Abortion and Murder

UPDATE:  I just noticed Rick's post on this below.  I agree with Rick that the LAW treats all sorts of homicides differently, but usually not based on the mere identity of the human victim.  (Imagine a law, for example, that classified the killing of very old people as a less serious form of homicide than the killing of someone in the prime of life.)  If anything, we normally think of the killing of the very young and defenseless as a particularly egregious form of murder, not as something worthy of lesser forms of punishment.  All of this points, in my view, in the direction of the conclusion that we do not intuitively view abortion as falling in the same legal category as murder.  Moreover, in addition to the legal distinctions on which Rick focuses, there's the question I address in the body of this post below, i.e., of the moral quality of the act, and the moral and political response it demands from those who equate abortion and murder.

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In a recent post, Kevin Drum (rightly, in my view) takes Ramesh Ponnuru to task for, on the one hand, equating abortion with murder, but, on the other hand, refusing to advocate the sorts of actions that moral assessment would seem to entail.  In an essay that is forthcoming in Commonweal, I make a similar point.  Commenting on an op-ed that Robert George and N.D. law prof. Gerard Bradley wrote for the National Review during the past election, I argue that the simple equation of abortion and murder is an argument that proves way too much. 

According to Ponnuru, “Eight-week-old fetuses do not differ from 10-day-old babies in any way that would justify killing the forme . . . .  The law will either treat the fetus as a human being with a right to be protected from unjust killing or it will not.”  According to George & Bradley, the importance of the death penalty pales in comparison to the "scale of the wrong anything approaching 1.3 million deaths per year by abortion."  They go on to compare the issue of abortion to slavery in the nineteenth century.

I have no doubt that George & Bradley (and Ponnuru) fairly reflect the tenor of authoritative Catholic teaching on abortion.  Here's my problem with this position, though.  (I take it that this is Kevin Drum's objection as well.)  Why don't the actions of those who engage in this heated rhetoric match their words?  The United States fought a war over slavery (among other things) that killed half a million people.  John Brown went to the gallows for attempting an armed abolitionist uprising.  These actions seem justified to  me in light of the gravity of the injustice. But if abortion is murder, then the scale of the injustice being perpetrated on a daily basis in our country alone (not to mention the world) is truly staggering.  Over six million innocent human lives have been intentionally taken in the United States under the Bush presidency alone.  Why does President Bush get a pass for this?  No doubt some will point towards his  rhetoric of life and the limited actions he has taken, which admittedly would not have been taken under a different administration.  But if abortion is mass murder on the scale of a Holocaust every eight years, shouldn't he be doing more?  Where is the sense of urgency?  If abortion is mass murder, the President should be filibustering, refusing to talk about anything else, shutting the federal government down until he gets his way, not taking his eye of the ball and fighting wars in Iraq, negotiating trade agreements, cutting taxes, or making speeches about the problems with social security.  Abortion opponents should be taking to the streets to prevent the ongoing murder.  Catholics are not pacifists, so perhaps armed intervention would be justified.  (In light of the equation to murder, I think it is apt to ask what our faith would require of us were we to have lived in Nazi Germany.  I assume armed resistance would have been morally permitted.)  The destruction of property (e.g., the fire-bombing of abortion clinics at night after delivering a warning to ensure no loss of life) would seem like an easy case.

Of course, I don't think any of this is really justified.  Whatever one thinks of the morality of abortion, I think there is cleary a difference between, say, procuring a first trimester abortion and murdering an adult (or even a newborn infant).  The simple equation of abortion and murder seems to me to obscure the moral complexity of abortion, a complexity that even its most strident (mainstream) opponents acknowledge with their actions and prescriptions, if not their words.  Ponnuru, for example, refuses to endorse the imprisonment of women who seek abortions.  I wonder what he thinks of violent resistance.