You don’t have to kill him to assure that he never murders another baby. Perhaps removing his thumbs or even his hands would do the trick.
I have slowly, but surely come to oppose capital punishment on the ground that the governments that are imposing it lack the moral authority to do so since 1973.
Murderers murder. It is what they are, it is what they do. Anyone who would butcher thousands of the most innocent cannot be trusted to continue to breathe oxygen with the rest of us. Such a person is capable of the grossest, greatest crimes, not just against small, unborn babies. Denied the capacity to express their satanic desires through the infamy of killing babies, it is difficult to predict what enormity they might commit.
That's why I talk about “internal restraint.” Prison is a form of external restraint. Chopping off folks’ thumbs (are we now permitted to mutilate - a mortal sin by Catholic reckoning - to avoid that to which the state has a right, execution?) is a form of external restraint.
The goal is to find the needed balance between internal and external restraint to prevent the offender from re-offending, or from committing even more gross crimes. Those with a great deal of internal restraint will need little external restraint to keep from committing more crimes, especially crimes of violence. This is why what has been done with someone like Bernie Madoff is immoral, sending him to a maximum security prison. The likelihood that Mr. Madoff needs the physical restraints inherent in a maximum security prison to keep from re-offending is vanishingly low. Any “club fed” sort of facility would have done the job.
But for folks who commit many murders, their level of internal restraint is small, perhaps non-existent. In fact, many of these human beings actually derive sexual pleasure from committing heinous murder, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that any long-time abortionist has perverted himself in that way. Thus, far from restraint, these humans are driven to murder by their diseased spirits and depraved minds. And the problem is that it isn't ordinarily possible to rely on purely external restraint. Given a person in possession of his physical and mental faculties, if he has no internal restraint whatsoever from committing murder, he'll find a way. Even if it's only another prisoner, or a prison guard or visitor.
I've read about the lengths that hardened murderers go through to commit murder even in the tightest super-max prisons. Also, these sorts of folks are inclined to attempt escapes, and sometimes they succeed. And kill again.
Real-world example: Ted Bundy murdered roughly 50 folks and was sentenced to prison. Even though he had only a short while to serve on his sentence, and even though he was likely to be acquitted of another murder for which he was being tried, he escaped. He killed three more people and mutilated a number of others. Even the promise of likely release and freedom did not keep him from escaping and doing what he did, being what he was - a murderer who murdered.
Then, they caught him and executed him. Since his execution, he has directly brought to physical harm not a single person. He has murdered no other people.
As to the moral authority of the government, sorry, but if St. Paul viewed the Roman government has having the authority of the sword, I don't see where our governments don't. Our society may be degraded and degenerate, but the Romans by the time of St. Paul were pretty bad, too.
Every baby butcher should be executed, for no other reason than to make the world safer for the rest of us guilty of less-bloody, more pedestrian crimes.
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