Abortion

I'm not interested in continuing this debate any further, especially with my classes beginning in this coming week. But there are a few things I feel the need to point out. I'm hoping people who read this will take heed and proceed with caution before debating you in the future. Moreover, I hope you learn that someone has taken note of your sly tactics and, quite honestly, doesn't much care for them. First, you want to narrow this debate topic to the point where you can trap me on so tangential a point as "abortion is a viable choice in situations x, y and z." The problem is, I never agreed to debate that, and you're trying to run away from the negative, controversial side of your position. Worst of all is that this was never agreed upon. You claim that, because you used an asterisk in your first comment (and I'll get to that next), before I posted my first argument, that you're justified in changing the parameters of the debate. That isn't true. Your first post--where you laid out the topic of this debate--indicates that we would be discussing the LEGALITY of abortion. You said that you had an argument as to why abortion should be ILLEGAL; whether it's a viable choice was irrelevant at that point (though whether it is could certainly support an argument for or against legality), but you decided to change the question thereafter to address abortion as a viable option, claiming as your excuse that it was "2 a.m." From there, I accepted because (1) you had already posted your argument, (2) I could indeed make the case that it was a viable choice, and (3) frankly, your arguments were hanging on by a thread, and some were not only factually inaccurate, but horribly offensive toward women--calling them irresponsible, claiming that they should "get a job" (by the way, there are three unemployed people for every job vacancy, so good luck with that--not everyone can be so privileged), etc.--and you failed to cite your statistics that these women are unemployed (probably because they don't exist). You completely dismissed the fact that women who have abortions, who claim that they were either not ready to be a parent or cannot financially support a child, have plans to one day be a parent--they want to be mothers, but simply are not ready. Could we debate the morality of that? Yes, we could. But I didn't agree to debate that. In fact, I told you in my first post that I am opposed to abortion--I don't like it, but I'm in no position to make that decision for women. I accept that people will hold different views, and many women who get abortions are religious. They may even call themselves pro-life. Degrading them in such a way, I truly find repugnant. And trying to change the topic in such a way that you KNOW provides the upper edge to yourself--especially because my first post indicated that I don't like abortion--is quite low. Let's move on to the exceptions for health and life--which, again, were not in your first post. Not only did your first post not indicate that the question would be on whether abortion was a viable choice--which, again, I normally would not have agreed to debate, because I don't want to discuss the morality of such a divisive issue--but you never indicated those exceptions. Even in your first argument (and by the way, it doesn't work like that), you never specified those exceptions. You wrote "considering that the mother and baby both would be perfectly healthy through the pregnancy and birth." I don't want to make this about semantics, but I have to. This is not a specification or limitation of your statement, but simply an assumption: "Abortion is not a viable choice considering this fact." If you say, "provided that the mother and baby are healthy, abortion is not a viable choice," you would have, at least, made the point. I actually took note of this last-minute flip-flop of yours before I posted my argument, and wanted to comment on it, but knew that I won the game of semantics (and, frankly, of adherence to the site rules and even the rules that you yourself set). The point is, you can ask me to "kindly withdraw" all you would like, but that doesn't change the indisputable fact that you have cheated--in several ways--in order to provide for yourself an unfair advantage in a debate conducted over the internet with a complete stranger, without a prize of any kind. If you care so much about the win in this debate, you can have it. I won't be responding to this, so when this moves to the voting period, people can vote for you--I'd hope that they would adjust their votes accordingly to account for the fact that you unjustly changed the rules AFTER the debate was underway and after I had accepted, but I wouldn't blame them if they simply awarded you all of the points. I have a lot of things to worry about in my life, and trust me when I say that this is hardly on my list of priorities. With that said, I hope you can take something from this post, and these circumstances will never again occur.