How should we regard a forced abortion of a pro-life womans fetus?
This happens, of course, in China every day. It also happens occasionally in the United States–there have been several cases reported of husbands or boyfriends who in effect force a woman to have an abortion, either by coercing her to go to the clinic (these cases are perhaps not so rare), or by attacking her directly. For example, one jealous husband, after he found out that his wife was pregnant by another man, tracked her down when she was in her 7th month, and violently reached up into her uterus and caused a fatal miscarriage. Another man beat a pregnant woman on the belly with a baseball bat to kill the unborn child. (These cases are grotesque, but what an abortionist does differs only in manner, not in end.) Should such men be prosecuted for murder? If the law concerning abortion should be designed so that “everyone can act in accordance with one’s own beliefs”, then presumably just as the law lets some people procure an abortion, because their beliefs allow it, so it should le
