Abortion Should Be Legal

I know that this can be a touchy subject, but I really hope that people on both sides vote objectively. The first trimester of a pregnancy is defined as the first 12 weeks. [1] Biology I've never seen anybody compare seeds to a tree. If somebody is going to compare embryos to babies, they should at least be consistent between their organisms. Something that all anti-choice people should know that an embryo is not a person. The embryo cannot have thoughts, it cannot have feelings, and it cannot have aspirations. The embryo doesn't think about becoming a person. Google defines "human being" as "a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance." Let's break down this definition. "a man, woman, or child", until the end of the first trimester, it is barely a group of clumps of cells that are starting to form. Most people while looking at embryos of different animals wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between a rabbit embryo, a fish embryo, a salamander embryo, a turtle embryo, a chicken embryo, and a human embryo [2]. Throughout the first trimester they are identical. "Distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance." An embryo does not have superior mental development to a living cow. Therefore it is not a human being. Embryos cannot speak, therefore it is not a human being. embryos do not have an upright stance, therefore it is not a human being. Choice Women should have the ultimate say in this matter. It doesn't matter what men think. I admit that I'm a man, but until it becomes a female-exclusive matter, I am on the side of women. Women deserve the right to do whatever they feel is best for their body. Men should not get to influence their decision. Women should especially get the choice if they were raped. Finally, Making the right choice for the embryo. If the mother wants an abortion, then when the embryo eventually becomes a person, it won't be appropriately cared for. A woman that wants an abortion obviously is not ready to a mother. Be she a high school girl, (FSM forbid) a middle school girl, or even a 26 year old woman. Nobody should be able to force a woman to have a child they cannot care for. Especially because it ruin the life of a young girl. A teenage girl that has a child to raise won't be able to attend college without help. If she cannot afford help, and does not have anybody to reach out to, she will have to get a low paying part time job. She'll only be able to get a real job once the kids are in school, but she won't have obtained any skills for a real job. Attending night school/online school is only an option if you have time, and it takes years to get a degree. My final point on this is what if you can't afford to raise a child? It costs $240,000 to raise a from birth to 18 years old. That doesn't even include the cost of college [6]. I'm sure that all anti-choice readers are thinking the same thing: adoption. This isn't as good of an idea as it sounds. There are 104,000 children in foster care, waiting for a loving family. 20,000 kids age out of foster care every year without having a real home [3]. There were roughly 1,000,000 abortions in the United States in 2012 (the latest year with available statistics [4]. Let's add 1,000,000 kids every year to the existing 104,000. We're now at 1,104,000 children that need to be adopted. Not only does the country not have the infrastructure for that, but I doubt adoption rates will increase to cover the increase in children. These are only legal abortions though. "Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967." [5] "In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions, which was one abortion-related hospital admission for every 42 deliveries at that hospital that year. In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center, another large public facility serving primarily indigent patients, admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one admission for every 14 deliveries." [5] It's important that abortions remain safe and legal because banning abortions does not stop abortions. It just makes them more dangerous. In many cases, it is between the mother and the embryo. Who will you choose to save? Contraception If one is going to equate abortion to murder, they should also equate birth control/condoms to murder. It does the exact same thing as abortion: it takes away potential life. [1] http://www.webmd.com... [2] http://www.dls.ym.edu.tw... [3] http://www.adoptuskids.org... [4] http://www.abort73.com... [5] http://www.guttmacher.org... [6] http://money.cnn.com...