Abortion should remain legal in the United States

Note: I do not advocate or condone every abortion that happens, but what I feel is irrelevant. I am going to take you through you some logical processes to show why abortion should be legal. This is not a debate about whether or not abortion should be legal in (x) or not legal in (x). We are debating if there are some circumstances that could possibly occur that would warrant an abortion. If there are some circumstances in which an abortion should be permitted, it should therefore be legal and allowed by law. My adversary is taking the stance that there are no circumstances in which abortion should be legal. So now let me being with some of my contentions Contention 1Is a fetus a life or is it a human life. I am not going to spend much time on this because it is overall irrelevant to some of the points I will be making. I would like to spend a small bit of time on this though, just to clarify some basic thoughts. I have just posted this topic to the challenge leader board, and I am writing this on word before my adversary posts his first round. So I am quite sure he will spend a copious amount of time explaining that a fetus is in fact a life. I will not even contest this point; it in fact is a life. That point cannot be argued or disputed. The next logical question one may ask is whether or not it is a human life. This is a far more in-depth question. My adversary will surely spend some of his allotted words on presenting the fact that a fetus is a life at conception. Again this is not the underlying question. This is the basic process of thought in which most people would exhibit. (A) A fetus is a life and it was conceived by a human, therefore the fetus is a person or a baby. I think this exhibits some flaws in logic, because the next logical step that my adversary would take is that killing this person or baby after the time it was conceived would be murder. Murder – The act of unlawfully taking an innocent life without justification. So how do we define what makes us human. I would almost argue for the fact that the fetus would have to exhibit pain, feelings, emotion, and conscious. It must have some type of senses. If ending a life were considered murder, we could be put on trial for stepping on an insect. An insect is a life, and almost anything we can imagine is in fact living. This is in fact almost impossible to show and prove at what stage it develops these qualities, which is why it is such a controversial issue. This varies from state to state and is also a huge reason that late term abortion is banned. One of many studies shows this. “Anand argues that because fetuses can respond to stress or other stimuli at 20 weeks, abortion after that point causes them "severe and excruciating pain." The bulk of the scientific literature on the subject, however, finds that the brain connections needed to feel pain are not in place until at least 24 weeks, which is also the earliest possible time a fetus becomes viable outside the womb. Anand's testimony has been used to justify state and federal laws banning abortions after 20 weeks; those efforts have passed in nine states since 2010.”“Dr. Kanwaljeet "Sunny" Anand, a University of Tennessee professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and neurobiology who has promoted the idea that 20 weeks post-conception is the point when a fetus begins to feel pain. None of this evidence follows or aligns with almost any other scientific research done on this subject”While a fetus may be a life, it does not start to develop characters that humans share until around 20-24 weeks. I do not need to spend much more time on this because as I said earlier, it is irrelevant. Contention 2Abortion in cases where it could danger a mother’s lifeFor the sake of argument, let’s pretend my adversary is right. Let us say that a fetus is in fact a living breathing person, and acting on abortion is committing murder. Now we have an entirely different issue. What happens in a situation where the mother could die from the pregnancy? If abortion is banned, the most obvious answer is that she will die. Whether this will or will not occur a majority of time is erroneous, but claiming that abortion should be outlawed all together would give no choice to the mother in this situation if it did actually happen. These are just a few facts on how many pregnancies can be fatal. “Globally, an estimated 287,000 maternal deaths occurred in 2010” “Of all pregnancies anywhere, 15 percent will have a potentially fatal complication. In the developing world, having a baby will be the riskiest thing a woman will do. “Now there are a few ways we can look at this. If this is an early term pregnancy and we know for a fact, that if the pregnancy continued the mother would die. There is a big problem with this and it is cited and acknowledged by multiple people(A) If the pregnancy continues, the mother will die. If the mother dies, the child will die.(B) If the pregnancy is ended through abortion, the child will die, but the mother will live.Now you face a dilemma. Either way the child is going to die, so the only just cause is to save the mother. That is one way an abortion should be justified and not illegal in all circumstances. Now let us review a situation in which the baby could live if the mother would die. (A) Having the child will result in the death of the mother, but the child can be saved(B) Ending the Childs life would save the motherNow there is a much bigger dilemma. A life is going to end either way, so we have to gauge the value of a life. There is no objective way to judge this. Imgaine if a robber breaks into your house and points a gun at your wife and newborn child. He then gives you the choice that one may live and the other may die. He even allows you time to discuss this with your wife to see if she is willing to die. This is a situation that surpasses common law because of the situation. Much like murder in the case of self defense. While murder is wrong, it is justified within the situation. This is almost the same situation with abortion, with fatal situations playing the role of the robber. There is no way for anyone outside of that family to judge the value of a life. This is a difficult circumstance to be put in, but with the child having no way to respond in both situations, the only viable way to judge this is let the parents decide. In the case of abortion they have never seen this child, or have not developed the same type of connection in which the husband and wife have. Imagine if you are with a girl for 7 years, and at the age of 25 she encounters this situation. A good amount of people would choose to keep the wife alive or want their wife to stay alive. The main thing is, that they are allowed to have that choice. When my adversary is claiming, that there is no situation in which abortion should be allowed. He is taking his perspective of abortion and what he would do in this situation, and applying it for all situations and circumstances like this. This can and should not be done. In this type of situation, only that family has the right to choose the outcome. Contention 3Abortion in cases of rape. Now if we can condone abortion in the previous situation, and say that we do in fact have a reason to allow abortion and end a “life”, let us go to the next most logical step. Again imagine a 16 year old girl walking home from school. She is raped and gets pregnant. If we are not allowing her the right to have an abortion, we are essentially screwing up her life or even potentially killing her future. She had no say in what happened, because of someone else’s choice, she has to bear this child. If we make it illegal, she is forced to bear this child for months. Suffer the pain and agony of going through this pregnancy. Endure the emotional and mental stress of someone else’s indiscretion. It could mess up her grades in school, and she could be held back. Even if she forced her to have the child, some states give the rapist visitation rights! That would be more of an emotional bullet. Again this was not her choice to go through this pain for months on end, with the possibility of it messing up her future. In regards to this situation, it is her choice to do what she wants. If she wants to bear the child because of moral and ethical reasons that is fine. If she does not want to suffer through the pain and agony of pregnancy at such an early age, we should also give her the option to opt out. This was not her choice or was caused by any action of her own. It is her body, and we are forcing pain on her in which she did accept or welcome. Some facts on rape related pregnancies that show common they are“the national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator.”With it happening more often than we think, I think it is only acceptable that we give the woman the right to choose what to do in this situation. It is not our place to issue and objective commandment or law, saying that she must suffer for the mistakes of others. We all are not religious, and hold to such an ideology. In Closing.This debate is about one of two choices. First we can make abortion illegal regardless of all circumstances, and not have a viable option when extreme cases do arrive. Second we could leave the option on the table for certain situations that go beyond the norm. How often it may or may not occur should be non factor. If we make this illegal and take it away all together, we are putting people in impossible situations. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... http://www.savethemothers.org...