Is Abortion Murder?

United States federal law does not go into that. Abortion is legal in this country, and the action qualifies as abortion rather than murder so long as the fetus has not been legally transformed into a person by virtue of having been born.

The various states have their own laws about abortion, and some do indeed prohibit the procedure if the fetus has reached some sort of milestone. That is usually an arbitrary number of weeks after conception. Perhaps one of the states, instead, defines it as the point at which a heartbeat can be detected, but that would be rather difficult to enforce in actual practice since, obviously, there will be no heartbeat after the abortion has been performed. The law would have to require the surgeon not only to check for a heartbeat, but to record it and retain the recording--with a time/date stamp, of course.

I have, happily, never lived in one of the Redneck states that treat their women like second-class citizens--now that they're required by federal law to treat Afro-Americans as first-class citizens. So I have no personal knowledge of their abortion laws and the way they enforce them.

 

Not content with terrorising adults, pro-lifer terrorists have now taken to targeting and terrorising small children.

On the morning of Nov. 16, elementary school students arriving at Two Rivers Public Charter School were greeted by a banner that read "They kill babies nearby! Tell your parents to stop them," allegedly held by a man who spent five years in prison for possessing a pipe bomb he planned to use to blow up an abortion clinic.

Now Two Rivers seeks an injunction to prevent the group of anti-abortion protestors, who object to a Planned Parenthood clinic set to be opened next year nearby, from staging their demonstrations outside the school, according to a complaint filed in Washington D.C. Superior Court Wednesday.

[...]

The first protest the school mentions in its 30-page complaint occurred on Aug. 27, during parent-student-teacher conferences. That morning three people set up large posters with pictures of dismembered fetuses on them, positioned so students and parents had to pass them before entering the school, the school claims in the complaint.

Lauren Handy, one of the five protestors named as defendants in the suit, shouted at students -- some of whom are as young as three -- and parents who were entering the elementary school, according to the complaint.

"Tell your parents that you don't want to go to school next to a baby-killing center," Handy allegedly yelled at students and parents entering the school.

On Nov. 1, Jonathan Darnel, another protestor named in the complaint, sent an email to nine Two Rivers officials urging them to stop the Planned Parenthood construction by citing nine disturbances the clinic would bring with it, according to the complaint.

The email warned Two Rivers administrators of people "you wouldn't want your students interacting with" walking to the clinic; potential violence between "abortion-minded women" and their significant others; Planned Parenthood's "overtures" to middle-schoolers in order to "hook them on the perverse sexual lifestyle that they promote;" and the "loud" protests of anti-abortion sidewalk counselors trying to talk women out of abortions, according to the complaint.

At the end of the message Darnel insisted if the school didn't respond he would "feel a moral obligation to alert the community (including the parents of your students) [himself]," the complaint says.

"I'm sure you don't want to see me, my anti-abortion friends and our graphic images any more than we want to be in your neighborhood," Darnel wrote in bold type in his email, which is reproduced in the complaint.

Two weeks later Darnel, Handy, a man named Robert Weiler Jr. and another unidentified person were back outside the school holding the sign near the student drop-off lane, the school says. The group constant moved around the school to thwart Two Rivers' attempts to shuttle students around the protests, according to the complaint.

Weiler was sentenced in 2006 to five years in prison after he was caught with a pipe bomb and a gun he intended to use to attack an abortion clinic in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland. He was released in 2011, but was arrested again in 2014 outside the same facility, according to the complaint.

The school says that at another protest, Larry Cirigano -- also a named defendant in the suit -- stood near the entrance of the middle school holding a sign with a picture of a bloody aborted fetus. Darnell shouted at students entering the school, "They are going to murder kids right next door if your parents don't do something about it," according to the complaint.

Two Rivers claims the protests and others planned for the coming months have caused irreparable harm to the school and its students. Some children have reported feeling "upset and sick," sometimes opting to stay away from the school, according to the complaint.

"One student was so upset by this incident that he began to feel sick and had to go home," the complaint says. "He was only able to return to school the next day with the promise that the school counselor would meet him at the front door."​