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Abortion Isn’t Murder

And it’s asinine to say it is

Amber Fraley
4 min readSep 11, 2023
Photo by Amr Taha™ on Unsplash

One of the most frustrating arguments (to me anyway) in the arsenal of the forced-birther is their assertation that abortion is murder. To me, and people who think the way I do, this is nonsense on its face, and not even worth debating. Unfortunately, we’re being forced to debate this lunacy, because we are living in a very dumb time.

Our legal definition of murder in the US explicitly excludes abortion as murder, so forced birthers prefer to cite the dictionary definition: the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person.

Sane people know an embryo/fetus isn’t a person. This was not even a debate for thousands of years. In fact, our Constitution explicitly states that citizens of the United States of America are born.

But forced birthers figure the key to a national ban on abortion is to make embryos and fetuses legal people. For instance, the “prolife” organization Focus on the Family claims an embryo is an “individual” because it has its own DNA. In fact, unique DNA is an argument many forced birthers use as some sort of justification for requiring a girl/woman/trans man to remain pregnant and give birth.

But a zygote, embryo or fetus is literally, physically most decidedly not an individual. Individual means “one.” Singular. Existing as a

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Amber Fraley
Amber Fraley

Written by Amber Fraley

Writing about abortion rights, mental illness, trauma, narcissistic abuse & survival, politics. Journalist, novelist, wife, mom, Kansan, repro rights activist.

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