Not all homicides are the same, and the laws of our country recognize this simple fact.  While different states differ in some particulars, generally murder is the intentional killing of another person, while manslaughter involves the reckless killing of another.  Often state codes will include a category of negligent homicide in various situations as well.  The similarity between them all is that someone is wrongfully dead, but the thing that separates them is the mental state and motivations of the person causing that death.

Of course, there are defenses to criminal homicide of any stripe.  Most commonly, there is an assertion of self-defense.  Recently, there was an example of this from one of my former neighborhoods.  A man who owned a jewelry store was sitting down to watch some television before going to bed.  There was a knock on the door, and when he answered it, he found one of his employees and two of his friends.  They grabbed the man, stuffed him into the back of a waiting car and began driving to his store.  In the process, they threatened his life and threatened to go back and kill his wife and children.  Unfortunately for these thugs, they didn’t search him when they grabbed him and were unaware that he was carrying a pistol.  A few trigger pulls later, two of these kidnappers were dead and the third was severely wounded.

While this individual clearly intended to injure and perhaps kill his kidnappers, charges were never brought against him because his actions were excusable as defense of self and his family under the applicable state law.  These kidnappers were a credible and immediate threat to his life and the lives of his family. The law wouldn’t condemn his actions.

Under the common law, the mental aspect of murder was the presence of malice aforethought.  I’ve always liked this phrase better than the more clinical “intent.”  In sum, the thing that separated murder from manslaughter was simply a question of whether or not the killer intended to kill.  Obviously judges and juries don’t read minds, and so they need to look at the sum of the circumstances to posit the mental state of the accused killer.  Did he prepare ahead of time?  Did she leave evidence that would suggest an intent to kill in advance?  There are likely millions of pages spent on sorting out these issues, but this will suffice for our purposes.

Taking this into consideration, what if the person you kill isn’t considered a person in the full legal sense?  We see unfortunate examples of this in many places in our history.  For many years, certain people in this country were slaves.  They lacked legal standing and were not afforded the protection of laws that protected other human beings who were fortunate enough to not be a slave.  We have seen genocides attempted in Germany, Turkey and various countries of Africa in recent memory, in which the victims of those genocides were deemed to be less than fully human, despite the biological obviousness of their humanity.

And, in our present day, there are millions of human lives killed due to an arbitrary decision by some that a human life isn’t quite a human life simply because that living, sentient and fully human hasn’t been pushed down a birth canal yet.  The proponents of this killing, which occurs on a scale far in excess of anything war or famine has done in this country, have done their best to “other” those people by drawing entirely arbitrary lines based on whether or not they still reside in their mother’s womb or based on how big they are when observed by ultrasound.

I began thinking about this when I came across an article on the ACLU website, entitled “What’s Wrong with Fetal Rights.”  They argue that every effort must be taken to prevent any legal acknowledgement that a “fetus” may have legal rights, as that would inexorably lead to restrictions on the legal ability of a mother to kill their child with impunity.  I use that term purposefully.  The human life snuffed out in any abortion is the child of the mother electing to have that abortion.  It is a horrific act under any circumstances, regardless of the motivation.

If we dehumanize these children using semantics by calling them a fetus rather than a human, for instance, we are playing word games to excuse the homicide that abortion truly is.  If we affirm the reality that an unborn child is by any reasonable estimation a human life, and apply criminal law as currently written, the killing of another with intent is indeed murder.  There are excuses for it, as in self defense in situations in which the mother’s life is truly being imminently threatened by her child, but let’s not pretend that this accounts for even 1% of abortions in this country each year.

Some of my LDS audience will assert that the Church gives permission for abortions in a wide range of circumstances, but let’s look at what the actual statement says.  In the Handbook, we are told that the Church opposes abortion and “counsels its members not to submit to, perform, encourage, pay for, or arrange for such abortions.” In the case of abortions due to maternal self-defense, children that won’t survive beyond birth, rape and incest, the Handbook calls these “possible exceptions” that should be exercised only after counseling with ecclesiastical leaders and seeking guidance through prayer, and that these categories do not “justify abortion automatically.”

And this only makes sense.  Abortion is a killing of another human life; a killing of another person; a homicide.  While there may be some excuses for it, one shouldn’t be looking for excuses to kill one’s own child.