less’ than that which could be experienced by the unborn (which I had suggested was curiously utilitarian of you)
Luckily, with the courts (in the US) there has been a move (in part thanks to the frequent pithy challenges to the law) towards seeing abortion rights as more of an equality over a liberty matter, which addresses this head on; on what assumptions is state intervention in protecting ‘potential’ life based? Are they seeking to protect the unborn in ways it would not do so, but for patriarchal/religious assumptions about women’s roles. Assumptions are being made about how woman
should respond to pregnancy, when most terminations occur not on the a priori assumption that in doing so women are consciously rejecting the process, but rather as I mentioned above, that their actions are in response to the state of pregnancy that they are in. What’s helpful to the pro-choice movement is that the anti-choice movement are, generally speaking, so fixed on liberty, as expressed in Roe, that their arguments against equal protection are embryonic at best.
