[bluecalm]

You're wrong about it being easy, that's why it doesn't make sense to you. There are many ethical systems in which both death penalty and abortion are justified.

Death penalty is any easy one. It was considered to be a proper penalty for various crimes for most of the human history in many cultures. It just takes understanding of ethical values of those cultures to understand why it was justified.

Your argument about taking innocent human life is a naive one. We do a lot of things that cost innocent human lives. Allowing diesel cars in cities cost more innocent lives than all death penalties in the history of humanity combined and it's not a small difference.

It's about tradeoffs and priorities. It's natural for a tribe or state to kill for treason for example as disincentivizing treason is more important (saves more lives, prevents suffering and destruction of your countrymen) than occasional mistake. Putting long term survival and well being of your society is more important than individual lives.

Our wealth clouds the picture so well. If it was required of everyone one to spend addition 20 hours a week providing food and shelter for a murderer atop of all the work we need to put into getting food and shelter for ourselves and our families you would be very quick to accept death penalty instead. As the choices would be about caring for your family and making sure the murderer doesn't die in custody. Today we can arguably afford it but if that's the argument then we already agree it's about tradeoffs and where the exact line is not obvious.

Even if you don't agree you can at least see it's a justified view. It's all about tradeoffs.