Abortion. Is it justified?

It is an obscene practice but entirely necessary at times.
It is justifiable in self-defence.

Abortion is the taking of a human life. That's murder. If the authorities wont do anything about a doctor specializing in murder someone else has to.
Atheists are happy to justify murder of children and old people. They lack any morality yet they invent nice names for themselves, "humanists".
There is nothing human about you.

OUCH!! that hurt.

It is justifiable homicide, Mary, it is not murder.

Mary and carusmm,
Abortion of the foetus in the early stage is not murder, nor is it homicide.
(homicide is defined as the deliberate killing of a human being.)
Australian law and in most states, American law does not regard the killing of a foetus as the killing of a human being.
When the foetus consists of a group of cells there is the obvious potential to become a human but that is different from being human.
Mary appears to be a Catholic and shows signs of the absolutist type of thinking which goes with Catholic dogma.
That church likes to define human life as beginning at conception.
When it actually begins is a philosophic question and the answer isn't clear, but few outside the Catholic Church would use the definition they do.
What it means to be human is a matter for great debate. Becoming human is something we could consider to be a process rather than a single one time event.
For example, Mary has just told us all there is nothing human about us. (Yes, it is contradictory, but that is Mary.)
Doesn't the love of parents, the socialization, the education and the great wealth of experience we each develop make us human and doesn't the lack of these things leave us less human or even less than human?

The ideal is to have good quality family planning and contraception and the Catholics and Muslims in particular oppose that.
Then they oppose abortion even in the early stages of pregnancy.
The result is unwanted children.
The family may accept them graciously or grudgingly depending on what kind of people they are.
In many third world countries and even in Australia sometimes those kids are soon on the street.
They can't get jobs. They are not educated. They may become criminals. Some try to get to less populated countries.
All because of crazy, religious ideas.

Mary's comment perfectly encapsulates the hypocrisy of absolutist religious thought. She decries abortions as murder, then goes on to endorse the killing of doctors who perform them.

And still I expect she wonders why no-one takes her seriously.

siliboi9 you say of a human embryo "When it (being human) actually begins is a philosophic question and the answer isn't clear".

Yet you have no such hesitation about defining the answer to that question when you have said "When the foetus consists of a group of cells there is the obvious potential to become a human but that is different from being human".

I wouldn't dare to assume to know, or to proffer, an opinion regarding when human life begins, but I just want to say that all the arrogant criticism of Mary becomes null and void when her opinion is just as valid as those pretending to know better, when it is obvious they do not.

Mary's "opinion is just as valid as those pretending to know better,"
Carlos an opinion that justifies murder is not as valid as the other opinions stated here.
Do you share her other opinion that a foetus is a human?
Doesn't the acquisition of human culture count for anything in the humanizing process?

siliboi9, I was not striving for a legal definition of abortion but bearing an analogy to the law.

What has been said after you is relevant to the abortion question but people find it hard to address the question directly. The question of abortion is solved by saying that a child is not human until a citizen. Aristotle's formulation that a child is not human until it smiles is not useful though cute.

siliboi9, what you say about experience is completely correct, however it complicates the question to no end. I prefer to act the conqueror. But it doesn't help somehow. As you said somewhere, not precisely, Shereen, what is freedom? I am capable of choosing another course, yet then I would not be what I am if I chose it. I could not love myself, in fact I think that I would be incapable of love entirely. It is a great sorrow. But what is my conscience to the safety of women? As my sister would say, Suck it up, baby.

'Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.'
Jean-Paul Sartre

I am good, damn good in a righteous sort of way.