Originally Posted by nighthawk
Barak, that's a conundrum I've worried over since college. Leaving religion aside, preservation of (innocent) life is paramount. Nobody wants to be killed, it's one assault we cannot overcome. So as an individual and as a society preserving life must be a paramount virtue. And bang you're right back to the question of when life begins. Some opine this, some opine that but nobody knows. If preservation of innocent life is truly a paramount virtue we can only say with certainty that it's at conception or sometime after, however conception occurs. Saying life begins sometime after conception is guessing. How comfortable can one be with that? Some propose that life ends when age-related dementia reaches some arbitrary point.

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I'd much rather see abortion dealt with through social stigma than through government action.

Me too, but I can say that about any homicide. I see a somewhat greater role for government (society) than you do. If preservation of human life is a paramount virtue, I believe it is incumbent on society to protect and assist those who cannot do so on their own.

(Yeah, super short version with a lot of holes. Books have been written...)

Yup.

As a Christian, I don't believe preservation of human life is the paramount virtue, of course (and I suspect that if I pushed you hard enough with the right examples you'd decide that it wasn't either, at least not in some cases), but I believe it's pretty darn important.

And, of course, I believe that the phrase "incumbent upon society" dissolves into inconsistency, contradiction, and meaninglessness if you examine it closely enough.

But beyond that, the feature that makes prohibiting abortion qualitatively different from prohibiting other murders is that it's a whole lot easier to prove that a non-abortion murder has taken place than it is to prove that an abortion has taken place. There are measures that can be taken to make it reasonably certain that a prosecutor can prove that a baby has been conceived and aborted (as opposed to miscarried), but all the ones I've heard require massive and appalling usurpations of liberty for huge numbers of women who would never dream of having an abortion.

On the other hand, "Ooh, look, a dead body with forty-three stab wounds! There must have been a murder!" Much easier.

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --Lysander Spooner, 1867