Abortion in the embryonic period should be legal

My thanks to illegalcombat for his concluding arguments.Final ArgumentsMy only positive argument has been based on human rights. It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being, and that abortion kills innocent human beings. Furthermore, there is moral equality between humans and that humans have inalienable rights - the foremost of which is the right to life.Pro's defense is that this is not "intentionally killing the child". Now this is not a woman with cancer undergoing Chemotherapy which happens to kill the child. This is aspiration suction, wherein the body of the developing child is ripped apart by a vacuum. The procedure is a direct attack on the unborn child. Or if using RU-486, it is the equivalent of intentionally starving the child to death.Pro further argues that I cannot justify that inalienable rights exist right from the beginning. Easy:Inalienable: not transferable to another or capable of being repudiated [5] Synonyms: inviolable, absolute, unassailable, inherent [5]If it cannot be transferred it cannot be gained, it if is inherent it is a fundamental aspect of the organism. That is why I can clearly state that fundamental rights exist from the moment of fertilization. As Pro has never questioned the existence of fundamental rights, we can conclude that he concedes they exist.Likewise with rationality. That the unborn cannot yet express its rationality does not mean it is not a rational creature with a rational nature. If it is a human it has a human nature, of which rationality is one inherent characteristic. A newborn has less self awareness and rationality than the cow I ate for dinner (btw, the burger was delicious). Does that mean we should be able to kill newborns for a lesser reason than just being hungry? This is the absurdness of this argument once you take it to its logical conclusion.Additionally Pro's response to my claim that he never established why Warren's various criteria were necessary for personhood was... I don't know, he still didn't answer the question. I'm quite sure that I clearly explained rational nature, but Pro seems to be of a different opinion. I have a rational nature because I'm human. It is not by accident that humans do not express rationality - i.e. if I have 2 identical twins, it isn't random chance that one will express rationality and one won't, it is their nature to be rational. And it is something that normatively and naturally develops from within - not something granted from without.I will leave this argument with one final analogy. Say you were on Loch Ness with your old Polaroid camera. You saw "Nessie" and took a picture. As it comes out of your camera you exclaim to your friend the you have a picture of Nessie. He grabs it from your hand and looks at it. He sees only the brown/black smudge that the Polariods have when they first come out. He says, I don't see anything and throws it away. You angrily tell him, all he had to do was shake it for 5 minutes and he'd have seen it. It was a picture, you just couldn't see it yet. Likewise our brain doesn't finish developing until the mid 20s to 30s. [6] Does that mean that you really don't have fully equal human rights until that point?I believe that I have clearly demonstrated why merely possessing a rational nature is the correct determination of why someone is a person and not some additional qualifier of "AND."Final RebuttalsViolinistPro never actually stated why bodily rights could be a justification for abortion. In Round 2 I clearly showed that this was an argument based on Natural Law. As he never disputed this or gave an alternate justification, we have to assume that he accepts this.Natural Law grounds morality in general, and sexual morality in particular, in human nature. The basic idea is that what is good of a thing are determined by the ends or purposes for the sake of which its natural faculties exist. [7]Pro claims that teleology only exist for manufactured objects.The roots of a tree exist for the sake of providing the tree with nutrients and stability to the extent that a tree grows strong and deep roots it realizes these ends and thereby flourishes and to the extent that it fails to realize these ends it is defective and tends to atrophy. [7]Human beings are no different from other living things in having characteristic faculties that exist for the purpose of achieving certain ends... What is good for us is what is determined by what what realizes the ends inherent in our nature. Then what is good for us in the sexual context can only be what realizes the ends of our sexual faculties. [7]From a purely biological analysis, it is incontrovertible sex exists for procreation. Though we desire sex because it is pleasurable, sex does not exist for the purpose of pleasure. Rather the pleasure exist for the purpose of getting humans to procreate. Likewise, while eating is pleasurable, the purpose of eating is not pleasure, but rather to provide nutrition to the body. This is why one can say that bulimia is wrong - it violates the purpose of the action. It attempts to derive the pleasure of eating while destroying the nutritive aspect of the action.As you can see these are not mere assertions, but logical and philosophically valid means of determining the moral actions and obligations. Pro merely found it convenient to use this line of argument when he thought that it worked in his favour, but claims it to be unsubstantiated when used against him.One final analogy here. If we were not dealing with rape, we could reverse the violinist analogy. This time it was you with a friend, who for kicks and giggles, kidnapped and hooked the violinist up to you. You then found out that you had a rare virus that caused severe damage to the violinist's kidneys (would take 9 months for them to heal). If you were to unhook yourself the violinist would die. Would it then be morally ethical to unhook from the violinist and let him die? No, you'd be charged with at least manslaughter if not murder. Thus we can confidently say that bodily rights are not absolute.I showed the obligation of a mother to nurse a newborn. Con brushed this off. I assume that he is actually arguing that it would be morally just for a lactating mother of a newborn to let the child starve to death as an extention of her bodily rights. Nature gave this child a mother with the natural means to provide the needs of the child and Pro is actually arguing that there is no moral obligation on the mother to provide for those needs. Even the unreasoning animals act more ethically than this... and they only act by instinct. If there is no natural incumbency even here, then I dare to say, that there can be no moral obligation to do anything at all.BillionaireIn the previous round, I already showed that Pro had reduced this argument to bodily rights. Additionally, I showed that there is a difference in obligations as there is a parent-child obligation/relation which is much stronger than the supposed obligations of the wealthy to donate to the poor (which I supported in another debate)Burning BuildingI'm surprised that Pro continued to argue this. As I previously noted, it is actually an ad hominem attack. Let's say it was the father of one of the 3 day embryos and he chooses to save the embryos instead of the little girl, does that mean that the girl is not a person? This entire argument is just a character attack.Closing StatementI believe that I have clearly laid out my argument and rebuttals. Each and every one of them was supported with logic based on sound premises. Whereas Pro has tried a shotgun approach of many arguments without ever really substantiating any of his arguments on any kind of a logical foundation. I believe that I have shown that abortion should not be legal in the embryonic stage.My thanks to illegalcombat for a highly entertaining and hard fought debate.References[5] http://tinyurl.com...[6] http://tinyurl.com...[7] http://tinyurl.com...