Why is abortion not considered murder by the law, when the law states that
murder is the act of taking another human life?
How does it justify it?
One possible legal intuition behind it could be something like this:
Any crime, that by its nature is such that it requires at least two persons to commit it, can justly be persecuted only if all the involved persons are prosecuted.
For example: illegal drugs. There are at least three persons necessarily involved: the producer, the distributor and the user (they can of course also be one and the same person, hence the three are only different roles; but usually, it is two or three different persons). In most countries, all three roles are criminal. It is not that the user would take the whole responsibility and culpability, and the producer and distributor would be innocent.
By similar reasoning, an unwanted pregnancy is a crime that requires both the mother and the father in order to commit it.
But since for the majority of human history, it has been impossible to establish with certainty who the father is, while it is certain who the mother is, even theoretically, only one accomplice is knowable (namely the mother). It would not be fair that in a crime that by its nature is such that it requires at least two persons to commit it, only one person would bear the whole burden of the crime.
To consider abortion murder, but only punishing the woman, would not be just, as it would ignore the role of the child's father, who may be just as guilty as the mother to bring about an unwanted child.
In other words, the situation with abortion (and sometimes infanticide), may be legally unresolvable due to necessary lack of evidence (at least historically this lack is a given, since they had no DNA tests) and due to lack of proof on whether there was a meeting of the minds between the man and the woman before engaging in intercourse (ie. perhaps one wanted to have the child and the other didn't).
