The meaning of murder

Here's a cheery topic for May: Murder - what does it mean? Can you murder something that is not human? A plant, say? I have sometimes thought of myself as a plant-murderer because I'm not much of a green thumb.

What about insects? If so, then I must confess to being a mass-murderer! Spiders (especially huntsmen!), cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, ants... the list goes on. 

Or what about a goldfish or other kind of aquatic creature? When I was little my family looked after a yabby for my mum's friend who was a primary school teacher. The yabby was a class pet. It was a hot summer. The poor yabby couldn't withstand the heat and when we came home one day we found it had died.

Mammals? I've orchestrated the killing of numerous rats and mice. Maybe the odd possum on the road.

Of course, it's ridiculous to think that murder includes plants and insects. It's possibly less ridiculous to include fish and reptiles, and getting a bit more uncomfortable once we get to mammals. And that's probably because mammals are getting closer to humans in terms of being warm-blooded.

Any dictionary will tell us that murder is when one person kills another person. It has to be unlawful (i.e. not with the permission of someone legally authorised to give that permission, as with capital punishment - and that's a topic for another day). It has to be premeditated, not accidental, otherwise it's considered manslaughter instead.

I was prompted to think about this after the recent disturbing news of the man in Ohio who had kidnapped three young women and held them hostage in his house for a decade. He probably fathered the 6-year-old child found with the women, and the reports talked about accusations of him forcing one of the women to miscarry other pregnancies. The report in the Sydney Morning Herald said this:

As more grim details emerge about the long captivity of the three women rescued from imprisonment in a dilapidated home in Cleveland, prosecutors said they would seek murder charges, potentially carrying the death penalty, against Ariel Castro, accusing him of forcing at least one of the women to miscarry.

Could causing a woman to miscarry constitute murder, according to the basic definition I put forward above? What was killed? An unborn human child. Was it unlawful? Presumably no one gave him authorised permission to do so. Was it pre-meditated? Hard to say, if it's true that he would 'starve Ms Knight for weeks, then repeatedly punch her in the stomach ''until she miscarried''', that would probably be considered pre-meditated.

One interesting factor in all this is the status of the unborn child (or possibly children) miscarried during those terrible years. If the prosecutors want to bring a charge of murder against Castro, they will have to establish that the unborn child should be considered human. I wonder if their case against him will be made difficult by the Abortion Laws in Ohio that allow abortion of foetuses up to 24 weeks (more than half the usual full-term gestation period). Foetuses at 24 weeks (but sometimes earlier) are usually considered 'viable', that is, able to survive outside the womb.

It seems that it's partly also a conflict of wills. In most cases the murderer wants the other person dead, but the person who dies doesn't usually want to die (except in the case of euthanasia - again, a topic for another day). In this case, it was the will of the man who caused the miscarriage and the mother's will was not taken into account - much less the 'will' of the unborn child.