If you think it's murder, why should it matter?
Do you think murdering a human and murdering a fetus are exactly the same thing, or is there a little difference? The Torah explicitly does not consider murder to include abortion. There are 2 key differences IMHO. First, a human being is a soul, the body is just a wrapper. The soul isn't fully present in this world until birth no matter how late stage the pregnancy is. Second, abortion isn't proactively taking independent life, it is simply removing the mothers protection. Why should the mother be forced to sustain life, of a rapist no less?
An abortion is preserving the woman's sovereignty on her body. That includes the freedom to sin with her body. The Torah doesn't place penultimate value on freedom, so we believe a woman is generally obligated to sustain the infant, and stopping the pregnancy is a severe moral transgression. But do we want the government to enforce our religious obligations? The Torah considers marital infidelity and incest to be far worse than abortion. Do we want the government to tell people who to sleep with? What about if the majority of a Chrisitian country want to impose the Catholic ban on divorce?
If a fetus's rights are so valuable that they warrant governmental intervention to compel the mother to fulfill her obligations toward it, what will you to those who argue an 8 day old baby shouldn't have its body mutilated because of our religious belief? We don't want a nanny state. The government shouldn't tell us what we should do to our babies, and it shouldn't force mothers to maintain pregnancies they aren't interested in, whether they are morally and religiously obligated to or not.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortionSee here to start, happy to discuss if you have a more specific question.
The real question is where does the Torah prohibit abortion for Jews in the first place? It is far from clear, and most mainstream opinions believe it is thus not applicable in many scenarios.
