[WS:] When I hear passive voice, I extend my middle finger. "Interpreting something differently that it is intended to be defined" invariably means "shut up and go with the program."
A life is a life to its owner, period. This holds for all forms of life. Its "value" is a social convention attached to it by other humans. If you think that taking one life is somewhat more "naturally justified" as taking another - it is you you are obfuscating and fooling yourself that your set of values is natural, whereas other sets are man-made (the Old Man said that somewhere.)
I have no such delusions. I have no doubt that slaughtering a cow, aborting a fetus, euthanizing an ill or elderly person, or executing a convict all involve taking a life, period - no matter how you paper it over. What differentiates these different forms of killing is social conventions that consider them acceptable based on different values these conventions assign to different lives. Thus, in the US it is acceptable to slaughter a cow, abort a fetus or execute a convict, but not to euthanize an ill or elderly person, whereas in the Netherlands it is acceptable to euthanize and abort, but not to execute. In India, slaughtering a cow is not acceptable, but executing a convict is. And so on.
So here we are - on the one hand we believe that taking away a life is wrong, but on the other hand we know it is inevitable under certain circumstances. All we can do in this situation is to collectively decide under what circumstances it is legit and under which it is not.
There is no other way out. All the suppositions of natural laws and norms disguised by semantic contraptions, such as but not limited to passive voice - are delusions that our social norms and value are "natural" or "god-given" whereas all other are man-made.
Unlike you, I believe that there are people on the anti-abortion side who are genuinely concerned about this form of taking a life. True, there are also shysters and demagogues who exploit these feelings for a political gain, but that is also true of death penalty opponents, supporters of euthanasia, environmentalist, or vegetarians. But disregarding these genuine concerns on the grounds that there might be some fraudsters among them strikes me as a really bad case of thought policing, stalinism, and toeing the party line. The best we can do in this situation is to understand each other's views, acknowledge differences, and agree to disagree. I have no illusion that eating meat, aborting a fetus, and euthanizing an elderly person involves taking a life, but I am also determined to protect or establish social conventions or policies that justify these forms of taking a life under certain circumstances.
Ditto for death penalty - my problem with it is not that it takes a life or concedes some right to the state - for taking a life or giving rights to the state can be justified under certain circumstances - but that it is currently applied too wantonly and inequitably or for the sake of political expediency. To put it differently, the subject to debate is not the absolute prohibition on taking a life but rather conditions under which this is justified. Where I stand, a woman's wish to terminate her pregnancy or a person's wish to shorten his/her significant other's suffering are sufficient conditions to justify abortion or euthanasia, but shooting a cop does not necessarily justify death penalty. I also know that others disagree - not necessarily because they are crooks, demagogues, or idiots, but because they happen to follow a different set of social conventions aka morality. I think it is a much healthier attitude than searching for absolutes and forcing them down the throats of others.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."