I keep seeing this all over the place. Bumper stickers,
wikipedia talk pages, and
web pages made by 12 year olds, and even
pages made by sociopaths seem to tout the message.
Of course, I'm having a hard time understanding the validity of the point or even why people would want to defend it, and it's not coming from a pro-abortion point of view, either. It's a practical thing. If someone says, "Abortion is murder," then there's a fundamental assumption that life begins de-facto at conception. I understand why this point is made; after all, a cell is living, thus, there is life, so ending life would, in essence, be murder. Okay.
My problem is that aside from the practical definition, I find a serious problem with calling it
murder Sure, you're killing an unborn fetus, and I realize that people can have issues with that. However, calling it
murder seems to devalue the connotation of the word. For example:
(continued)Say we put five people/things in a line-up: a cell, a fetus, an 8 year old, an 18 year old, and an 80 year old.
Then, we kill each one sequentially. Which one(s) are most appropriately able to be called
murder?
We
murder cells seasonally— they're called bacteria. We use extremely powerful antibiotic agents to
massacre billions of bacteria in various people around the world— apparently under the presumption that they're less worthy of life than us. So, obviously, saying that we
murder bacteria isn't appropriate.
The fetus we'll come back to.
Without any disagreement almost everyone will agree that killing the 8, 18, and 80 year olds would definitely be
murder. They have life experiences. They make an impact in society and the world. They breathe; they walk; they cry; they love; they laugh. Of course, there is disagreement. We seem to have no problem
murdering an 18 year old who has
murdered someone else (well, some states, at least). But, either way, it seems to me that killing the actual members of society seems like
murder, and we all agree that
murder is generally a bad thing.
So here's my problem: we all already agree that
murder is a bad thing, so why are anti-abortion people trying to frame abortion as murder? Sure, from their point of view, they already equate abortion with murder, but the majority of America disagrees with them, and it's more or less been legal since the 70s. But, therein lies the problem: if the majority thinks that abortion is morally and legally acceptable, then the anti-abortionists are actually doing everyone an injustice by labeling it
murder.
It's simple: we all already agreed that real murder was actually
murder, but the more anti-abortionists try to extend
murder to include non-murder, the very consensus of establishing
murder as homicide being a bad thing could, conceivably be slightly disrupted. I liken it to the progression of other words, like
awesome.
At one point,
awesome meant evoking awe and wonderment at an extraordinary event. Now, it's simply a synonym for
cool. Because the word was over-extended to include non-awesome events, the word itself lost power in conveying its original intent— that something is absolutely amazingly awesome. Notice how I had to use two extra adjectives in the last sentence to truly convey
awesome? It's easy to see something similar happening to
murder.
Capital punishment is an example. It's murder, but it's not
murder murder. It's
okay murder. See?
We started using it as slang, as well: "The actor murdered the original beauty of that song."
We can "scream bloody murder," as well.
When stuck in traffic, some say to themselves, "ugh, this traffic is murder on my patience."
Oh well. Guess we're murdering
murder.
So anyway, call abortion whatever you want, but for the sake of preserving one of the few things we can all agree upon as a society (for the most part), let's keep
murder applied to things it should be: actual people. Blurring the lines of murder isn't a good thing, and
murder isn't a tool for boosting PR for your hopeless cause, because in the end you'll both lose your argument and devalue an extremely important, practical, and clearly distinguishing word.
By the way, the next time someone sends me a picture of a dead fetus in trying to promote their bullshit, I will, as a token of appreciation, be sending back to them graphical pictures of amputated body parts, pictures of dead children from various wars (including the current one), interracial porn, and gay porn. After all, I've gotta promote my pro-abortion, anti-war, anti-racism, pro-gay rights agenda, too, and since they feel that evocative pictures are the most appropriate methods of discourse on controversial topics, I'll be more than happy to oblige.
Oh, and to the anti-abortionists: you lost. Sorry. A hapless turn of events, yes, but shut the fuck up about it already. You're as bad as the anti-evolution motherfuckers— in fact, you hang out around the same water cooler. You have a knack for disrupting societal consensus for belief-based arguments, and it's getting on our nerves. You're like the jesus freak at the party who always murders conversation and incites frustration just to peddle your religious beliefs. Too bad we can't choose to not invite you back, but invariably you'll always find a way to move in down the street from me and stop by uninvited just to do it all over again.
Cheers.
