Is abortion murder?

ABORTION: A philosophical conundrum

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READ TIME: Approx. 11 minutes.

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KEY POINTS:

• Anti-abortion activists regularly claim that abortion is murder;

• There are multiple perspectives to take into consideration when it comes to abortion being equal to murder;

• Murder is defined as “the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person”;

• Abortion being comparable to murder is deeply entrenched in one’s own personal views on the matter.

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Is abortion murder?

Photo by Valeriia Svietlova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-sonogram-11837653/

When it comes down to reasons to be against abortion, opponents regularly and loudly declare that abortion is murder. However, is this true? To better understand this question, we need to ask a few different questions.

For one, what is murder? How does murder relate to abortion, if at all, in the typical religious American view? How does murder relate to abortion, if at all, in American law? Finally, how does murder relate to abortion, if at all, from a scientific perspective?

Defining ‘murder’

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term ‘murder’ as “the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person.”

With this term, we can begin to understand a few different things about what it means to commit “murder.” For one, it is defined specifically as a “crime.” Immediately, we begin to understand that “murder” is a term that is intrinsically connected to the law. In order to commit murder, according to the definition, a person must be killed under two specific circumstances. The killing must be both unlawful and unjustifiable.

So, now that we have an understanding for the term “murder,” we can start our understanding of how it relates to abortion in a few different perspectives: The religious perspective, the legal perspective, and the scientific perspective. The reason we are looking at these three perspectives is for a few reasons. For one, of these three perspectives, everyone is going to put more importance on one of them than the other and that’s going to be different for each person. Secondly, religion, science, and politics influence our ideas and our perspectives everyday. All three of these are powerful enforcers that guide people on a number of issues all the time. Finally, how murder and abortion relate differs upon each perspective and most people simply say abortion is murder or that it is not murder based on their own biases without thinking about the connections and the disconnections too deeply, despite the deep, philosophical ideas that can be arrived to from thinking about this issue in a more critical context.