lavendersparkle

I think part of the difficulty is that people frequently try to meld together two categories into one. We would say that for every act there is morality and culpability. Morality describes whether the act in and of itself, the act qua act, is good or evil. Culpability takes into account the circumstances in which the act occurs to talk about the specific culpability of the moral agent in that situation.

So, we would say that the abortion because the 12 year old was raped by her father is as evil as the abortion because a socialite wants to fit into a certain dress. No matter what the external, accidental factors surrounding the moral act, abortion as the deliberate killing of innocent human life is equally evil no matter what. HOWEVER, the culpability of the parties is influenced by two things: knowledge and freedom. A bad act can't be rendered good, but the way we treat it depends on how free the parties were to act differently. The culpability for a 12 year old who has an abortion because she has been profoundly traumatized would be very low compared to the socialite mentioned. That's where we take those situations into consideration, but abortion qua abortion remains the same no matter what.