Good question. I’ve seen the Jewish side of this debate for awhile now. The pursuer (”rodef”) in most instances of abortion is technically the doctor, not the mother. One important note though, is that your personal action in stopping a pursuer assumes that there is no time to engage the civil authority, to which you are to submit, to stop the pursuer. In this case, the pursuer is acting under the authority of the civil authority, so you cannot use potentially violent means to prevent this. Only if you were the mother being forced to abort the child (to be an accomplice), would you have standing to use violent means to prevent the pursuer (the doctor) from killing the child.

As I mentioned to you yesterday, there is a case where the child might be considered rodef – cases where the child is truly putting the mother’s life in imminent danger (like with tubal pregnancies). In such cases, the mother would have a legitimate, moral right to choose under pikuach nefesh.

I didn’t mean to argue so much and the main point is that I disagree but you have many good verses to back up your position that I need to consider.

but in my view pacifism (or specifically a classically liberal government) would have prevented it from getting there to begin with.

I agree – but by the time 1941 rolled around, such options were long off the table. I agree that a lot more intelligence and forethought today, rather than expedient solutions, will save much more undesirable decisions in the coming years. Even so, this does not account for the actions outside of our control…

The purpose of just war doctrine is to prevent unjust wars from occurring, not to try and justify a war in advance. War fits within the purview of the responsibility given to governments, as God’s servants. While I think that many Christians have swung the pendulum too far towards considering violence an answer, I’m not sure the solution is to swing it equally as far in the opposite direction.

I believe that WWII met the criteria for Jus ad bellum (the declaration of war), but that there were a number of instances where Jus en bellum (conduct in war) was not properly met (like the firebombing of Dresden), and that Jus post bellum was met, particularly in the reparations made to Germany and Japan. Whlie I believe it could have been staved off in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, by the time Hitler’s invasions had begun, there was no other viable solution.