Inexcusable Foreshadowed

[dukealien]

@busker - Thanks for the read.  You make, perhaps unintentionally, my point here - that we are now moved, inescapably, back to making actual moral arguments instead of pretending some fifty year-old legalese mumbo-jumbo could take their place and make them unnecessary.  What the leaked document did was dissipate the pseudo-legal smokescreen: it does not pretend to moral judgements, which must properly be made by the citizens on a delegated, i.e. representative basis rather than by appointed justices acting ultra vires (or would it be ultra viribus?)  The moral choice is stark again, and it must now be made instead of funked.

I regard the argument that onanism is murder if abortion is murder to be a straw man at best.  Women also involuntarily expel ova, though on a more regular basis than wet dreams.  The maximalist anti-abortion position is that life begins at conception, i.e. when the ovum is fertilized.  This results from an intentional act (though that may not be what the act intends - "90% of people are caused by accidents," as the saying goes).  But that doesn't detract from the humanity of the fertilized ovum, or the consequent responsibility of his/her parents for it, or even the responsibility of others to avoid harming him/her before it's brought to term.  The Hippocratic Oath recognizes this responsibility; an abortionist is no doctor.