Abortion is Generally Immoral.

Con say that my first and fourth premises are not "truth apt," but I will argue that they are. First of all, even if we couldn't prove that we were killing human life, the benefit of the doubt should still go to life. If a hunter hears a rustling in the bushes, he won't immediately fire because it could be a human and not a deer. He'll make sure he's not going to shoot a human before pulling the trigger. Secondly, I think that Con is confusing objective truths with subjective truths. Preferring tacos over hamburgers is subjective. It is an opinion. One is neither more true than the other because they both speak to personal preference. However, saying the preborn are living human beings is an objective reality. It is either true for all of them or it is false for all of them. It is not mere preference but a scientific and philosophical fact. I have even shown that the experts in the field, the embryologists, support the life and humanity of the preborn. Additionally, Con has created a strawman argument against me. I have not argued from religion. I have kept my argument purely secular, using science and philosophy to prove my case. It may be true that churches have used their position to take advantage of people in this past, this does not prove religion to be false and it does not prove the pro-life position wrong. It just proves there are horrible people who use religion to control others. The benefit in classifying zygotes as human beings is not only is it scientifically true, but if abortions were stopped (or at least made much more rare), then we would stop killing the youngest members of our species. So again, my proposition is true, irrelevant of whether it is good. However, it is still good because in the vast majority of cases a zygote is created through a consensual act by two people. They perform an act which creates a naturally needy child, so they bear a responsibility to care for that child. Creating a human only to kill it is both irresponsible and barbaric. Here, also, Con is guilty of equivocating. He uses "human" to mean two different things when he talks about zygotes and sperm or hair follicles. Sperm and hair follicles are parts of humans, but zygotes (and embryos, fetuses, newborns, adolescents, teenagers, etc. ) are full human beings, developing themselves from within. They are growing, living human entities. Con is confusing parts with wholes. Premise 2I'm not entirely sure what Con means by intrinsic value being a linguistic impossibility. Intrinsic value is a well-known philosophical ideal. For example, happiness is intrinsically valuable because it is valuable in and of itself. Money is instrumentally valuable because it is the means to an end. Money is not valuable, unless we ascribe a value to it and then it can lead us to something intrinsically valuable, like happiness. A family may have instrumental value because people use those to attain happiness whereas another person may not find value in having a family. However, humans are intrinsically valuable because they have value regardless of whether anyone else values them. Take a homeless person. Homeless people often do not have families, and no one values them because they are seen as "leeches," who give nothing back to society. However, it would be equally wrong to kill a homeless person as it would be to kill Con or myself without just cause. We may have different instrumental values to society, but we both have the same intrinsic value. If it were shown that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, I would still believe them to have the same intrinsic value as humanity. This does not show that my judge of value is incorrect, just that I would have to give consideration to other forms of intelligent life like I do with humans. I would afford Mr. Spock (a Vulcan) the same value and right to life as I would a human being because he belongs to a species like humans, a sentient species. And I would consider it just as wrong to abort a Vulcan child as I would to abort a human child. When it comes to super-intelligent animals or artificial intelligences, I really believe those to be more fantasy than reality (I'm dubious as to whether a robot or android could ever really attain sentience), but even if they did, it would be taken on a case-by-case basis. If they were shown to be like humans, then I believe they would deserve the same protection as humans. Now, I should state that no zygote is ever killed through surgical abortion. The preborn is always in the embryonic state when a surgical abortion happens. So constantly referring to the zygote seems irrelevant to me because we don't kill zygotes. However, they are still human and deserving of the protection of life, even if we were killing them outright. Additionally, killing a preborn child is much different from killing a braindead patient. The braindead patient is not the person he once was. The braindead patient is essentially dead, their body is just being kept alive. But everything they were, the person they were, is gone and will not be coming back. This is different from a zygote which is on the natural path of human development. They may not have a personality or sentience yet, but they have an inherent capacity for sentience which they will develop. The braindead patient has no future whereas the zygote does. Therefore, Con's critique of my second premise fails. Zygotes do benefit from protection because then they can grow into productive members of society and live. Life is always beneficial, even in a comatose patient who has a good chance of coming out of his coma. It would be wrong to just give up on Coma Guy because he has a good chance of coming out of his coma and living. The right to life always trumps other rights. We don't have the right to kill people just because they're inconvenient for us to have around. Abortion is not about reproductive choice. Reproductive choice would be choosing not to have sex with your partner because you can't afford a child right now. Premise 3I really feel like Con's argument here is a non sequitur. Classing the preborn as humans would not negate the presumption that killing humans is wrong. In fact, it would make killing zygotes/embryos/fetuses as wrong because they're human beings. Keeping abortion legal tells us that we can kill humans as long as we have a convenient reason to do so. Killing is wrong because it frustrates someone's desire to continue living, not because it causes fear and grief (though that's part of it). It would be wrong to kill someone in a reversible coma because they would want to continue living. As such, it should be up to the individual (e. g. the zygote) if it wants to continue living, but humans believe they should be able to make life-or-death decisions for someone lesser than themselves. Obviously a zygote cannot tell us it wants to live, but it should be assumed. Killing a zygote is wrong not just because it's human, but because it would frustrate its desire to continue living if it could voice that desire. ConclusionAgain, an individual's right to life supercedes an individual's right to convenience. I understand that pregnancy can be hard on a woman but the solution is not to kill the developing human within her but to make her pregnancy as comfortable and easy as possible. I have also well-supported my conclusion and shown how Con's critique doesn't hold up. He has also used a number of logical fallacies in attempting to disprove my premises. As Con stated there is nothing wrong with having babies, and nothing wrong with not having babies. But there is something wrong in killing a living human because you don't feel you want to have a child right now.