Is abortion considered murder?
This fact-check may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information.
Executive summary
Abortion is not categorically treated as murder across law, medicine, or most secular legal systems today: murder, by legal definition, requires the killing of a person with malice aforethought, and most jurisdictions do not define all abortions that way [1]. At the same time, a powerful moral and political movement insists abortion is equivalent to murder and is pressing state laws and prosecutors to treat it as homicide, creating real legal uncertainty in parts of the United States [2] [3] [4].
1. Legal definitions: why “murder” is a narrow term and usually not applied to abortions
Under modern criminal law murder is a specific category—typically “the killing of a person with malice aforethought”—so whether any act counts as murder depends first on whether the law recognizes the fetus as a legal “person,” a threshold most jurisdictions historically and currently treat differently than born persons [1] [5]. In the United States federal and state criminal codes generally distinguish between unlawful killing of a person and other bans or regulatory frameworks for abortion, and many analyses point out that legal murder requires elements—personhood, unlawfulness, and culpable mental state—that routine, lawful abortions do not meet [1] [6].
2. Political pressure and new state efforts to reclassify abortion as homicide
Since the post-Dobbs landscape legislators in multiple states have proposed bills that would classify embryos and fetuses from fertilization as homicide victims, and some bills would expose people who seek or help obtain abortions to murder or manslaughter charges and civil wrongful-death suits, creating a credible pathway for some abortions to be prosecuted as homicide in certain states if those laws pass [4] [7]. Legal scholars warn that existing fetal-personhood statutes and prosecutorial discretion already provide “scaffolding” for prosecutors to bring homicide or capital-murder charges in some jurisdictions even without a uniform criminal definition of abortion-as-murder [3].
3. Prosecutorial reality: select cases show prosecutorial willingness, not settled law
Individual prosecutors have pursued homicide or feticide charges in cases involving alleged self-induced or otherwise nonstandard abortions—cases that often did not survive judicial review—but these prosecutions illustrate prosecutorial appetite and local discretion more than an established national legal rule that abortion equals murder [3]. Reporting and research show dozens of criminal pregnancy-related prosecutions after Dobbs and variably applied fetal-personhood language that has already been used to pursue murder charges in contexts unrelated to routine, lawful abortion care [8] [3].
4. Moral, religious, and philosophical claims: deep disagreement about personhood and sin
Religious and philosophical sources assert sharply contrasting positions: some theological arguments integrate scripture, philosophy, and biology to claim that life—and thus personhood—begins at conception, concluding abortion is murder and a moral sin [2] [9], while other legal and religious scholars note that many traditions and legal analyses do not treat early fetal destruction as murder and argue that questions of sin or moral status should stay within religious teaching rather than criminal law [6] [10].
5. Historical and cross-jurisdictional context: no global or historical consensus
Historical common law and international practice show great variation on when the unborn are legally protected; earlier doctrines (e.g., “quickening,” viability standards) and modern international differences demonstrate there is no universal legal consensus that abortion is murder, and the debate has long mixed medical, moral, and legal concepts without a single authoritative answer [5] [10] [6].
6. Conclusion: a balanced answer to the question “is abortion considered murder?”
Legally and empirically, abortion is not categorically considered murder across most legal systems today: murder requires personhood and culpability elements that routine, lawful abortions typically do not meet under prevailing law [1] [6]. However, political movements and some state proposals aim explicitly to recast abortion as homicide, and prosecutors in some locales have sought—and occasionally attempted—to charge abortion-related conduct as feticide or murder, meaning that in limited places and circumstances abortion could be prosecuted as murder if laws or prosecutorial strategies change [3] [4] [7]. Moral and religious communities remain deeply divided: some hold abortion is murder on theological grounds while others reject that framing and caution against criminalizing reproductive decisions [2] [6] [8].