Capital Punishment For Abortion

Saying that capital punishment for rape applies to all women who rape others is logically contained within calling rape a capital crime, and thus it would be repetitive and unnecessary to clarify this in a society that was truly egalitarian.  However, a host of cultural ideas that contradict this consistency make it necessary to specifically clarify that executing rapists entails executing plenty of women as well as men.  The same is true of saying that capital punishment for murder (in the moral rather than strictly legal sense) applies to those who perform abortions.

If intentionally killing a human outside of self-defense, just warfare, or just forms of capital punishment is murder, then abortion is inevitably a subcategory of murder.  If murder merits capital punishment, as the Bible plainly teaches (Exodus 21:12-14), then it follows that abortion deserves execution--except in cases of medical necessity to save the mother's life [1].  It is therefore impossible for someone who endorses the death penalty for murder to be consistent if they think that the issue of abortion is a wholly separate matter.

This means that, if murder is indeed deserving of capital punishment as the Bible says, it is not oppressive for abortion to be punished in such a manner; it would be just.  While there are pro-life adherents who have realized this, it is still somewhat uncommon for people to openly, directly support the execution of those responsible for administering abortions.  However, legal justice is tied to certain moral offenses, and thus it is rather important to not treat abortion and murder as a whole as something that can be adequately condemned apart from a deserved legal punishment.

Punishing abortion is far from the most important aspect of upholding justice, as there are Biblical crimes far worse than merely snuffing out the life of an innocent human being, even when the motive behind this murder is convenience, selfishness, or philosophical apathy.  That it is not the all-important issue of justice that evangelicals often treat it as does not mean that it is trivial or there is no need to firmly acknowledge it all the same, even though it is a very controversial point.  What abortion is not is a subject of no relevance to ethics.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-exception-to-abortions-immorality.html