Abortion

I expected you to choose the attackers death over your child"s, so my response was tailored that way. You did not say it before, but you have stated it since. By making that choice I felt like it proved that you were presenting a false dichotomy but I"m willing to go into more depth on the matter if you feel it"s required. You base your whole argument on this false dichotomy response to your purposed question. Is human life worth anything? If yes then you must be against abortion, if not the you don"t care either way. You proved this to be a false dichotomy, when you said you would choose to murder the attacker to save your child, because you have chosen both sides. You value (just going to use your term here for easy of understanding, not agreeing with it) human life in that your child lives, and you didn"t value human life in that the attacker dies. This invalids your constraints of only two choices that are mutually exclusive. You have been proven as presenting a false dichotomy by your own words. I did not say that preventing them, using their body, prevents bodily autonomy. I said if you harm someone to protect yourself, you validate bodily autonomy. You didn"t respond to this but I"m going to take your attacker example and look it from another view to give an example of what I"m referring to. If someone tries to murder you, and you kill them in self-defense, you do so legally and morally because of bodily autonomy. The attacker is trying to change your body without your permission, so you are both morally and legally justified to stop them from changing your body without your permission. To take one step further, even if they are just trying to put you in a van, and are not threating you with death. You are still morally and legally justified to kill them to prevent that. To put it another way, trying to change a person"s body (even if there is no threat of death) without their consent allows for you to protect your body and kill them. The attacker is the "others" who get hurt, and it"s ok that you hurt them to protect yourself. Does that make more sense? Next I would like to address this statement "If you value human life, you would care for the human life". Is there currently anyone on this planet that is helpless, but you aren"t caring for them? 700 homeless people freeze to death every year in the US, have you helped them? If you haven"t that must mean you are nihilist and don"t care about human life if we follow your train of thought. Because you COULD help them, but you aren"t, are you? You are letting them die, and that somehow makes you a murder in your world. Do you live on the street and send all your money to starving children in other countries? If you make 32k a year you are in the top 1% of the incomes of the world. Roughly 21,000 people (most of which are children) die each year because of starvation. Your money could save thousands of children, but you don"t live like a pauper, do you? By your words that means you don"t value human life, right? You let them die not to save yourself, but just to make your life more comfortable. This is what freedom is. Freedom is letting others die. Freedom is about being able to be selfish. And you are selfish, even if you don"t want to admit it. When you say that lower crime rates are irrelevant to the abortion debate, and you base your side of the abortion debate on what"s morally "right" that throws up red flags for me. Crime rates include homicide, I assume you know that, but I"m stating it just in case you don"t. You want to call abortion murder, but when presented with actual murder, you indicate that it"s not relevant in the a morally based defense you have created. I have not assumed you are hard right or republican leaning or anything else. I am simply going off your statements. You care about what you call murder when you look at a fetus, but you say actual murder isn"t relevant. Logically what follows is you just care about birth, not what happens afterwards. To put another way your moral compass only cares about fetus. Otherwise stopping homicides would be relevant to you. (and I"m talking about the real kind, not abortions) This is not an assumption, this is just logically following your statements about what is relevant. I am staying within the abortion topic; I"m not getting into your political affiliations be they republican or communist as that is outside of the scope of this debate. This debate is for or against abortion, and in the intro, you said "deliberately left the topic of this debate broad, to avoid contrived and un-passionate arguments." So, you have opened the door to the socio-economic effects of abortion within this debate, but consider homicide" irrelevant.