Defending the right of a child to live is wholly seperate from defending the right of a violent criminal to live. By choosing not to live by society's rules, a violent criminal has chose he is not a part of that society. An unborn child has not made any such choice.

It isn't at all like caterpillars and butterflies. If you are saying every aborted child would grow up to be a violent criminal so they and we are better off if they are aborted... Well that is just plain stupid. A newborn child has nearly unlimited possibilities. Even some of the most neglected and uncared for children have grown up to be great people. Your lot in life is not wholly dependant on who your parents are and what their situation is like.

To paraphase:

Violent criminal: Makes choice to break laws that carry the punishment of death -> Chooses to die.

Unborn child: No choices made, Infinite possibilities for their life and contributions -> No one gets to choose to murder them.

Honestly, I could easily construe your statement, that since old people nearly always die slow torturous deaths, people should be euthanized at the age of 60. If a child that *may* die such a death is better off dead, then an old person who *will* die such a death is certainly better off dead.

And since I'm not willing to toss the whole issue of a fetus to a child. Please explain to me how you can deteremine when a child is a child. Does exiting the womb change the fundamental nature of the fetus such that it then magically becomes a child? If I take a ball out of a paper bag was it something else when it was in the bag? If cognitive thought is the requirement, well that doesn't happen till well after birth, and there is almost no way to prove cognition without speach, so we'll just wait till a child talks, but any time before that we can kill it. Sounds fine to me, before that they're just animals. If you say it's "part of the woman's body" so she should be able to do with it what she wants, well that isn't true either. A fertalized egg is no more part of a woman's body than sperm is. It might be *in* her body, but it sure as hell doesn't have to be. Yes, a child cannot grow outside a womb (currently) but that womb can be nearly anyones, and it is really no different than the fact that humans are born completely without the ability to survive on their own, so that pushes the killing point sometime after birth again.

Feel free to ignore this last tirade, but I'd really like to know how you can rationally equate killing unborn children and killing violent criminals as non seperate issues. It seriously boggles my mind.