 Despite these counterarguments, most Buddhists today would accept that, in their ethical system, abortion is morally wrong. It does not necessarily follow that they would advocate making abortion illegal. In many ways, it is contrary to the spirit of Buddhism to impose Buddhist values on others by force. Buddhists were early advocates of religious toleration, and the political environment of India before the Islamic invasions was mostly quite a tolerant one in practice. Moreover, Buddhist states have usually not chosen to prohibit such practices as slaughtering and eating animals, even when their rulers have held that these practices are immoral. Some writers have argued that due to the severity of the offense of killing a human, abortion in particular should not be legally tolerated by Buddhist societies (for example, see Harvey 2000, 342–350). In fact, in some Buddhist countries, such as Japan, abortion is legal; in others, it is technically illegal, but the law is not strictly enforced. In a diverse society where the moral status of fetuses is controversial, a strict prohibition on abortion is likely to be difficult and costly to enforce, and doing so would lead to intense social controversy, alienating people from their own government. The inevitable use of coercion and violence in law enforcement, in the form of police and prisons, itself represents a grave karmic cost of imposing any penal law on segments of the population who do not accept it as legitimate. Thus many of the reasons internal to the Buddhist tradition that could be used to argue in favor of religious toleration would also seem to support a legal regime that permits abortion, even if Buddhist ethical views imply that abortion is wrong.