[flagged]
but see, there are people who believe abortion is murder, and perhaps one of the worst forms of murder because of its victim’s extreme innocence since it has not caused any harm in this world.
You can have a nearly identical baby in less than a year. A 50-year old takes 51 years to make.
That being said, the weird secular idea that babies are meaningless lumps of protein until they are born and are suddenly ensouled is equally silly. They're just arguing about dates, and at least the Christian tradition actually believes in a soul. I don't think most secular people could explain why you shouldn't kill an infant other than they find it distasteful, like eating a dog (when you eat pig and cow.)
That abortion is more distasteful than murder is a modern political culture-war position, though, that nobody would have considered until at least the early-mid 20th century. In fact, the idea that babies were sinless meant that they would go to Heaven, so 19th century Christians greatly preferred to murder a baby, turn themselves in and be executed for the crime rather than commit suicide (which was an express ticket to Hell.) Both the baby and the believer could then go to Heaven.
You assume that a lady getting an abortion is not committing murder--these folks clearly think she is.
(We don't need to argue about whether it is in fact murder, or whether if it is that the murder is justified or not--just understand that there are people that believe differently, and apparently they're willing to expend police resources on it.)
That's exactly the problem: we do. Not here, specifically, but if someone's false beliefs have grown to the point that they are hurting others over them, they need to be stopped.
Yes, those people with "false beliefs". Ah, if only we could force everyone to have true beliefs. And it's not against freedom of thought and consciousness, oh no! We're only against actually false beliefs. That, you know, have been proven wrong. Or at least for which the proofs of incorrectness exist that we believe are correct. But since our beliefs true, this is fine.
In a democracy like ours, stopping the Queen and others from enacting restrictive and harmful policy based on impossibilities only requires convincing arguments. People are still perfectly free to believe in Creationism, but convincing arguments have removed it from curricula.
Like regulating the production, sales, and use of opiates. Or tightly restricting the abortions. Or forcing people to wear seatbelts while driving (and two years ago on this very HN I've seen lots of people complaining about state-mandated vehicular safety, so no, the seatbelts are not an uncontroversial topic). There are many other examples of the authoritarian nanny states unduly restricting bodily autonomy of people.
Crucially, most of those policies aren't really based on truth or falsity of anything but simply on a value call. Forcing people to wear seatbelts may or may not actually reduce vehicular injuries (in fact, some research indicates that wearing seatbelts makes one more prone to reckless driving) — they're mandated anyhow, simply because some people believe it's the right thing to do.
He simply stated that these irrational beliefs need to be stopped from turning into authoritarian and harmful policy. The way to stop that is by convincingly arguing the rational side. There is nothing authoritarian about making those arguments.
The police themselves may consider it stupid and counterproductive, but their opinion does not count until the next elections.