The strongest and most passionate Pro-Life advocates want to make me as emotionally horrified by very early term abortion as I am about the murder of a 3 year old. But this is hard to do. There feels something amiss with this emotional appeal. Our moral intuition suggests there is a difference here.
But what is the difference? And how can you talk about the difference, without therefore suggesting that early term abortion is ok?
In this article, Christopher Kazcor spells out some reasons given by Andrew Peach for this moral intuition, while arguing that abortion is still wrong, whether early term or late term:
- A murder by torturous means is worse than a murder by painless means. So an early term abortion, a foetus might not feel pain.
- To fail to meet a moral obligation when it is easy to do is worse due to its laxness. To fail to carry a child to term late in a pregnancy is an 'easier' prospect (all things being equal), since it has already advanced so far.
- The humanity of a fully developed human being is more evident and so intuitively obvious.
- Deliberate immoral action is worse than immoral action taken when in a state of panic.
- The length of the relationship with a person makes a crime against them more severe.
Kazcor concludes:
All intentional killing of innocent human beings violates that right, which all of them enjoy, but killing an embryonic human being and killing an adult human being are not equally wrong in other respects. Killing an innocent adult harms the communities that the person contributed to and makes other adults fear for their own lives. None of these harms is involved in taking unborn human life. Similarly, killing a private citizen and killing a prime minister are equally wrong, because the two have an equal right to live, but killing the prime minister may also harm the economy or social stability and perhaps even prompt retaliation or war.
The common intuition”shared, in general, by advocates and opponents of abortion alike”that late abortion is worse than early abortion seems to undermine the basic equality of all human beings and to help justify early abortion. In fact, it implies no such thing. Circumstantially, no two cases of intentional killing of the innocent are exactly alike. Intrinsically, however, every case is identical, as an act that unjustly deprives the victim of life. That it is worse to kill a human adult than to kill a human being in utero, and worse to kill a child already born than to kill one at the embryonic stage, does not in any way justify the killing of the latter.
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