Do you or do you not have the right to expel the tresspasser (and to use lethal force if the intruder refuses to comply)? What is different when someone is tresspassing on your body?
And you still refuse to answer the question, Aaron. What is the penalty do you propose for this act of pre-mediated murder? Death? Be very careful with your answer, because, throughout history, juries have refused to convict women for infanticide. Never mind abortion.
I certainly don't have the right to kill someone on my land who's there through no fault of her own, and if I do, it's not outside the government's jurisdiction because it happened inside what I own. It happened to someone I don't own, and that's the key issue. (Or, rather, I did it to someone I don't own, and would therefore deserve punishment.Do you or do you not have the right to expel the tresspasser (and to use lethal force if the intruder refuses to comply)? What is different when someone is tresspassing on your body?
Is the foetus a trespasser in the womb?
Hasn't he/she been invited into the womb by an explicit act of the possessor of that womb?
In the vast majority of cases, does not the possessor of the womb in question know that by performing said act, she is explicitly inviting a foetus to take up residence in her womb (for a period of time known beforehand to be approximately nine months)?
Does not the possessor of the womb know, and is she not responsible for the actions of her body, which, after she has invited the foetus to take up residence within her, begins an explicit process of nourishing and sustaining the foetus during its nine month sojourn, which is designed to culminate in the the safe passage of the fully mature foetus from her body to the outside world?
Is not abortion the reneging upon of a contract (agreement) made by the woman and her body to house and sustain the foetus for a nine-month period?
Isn't this analogous to the implicit contract society presumes is made between parents and their BORN children, such that parents have the ultimate responsibility for providing for and developing their children until such time (legally 18 years) as those children assume responsibility for sustaining themselves?
I deny that "tresspasser" is a term applicable to a baby in the womb. At what point is the tresspass committed, before or after he's in his mother's body? It can't be either, because either he doesn't exist yet, or he's already there. Since you've already called abortion murder, you can't compare it to forcing an intruder off my land. The only comparison would be to another act of murder, say, poisoning someone I had invited to dinner or killing someone who had come to my door to ask to use the phone because his car broke down, or otherwise killing someone without justification who was inside my property because of no wrongdoing on his part. If murder should still be punished even though it happens inside my property, I see no philosophical difference between one type of property and another.
And you still refuse to answer the question, Aaron. What is the penalty do you propose for this act of pre-mediated murder? Death? Be very careful with your answer, because, throughout history, juries have refused to convict women for infanticide. Never mind abortion.
As OP has pointed out, the mother isn't necessarily at fault, while the abortionist always is. It would also be hard to get enough proof for a conviction, and I can live with that. Any attempt to fully enforce any law would lead to totalitarianism. We've accepted the compromises and limits of the common law procedure in the interest of liberty and avoiding false convictions in the case of other crimes, so I see no reason we can't do the same with abortion.
That said, the answer to your specific question is, any penalty up to and including death, in the worst case scenario. Now, prosecutors might want to go for a lesser penalty, for the very reason you stated, but that's a prudential decision for them to make.