This House believes that abortion is morally permissible.

Thank you for this debate, and I hope to get straight stuck into this. However, I just want to highlight this issue and make clear the scope of the debate. Currently according to IPAS, unsafe abortion kills 200 women a day[1]. This is a tragedy, and if banning abortion doesn’t reduce the abortion rate but instead increases the rate of unsafe abortions, then making it illegal is immoral, clearly; I am sure my opponent will agree with me on this issue. However, this debate isn't about whether abortion ought to be illegal or not, but whether it is immoral. Moreover, the debate is not about whether the medical procedure of abortion in some of its forms are wrong, or about public awareness of the issue. Of course, this is severely important in public policy, and still an existent issue: according to Charlottle Byrne, “they just throw the baby in the bin”[2]. However, this is not what the debate is about. It is about the ethical side of the debate. Secondly, I want to narrow the scope of the debate even more. Consider the case of Rosa. “25,000 people in Spain have asked the RCC to excommunicate them. Their move is in support of a Nicaraguan couple who were thrown out of the Church for allowing their [9 year old] daughter to have an abortion after she was raped.”[3] I think we both agree that abortion in this situation can be justified. Not only was it rape of someone so young, but also giving birth at such a age usually led to death. However, we must focus on abortion in general being morally permissible. The vast majority of abortions, a procedure to end the potential life of a child, come through the use of the morning after pill. Somewhere between 20% and 40% of younger women have used the morning after pill[4]. So this is the form I will focus on for my opening argument in favour of the choice to abortion. Consider the following.Dorothy, 14, and her mother Rachel are among the first clients to arrive. She is nervous and embarrassed, waiting to be told off for getting pregnant at such a young age. Bare-faced and wearing an Alice band and simple T-shirt and jogging bottoms, she looks painfully young. [Her GP] gave her the number of a youth sexual-health service near her home in North London which, in turn, referred her here. At her first consultation a week ago, the nurse spoke to her alone to make sure that she was not acting under duress and genuinely wanted to end the pregnancy. That is a statutory duty. The first of two drugs was administered then, and today Dorothy will receive the second. That will begin the medical abortion once she gets home.[5] Is this wrong? I believe that the debate revolves around a single point: is a fetus a morally valuable person? If so, abortion is murdering another and is morally wrong. If not, then abortion is perfectly permissible. So, I shall analyse are standards for whether a fetus is a morally valuable person. I’ll establish my own case for what makes a morally valuable person, then move to the potential argument. So, what makes something a person? The most obvious starting point is “a human”. This is what many people would say and have said. However, this is of course not true. For consider an alien species coming to earth with the same, if not more, developed code of society, culture, ethics and philosophy than us. They are conscious, rational, people. These creatures of course gain the right to life, and we’d have to extend our “human rights” to “personhood rights”. Therefore, being a person is more than just being “human”. What does this entail? Well, if you’ve accepted what I have stated, then it is one of the characteristics of “developed code[s]”, or “conscious” or “rational”. Or, and this is my preferred answer, some combination of the three. Mary Anne Warren comes up with five character traits which I think adequately gives across what makes a person, which I shall mildly plagiarise to help my case: Consciousness ... and in particular the capacity to feel pain; Reasoning; Self-motivated activity; The capacity to communicate, ... on indefinitely many possible topics; The presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.[6] Why these valuable traits, one may ask? They together are what makes one a person, and a person is inherently valuable. A foetus lacks the capacity to reason, to be conscious, to communicate, to be autonomous or self-awareness. Therefore, it cannot possibly be classified as a person with the rights of a person. However, surely one can argue that while it does not have the actuality of personhood, it can the potentiality of personhood, and that is what is important? I shall cover lightly this issue here, while putting more emphasis on this later in the debate. However, if we agree that personhood comes from having these qualities, then the debate becomes: does the potential to be a person make you as valuable as being a person? I have a few problems here with this argument. The first is that abortion does not necessarily deprive the world of a rational and self-conscious being. Considering a large share of abortions are done with the reasoning “I’m not ready yet”, we ought to take into account how many are simply delaying. Suppose a woman has planned to join a charity as a volunteer in Syria helping construct emergency housing. She has no children at present, and firmly intends to have one next year after helping those in Syria. If abortion is wrong only because it deprives the world of a future person, then abortion in this case is not wrong, but merely a delay of a life, and for the reason of helping many more people. In circumstances where the abortion is merely inconveniently timed rather than a child is not wanted at all, abortion is not wrong. Moreover, the idea that depriving the world of a potential child leads us to condemn practices like contraception – both artificial condoms and natural techniques like abstinence. In fact, if the world is overpopulated, as many would argue, then abortion is no worse than other means of preventing potential people being born. Finally, IVF is a huge problem for advocates of what I’ll call the potential argument. The science of IVF is a wonder that has allowed us to understand how life develops from a sperm and egg. It also has let us understand the probabilities behind it. So what is the probability of a potential life developing? “The probability of a child resulting from a given embryo is 10%, and the probability of a child resulting from an egg that has been placed in a fluid to which sperm has been added is 8%”[7] We learn firstly that the potential of an IVF produced embryo is only 10%! This intrinsically poses huge questions to whether the embryo is equally valuable to the human life. When we consider that with natural births “if pregnancy is diagnosed…within 14 days of fertilisation the probability of birth is 25 to 30%”[8], are we to say natural children are 3 times more valuable? However, we also must conclude that the value of the embryo, with 10% development chance, is almost as valuable as a sperm-and-egg, with 8%. “So if the embryo is a potential person, why are not the egg-and-sperm, considered jointly, also a potential person?”[9] With that I conclude and pass over to my opponent. Thank you. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk... [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk... [3] http://news.bbc.co.uk... [4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk... [5]http://www.philosophicalinvestigations.co.uk... [6] On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion Mary Anne Warren [7] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics 2nd ed. P159 [8] Ibid, p161 [9] Ibid, p159