Posted on 03/10/2003 7:09:54 PM PST by Coleus
Friday, February 7, 12:15am
By Dave Thomas
New Set of Murder Charges Stir Abortion Rights Issue
The Luzerne County District Attorney says the law treats killing an unborn child the same as killing an adult. That's why he charged a Luzerne County man yesterday with two murder charges: One for his girlfriend and one for her unborn baby.
Twenty-six year old Matthew Bullock admitted to Wilkes-Barre Police he killed his girlfriend on New Year's Day. But his girlfriend, 33-year-old Lisa Hargrave, was pregnant. So he's charged with killing the unborn baby too.
The fetal homicide charge is the first of its kind in Luzerne County and one of a few in Pennsylvania since the law passed in 1999.
The Unborn Child Law is considered controversial by some. The way the state defines a life is the same way anti-abortion protestors define a life. Luzerne County District Attorney Dave Lupas say, "This is not an abortion issue. The statute is a statute that deals with crimes against unborn children and it defines an unborn child as beginning at the time of fertilization."
But, that definition is why pro-life protestors have argued for years. In their opinion, life begins at conception. Courts have upheld abortion as legal, because they say it's the mother's right to choose whether to abort her pregnancy and doesn't define when life begins.
The Pennsylvania Crimes Against the Unborn Child Act states abortion is a separate issue, but the law is open to interpretation because it deals with the life of an unborn child. Many of the law's supporters are also pro-life supporters and they say anytime the law is upheld in court, it's a victory for them.
Joseph Casciano is a Catholic pro-life advocate and executive director of Parish Ministries for the Scranton Diocese. He says, "Certainly it is for us an important stand because there's recognition of life and not just something other than life. So, yes for us it's a very important message, that's it's a life."
On the other side are the pro-choice supporters. Lorraine Pierotti of Planned Parenthood of Northeast Pennsylvania told us on the phone, "It's a tragedy that this woman was killed and carrying a child, but this law should not give person-hood status to the fetus. Abortion is a separate issue." That's the way D.A. Lupas approaches it. He's using the law in an attempt to get two life sentences: One for the death of a woman and one for the death of her unborn child.
State Homicide Laws That Recognize Unborn Victims
The Moral Question of Abortion
To substantiate the thesis that abortion is murder, some points of clarification are in order. First, murder is the intentional killing of an innocent person. Not all causing of death of innocent persons is intentional, thus murder. Suppose I'm driving a school bus with twenty-nine children, on a treacherous mountain road, going down a steep incline. The brakes fail, and the bus is about to plunge down the abyss and kill all thirty of us. The only way I can avoid this catastrophe is by quickly veering sharply to one side. Unfortunately a person is walking there, and I will hit him, causing his death. It is too late to warn him. If I veer the bus sharply to the side, I cause his death, tragically. But I do not kill him intentionally. And so I do not commit murder.
Second, murder is the intentional killing of an innocent person. If the only way I can defend myself, or another, from a murderous attacker is by killing him, I kill in defense, which is not murder. Innocent in this context means non-aggressor; it does not imply lack of moral guilt in other matters (though that is in fact the case with regard to the child in the womb).
Both of these, intentional killing and killing an innocent person, clearly apply to abortion. The child is absolutely innocent. He is not an attacker. He is in his natural place. Abortion is the deliberate and intentional killing of this innocent person.
Third, it is important to distinguish clearly between murder as applying to actions, and as applying to persons, making them guilty, or murderers. Thus, to say that abortion is murder is to classify the action of killing an innocent preborn child as murder, it does not make a judgment about the personal guilt on the part of the woman, the doctor, and those who assist. In saying, quite generally, that A's killing of B is murder, the action is characterized as murder - as opposed to justified killing (e.g., self-defense), or unjustified killing, which is nonetheless not murder (e.g., a soldier who kills in an unjust war). In characterizing the action as murder, the question remains whether the moral guilt of the agent is that of a murderer. It may or may not be, due to extenuating circumstances. A person who is terribly frightened may shoot someone in desperation. The act is murder, the person is less guilty than someone who kills intentionally without being frightened. Thus, two people may perform what is morally the same act (e.g., killing someone to get him out of the way), but one is more guilty than the other. The first may realize with full clarity the wrongness of the action; the second may be in a confused state of mind, half realizing it is wrong, half trying to justify to himself that it is right, or not so bad. The first may act entirely on his own initiative; the second may be under strong pressure to do the killing. Clearly such differences among agents are to be found in the practice of abortion. Therefore, to say that abortion is murder is to say that the action of killing a child in the womb is murder, just as any other intentional killing of an innocent person is murder.
Does a doctor who performs an abortion in order to benefit the woman commit murder if his motive is to help her? Is this not a good motive? How then can the action be murder? 13
In Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov kills an old woman so that he can distribute her money to the poor. Good motive? Perhaps. But the fact that he intentionally kills an innocent person makes it murder, good motive or not. To point to a good motive is to refer to the end; the means are murder nonetheless. If I kill an innocent person for you in order to get him out of the way and thereby save you serious hardship, I may be motivated by good intentions, but my action is still murder. This is exactly what happens in the case of a doctor who performs an abortion: good motives or not, he commits murder.14
Does a woman who has an abortion commit murder? Some women are literally coerced into their abortions and are of course entirely innocent of murder. Some women decide voluntarily and then later deeply regret their abortions, exclaiming in some cases, "I have murdered my baby!."15 They feel they have committed murder. The action is murder; were they guilty as persons? There are many factors that can mitigate or remove guilt, such as ignorance of what abortion is and altruistic motives; for example, "I would rather abort than cause my parents shame." To a large extent, women are the second victims of abortion, often pressured into it by others, wanting to keep their babies but agreeing to an abortion only because they see no realistic alternative.16
Whatever the status of the doctor's motives, and the woman's motives and circumstances, the action of abortion, as the deliberate killing of a small child, is murder.
Fourth, in saying that abortion is murder, we speak of such an act in the moral, not the legal, sense. Whether a given act of intentionally killing an innocent person is legally murder or not depends of course on the status of the law. Where such killing is allowed under the law it is, of course, not murder in the legal sense. Thus the Nazi extermination process was not legally murder, but it was obviously murder in the sense that is really important, the moral sense. The Nazi extermination program was the mass killing of innocent persons who could not defend themselves, who were in some respects different or seen as different, in order to get them out of the way - a perfect description of abortion today.
That something is allowed by law, or even mandated by it, does not settle the moral question. Intentionally killing an innocent person, at whatever age, and in whatever locatio s morally an act of murder. No law can alter that fact.
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.
this law should not give person-hood status to the fetus
O.K. call it an EAGLE egg, and execute the murderer.
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