Essay, Research Paper: Abortion Is Murder, By David Jones

ABORTION IS MURDER

Suppose a person intentionally kills another adult. The victim was innocent, and not the agressor. That would surely be murder. Size, age, color, race or creed are irrelevant here. If it was an infant, a baby not yet born, but about to be born. The child still had a month or two to go before birth. If it is murder at a late stage of development, it is also murder at an early stage. Being a child or an adult is no different. Merely being in another place (the womb), and smaller, cannot take away the reality of murder. Abortion is the killing of an innocent human being: murder.

The moral question of abortion focuses on the some of the following: What is the nature of the being in the womb that is destroyed by an abortion? Is it mere tissue? Is it part of the woman's body? Is it something that will become a child? Or is it already a child, a small baby not yet born? Scientific findings and careful philosophical analysis thereby show that what lives in the womb is a real child, a small person, a human being essentially like us, in the first phase of his or her existence. So by reflecting on these matters we reveal an elementary point: The child who is born and later grows into an adult is the very same being who before birth was in his mother's womb. He is a person later, he is a person earlier, the very same person. This is the continuum of human life.

There must be an overriding, justifying reason for causing the pain that the unborn child suffers from. A woman wants to end an unwanted pregnancy in a typical abortion situation. Is this a sufficient reason for the grueling process of cutting a child to pieces, or subjecting him or her to more than an hour of burning? Pain should not be inflicted on the child and there is a alternative, birth. Killing the child is simply evil. Causing the child, unborn or born pain adds to the horror. The functioning neurological structures necessary for pain are in place between eight and thirteen and a half weeks, the brain configuration is already like the adult brain and brain waves have been noted at six weeks and most importantly, after the eighth week no further development will form. Everything is already present that will be found in a full term baby. If a full term baby can feel pain, then it is reasonable to infer that a baby that is essentially like him or her, one in whom everything is already present that will be found in the full-term baby, must also feel pain the child is destroyed by the violence of abortion.

Considering everything we have seen so far, the pre-born child should definitely be given legal protection. The child in the womb is a person, one of us; he should be given the same legal protection we have. Killing him is murder and all murder should be outlawed. To do that, it would make abortion illegal, a criminal offence. Allowing abortion is a form of discrimination. In allowing abortion the law is saying to a class of persons:" Your too small, too dependant, not sufficiently developed. We can't see you; you're not in an environment like the rest of us. So you don't count. While it is a criminal offence to kill other persons, it is all right to kill you." Blacks were treated as non-persons because they had the "wrong" skin color; the pre-born are treated as non-persons because they have the "wrong" size, location, level of development, etc. The differences are morally irrelevant. Legalized abortion is a form of slavery. The essence of slavery is that a person is treated as a thing, in the sense of being "owned," as if he were a car or a house. They are used or disposed of at will, In the case of black slavery, slaves were used or disposed of at will. The blacks were used as slaves, in the case of abortion the child is disposed of at will. No one, not even the mother has the right to treat any unborn as a thing and determine his or hers fate. But the law allows this and puts it's blessing on it by making it legal, it is an additional horror.

Finally, it is important to stress the point that abortion is murder. Otherwise one may have the impression that abortion, though wrong, though it is the taking of a human life, is somehow less wrong than ordinary murder. It is not. It is the same thing, morally, as the deliberate killing of a born innocent person.