Hey, things got a bit hairy in the most recent posts, but just wanted to point out that Banana is making some solid posts that contribute to the discussion beyond just opening doors that otherwise wouldn't have been. Banana, I hope you don't read this as patronizing, but I think it's worth pointing out, so I'm going to risk being patronizing.

I don't think the "murder has a meaning and you're misusing it" crowd is being pedantic. I think the most charitable concession that can be made here is what wuf suggested, murder is being used colloquially to mean unjustified killing regardless of legality. But even here, it's hard for me to wrap my head around someone thinking abortion is an unjustified killing and that they are ok with it. Being in support of unjustified killing must be a clear signal that the person(s) in question are less than psychologically well.

Banana, your "if a plant is alive, a fetus must also be, by the same criteria, alive." declaration is hard to find fault with, except for the fact that we now need to define what it is that is alive. Of course we find no issue, by and large, killing a plant, so why doesn't this transfer to a fetus? This leads to an interesting ontological discussion about what exactly constitutes a human.

You may say a human is a human at the moment of conception, and reasonably so, it's often the position of hardliners and appears to offer a much needed definitive boundary. But here's a thought experiment that may challenge that intuition. Say there are two fertile monkeys in a enclosure, one a male and one a female. Sooner or later there will be a baby monkey in the enclosure as well. Perhaps it's not a lock, but the odds are only ever so slightly worse than they would be had the female just been impregnated. Now, if we interfere, have we aborted a monkey?