Abortion [15 October 2022‪]‬ Not in Vain

Transcript
This transcript:Was machine generated.Has not been checked for errors.May not be entirely accurate.


So, abortion.

I actually wrote an article on this topic back in 2019.

To be clear, I still hold to the conclusions of that article.

The title of that article, Killing Abortionists is Moral, the subtitle, A Threat of Deadly Force Against an Innocent Engenders a Moral Duty to Defend.

You can, of course, find that on my website, coryjmahler.com, I know, very difficult to discern.

But let us step back for a moment here and discuss some fundamental matters.

What is abortion?

Sort of a fundamental issue.

If you are going to discuss something, you should be able to define it.

Now, when it comes to abortion, the term is actually overbroad, because there are two different, not quite different concepts, but two different subtypes under that umbrella term, and they are very different.

It is important to understand that difference.

We'll get to why it's important to understand that difference in a minute here.

But first, the two types.

The two types are spontaneous and elective.

Now, a spontaneous abortion is a miscarriage.

That is the more common term used for what is technically a spontaneous abortion.

And, of course, an elective abortion is what we usually mean when we use the shorthand abortion term.

The reason that it matters, the reason we should be careful in using these terms, is that 1.

Terms matter.

We should use words to mean what they mean, not abuse them, not misuse them, and not mislead people by abusing and misusing terms.

And 2.

The left, they in fact do abuse these terms.

And the reason they do it, of course, is for political ends.

Now, of course, there are also moral ends, in their case, immoral ends, evil ends.

But they abuse these terms by saying that, well, what we, our side, the right, those who are in fact lowercase r, right, what we are doing, they will accuse us of attempting to criminalize spontaneous abortion, which they will call miscarriage, of course, because that is the more common term.

And they are conflating these two senses of abortion, spontaneous abortion on the one hand and elective abortion on the other.

We, of course, are not attempting to criminalize spontaneous abortion.

You cannot criminalize something like that.

Well, yes, I mean, actually you could, but that would be a very stupid thing to do.

It would be like criminalizing sneezing, or something even less voluntary, because you can at least decide, I am not going to sneeze.

You can force yourself not to sneeze.

You can't really stop yourself from having a miscarriage.

And so, no, we're not attempting to criminalize that, because a miscarriage lacks the elements necessary to be a crime.

And that is the next point, because what is abortion?

Ultimately, the answer to the question is that it is murder.

Well, having defined abortion, what is murder?

Because if we call it murder, we have to know what murder means.

Now, for murder, there are, again, two different senses of the term that it is necessary to know.

The first would be murder under the positive law.

And to be clear, the positive law would be laws enacted by men.

So, under our criminal codes and the like, that would be positive law.

And murder under those, I'm going to give a general definition, this is the one that you should use.

Murder is the unlawful killing of one human being by another with malice aforethought.

Now, there are several requirements in this definition.

Of course, it is an unlawful killing, which is to say, of course, that there are lawful killings.

And most saliently is the mens rea requirement, malice aforethought.

Now, what mens rea means simply is guilty mind, because when it comes to a crime, there are typically two components.

The actus reus, which is to say the guilty act, and the mens rea, which is to say the guilty mind, or more commonly called intent.

Now, some will think innately that perhaps murder