Aborting children

I am reminded that an aborted baby may be a child.  It may be a child. Killing is not itself a fundamental prohibition of my ethics. I kill flies and mosquitoes, kill a chicken when it is ready to eat, am willing to go to war and kill others for my country, even if I disagree with much of what it stands for, believe in the right of people to end their own lives, and even in limited situations endorse the execution of vile criminals.

In short no ethical rule is absolute. It must be judged in the broader context. There are a couple of factors when there is a pregnant woman not wanting the child. Which does the most harm -- forcing the birth anyway and having an unwanted child grow up miserable, ill treated and ending up a criminal, or allowing the abortion? What if the reason is that the pregnancy was from a rape? Again, the mother does not want and will detest the child.

Adoption is not a good solution, as study after study has shown, for such children. The genetic nature of the parents will tell out, regardless of how loving the adoptive parents may be, and these children rarely actually get adopted by good families.

In short, it is never simple. Compassion and asking yourself what is for the best has to be looked at, and government is not capable of such flexibility. As far as I can tell only the mother is best placed, hopefully with loving and not inflexible, ideological, counsel, to make such a decision.

None of this should be distorted to assert that in general I favor murder.  Only specific and very limited situations that I don't think most people would define as murder.  Certainly the harm that happens to a person when they did vastly exceeds any harm that might happen were they to go on living.