Pro-life: Ignorance or Inhuman

PREFACE: In this debate it is to be understood that the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are not simply statements of personal preference. They are statements of political (and therefore ethical) ideology. A person who is pro-life does not simply say that they would not get an abortion but they say that abortion should be illegal. A position in which a person would not get or approve of an abortion but would NOT persecute or prosecute a person who would get one is pro-choice. Consider these two scenarios: 1) You're in a burning building and have a choice to save one of two things; a 9-year-old girl or a cooler with 1000 viable human embryos: Which one do you save? 2) You are in charge of making decisions for a 9-year-old girl and she becomes pregnant from a rape with twins. Every prenatal doctor you take her to tells you that the pregnancy is life-threatening and that an abortion would save her life. Would you authorize the procedure or would you not? As I understand it, if one wanted to be consistent while holding a pro-life position they would/should choose the cooler in #1 and to NOT authorize the procedure in #2 or at the very least deride the person in a situation like #2 if they were to authorize the abortion. This assessment of the pro-life position is obviously predicated on the stated pro-life position that suggests that humanity begins or human rights are bestowed at the moment of conception. My basic contention is that a person holding a pro-life position (as defined in the preface) is either inhuman - given the logical, philosophical, and real life consequences of holding and/or implementing said position - OR they are simply ignorant of the consequences of holding and/or implementing their position. Now I'd like to take the time to make my position as clearly as I can at the moment. I leave it to my opponent then to show the flaws in my arguments. 1) I do not believe a fetus could be considered a fully fledged person until around the 28th week when the thalamus (the brain structure known to be responsible for routing sense information to the brain and regulating consciousness) is formed and functional. Without this structure there is no sense information, no emotional capacity, no pain perception, and no capacity for conscious thought therefore; therefore an abortion, before the 28th week of development is not murder nor does it cause suffering. I am open to pushing the time limit back from the 28th week however I think that topic is for a different discussion. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk... http://discovermagazine.com... 2) Pro-life hypocrisy: A) I consider it a hypocrisy on the part of the pro-life movement to desire to outlaw abortion because of the opinion they hold that the UNborn have rights over the rights of the mother's right of self determination. They tend to say things like, "Who are you to decide for the unborn?" I ask, "Who are you to decide for all women?" B) Should someone site religious grounds against abortion, I wonder if they feel any sense of reverence for religions that revere animals as reincarnations of humans and therefore consider it murder to kill them? 3) I do not support abortion being used as a form of birth control however illegalization is not the way to reduce and/or prevent the occurrence of this phenomena effectively. Before 1973 (Roe v Wade and Doe v Balton) legal abortions at that time ranged around 250,000/year and there were an estimated 400,000 - 1.2 million illegal abortions/year and because of the illegal abortions there were over 5000 deaths due to complications from botched abortion procedures on top of many more disfigurations and health complications. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com... v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton http://thomas.loc.gov...: 4) Abortion is not used as a form of contraception. Pregnancy can occur even with responsible contraceptive use. Only 8% of women having abortions have never used birth control, and 90% of the women most likely to have an abortion are on birth control. http://www.alanguttmacher.org... 5) I think Bill Clinton said it best when he said, "Keep abortion safe, legal, and rare." Based on the number of then legal and illegal abortions and the fact that abortion levels today are arguably not significantly higher now then they were before abortion was legalized, the idea that illegalizing abortions will stop abortions from taking place, reduce their number or solve a problem without creating several bigger ones in it's place is laughably unfounded. 6) Illegalizing abortion would demonstrably cause more problems than it solves given the number of unwanted children heaping more pressure on the state (through adoptions, juvenile crime, and impoverished families/mothers who can't afford a child), the extra stress on the healthcare system due to unsafe illegal abortions causing medical problems, and the civil liberties of rape victims who become pregnant and a woman's right to control their own reproductive health being violated. (If your objection is along the lines of, "What about the civil liberties of the unborn." see #1) Conclusion: The only way to responsibly, ethically and effectively reduce the number of abortions is to increase access to birth control and abandon abstinence only sex education programs (given their complete and utter failure) and replace them with proper sex education programs that inform young and even older people about birth control, the truth about it, and how and where to access it. I am pro-choice, not pro-abortion: I believe that legalized abortion is a necessary evil if we wish to maintain the healthiest society possible and promote the highest level of well-being in that society. http://scholar.google.com...