Abortion Is Wrong

Thanks Pro for allowing me to take part in this debate. Definitions abortion:"a medical procedure used to end a pregnancy and cause the death of the fetus."morally wrong:that which is immoralmorally permissible:permitted; allowedIntroduction In this debate I will be putting forth two main arguments to justify the moral permissibility of abortion. I also want to point out that Pro bares the BOP since, by the title of the debate, he is the one claiming that abortion is morally wrong. With that said, let me begin. The Desire View of RightsBefore I can discuss the issue of rights, and what sort of beings can have them, I first need to define what a right is. A right is simply an entitlement to protection from certain acts. If I have a right to life or a right to liberty, then others are under a moral obligation not to kill or enslave me, since that would violate my rights. In this debate I will be defending a desire view of rights. Under this view, only things that have conscious desires now, or who have had them at some time in the past, can have rights. By conscious desires, I mean desires that only conscious beings can have. In order for a being to have a desire for something, he must wish that a certain proposition be true. The desires that someone can have are limited by the concepts it possess. [1] This means that the rights someone can have are dependent on what desires it has. Now that I have explained this view of rights, I now want to move on to the question of what kind of being can have a right to life. The Desire View and The Right to LifeUnder the desire view of rights, only a living thing that has a desire to continuing living can have a right to life. One can have a desire to continuing living only if one possess the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity. [2] This kind of awareness is only seen in rational and self-conscious beings and a fetus, being underdeveloped and unconscious, cannot have this concept I have outlined. Finally, I will now put forth my first argument for the moral permissibility of abortion. P1) Only a being who has a desire to continue living can have a right to life. P2) One can have a desire for continued existence only if one possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences, or has at least at one time had that concept.P3) A fetus has never had this concept.C) Therefore, a fetus does not have a right to life. At first this view seems plausible, but it's open to clear counter examples once critically examined. Here I will now list a couple of them. 1. Consider someone who is asleep or temporarily unconscious. When someone is in this state they are not presently desiring to continue living. Is it permissible to kill them while they are like that? 2. Consider a teenager who is suicidal and has no desire to continue living. Is it permissible to kill him while he is suicidal? Dispositional DesiresIn regards to these counter examples, I will turn to the philosopher David Boonin who I think successfully solves these problems. In his book "A Defense of Abortion," Boonin points out in the case of the asleep or temporarily unconscious individuals that: "When I wake up in the morning I do not have to learn everything that I believed the day before. I seem to have almost all the same beliefs, concepts and desires I had yesterday. This suggest that these mental items were retained in some form or other while I was asleep. Accordingly, when I was asleep I possessed in some way the concept of myself as a continuing subject of experience. And when I was asleep in some clear sense I desire to live." [3] So as we can see, the desire account of the wrongness of killing can still explain why it would be wrong to kill people who are asleep or temporarily unconscious. Actual and Ideal DesiresIn the situation of the suicidal person, I will again turn to David Boonin and his book "A defense of Abortion" who responds to this objection through an analogy. "Imagine that a hiker is at a fork in the road and must choose to go right or left. In this situation, the hiker ends up choosing to go left because the left path is more scenic. But little does the hiker know there is a landmine on the left trail which will kill the hiker if he takes that path. The hiker's "actual" desire was to go left, but his "ideal" desire was to go right and not hit the landmine. If this particular hiker knew about the landmine, he would certainly have gone right. Likewise, the suicidal person might have an "actual" desire to not go on living, but if this person was in a situation with better circumstances, his "ideal" desire would be to live." [4] Thus, as Boonin argues, it is a person's "ideal" desires that more accurately establish their right to life. Finally, I will be using Judith Jarvis Thomson's Violinist thought experiment to argue for a woman's right to choose. The ViolinistImagine that you wake up in a hospital bed connected through a series of medical tubes to an unconscious famous violinist. The violinist is dying from a kidney disease, and the Society of Music Lovers has found that you alone have the right blood type to save his life. So last night, in your sleep, they kidnapped you and plugged you into him. If you disconnect yourself from him now, the violinist will die. But if you disconnect yourself from him in 9 months, he will live and go onto play beautiful music. Now, the question is, are you within your rights to disconnect yourself from the violinist to let him die? I would argue yes, you do have the right. This is because you are a sovereign over your own body, and nobody should have the right to use your body against your will. So if you agree that the kidnapped person in this thought experiment has the right to unhook himself from the violinist, then you should also agree that a pregnant woman should have the right to unhook herself from the fetus. Conclusion In this debate I have presented two arguments to justify the moral permissibility of abortion. My arguments, I think, have been persuasive and shown why abortion is not morally wrong contrary to what the debate title claims. Therefore, we ought to reject the resolution.Sources Abortion and Infanticide by Michael Tooley Boonin, David. A Defense of Abortion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. http://spot.colorado.edu...