Resolved: Abortion should stay legal in the U.S.A.

Thank you to Deathbeforedishonour for the debate. It's unfortunate we couldn't continue the dialogue, but perhaps at another time. For the sake of the readers, I will still respond to the round three rebuttals. Rebuttal to Refutation #1: Pro offers Ann Cudd’s response as a rebuttal to Marquis’s Argument in that the "future like ours" argument presumes rights and obligations for the fetus. He further claims that Marquis “makes no exceptions; therefore, it would be consistent with his logic to say killing in the name of self-defense is immoral. ”Philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has come to the defense of Marquis in responding to Cudd arguing that Marquis never framed the “future like ours” argument in terms of rights and obligations [1]. Indeed, Marquis often notes that there can certainly be circumstances where abortion maybe justified in extreme cases, which refutes Pro’s charge of Marquis making no exceptions. Sinnott-Armstrong points out that Marquis argues the justification it may take to kill an adult could be employed to kill a fetus [2]. He summarizes this point as: We would like to hear more about which circumstances are extreme enough to justify killing normal human adults and fetuses, but Marquis is definitely not committed to absolute rights [3]. Pro goes into the list of authors Cudd defends; however, these list of authors itself is not central to Marquis’s argument. Marquis’s argument never closed off the possibility of having an abortion except instead of the debate being about the personhood of the fetus the debate becomes about the future of the mother or the future of the fetus much in the same way it could between a mother and another adult. So Marquis’s argument doesn’t paint abortion and rape as black or white. Pro finally reinforces his point about the woman’s self-ownership which I have addressed in round three. Rebuttal to refutation #2:Once again, Pro reasserts a formal self-ownership which I undermined in round three. Interstingly, his third contention is that the fetus is not innocent. If you remember back in round two, he first asserted that the fetus is not morally conscious; however, words like "innocent" or "guilty" have no application to fetuses since these words imply some sense of morality and consciousness. In other words, this contention contradicts the first argument Pro has made. Additionally, my opponent accuses my Kantian-Aristotelian argument of not considering the rights of woman which is a presumption that formal self-ownership is valid while the SOP is false, but that is one of the very questions of this debate that cannot just be sidestepped or presumed without begging the question. According to Kant, women by their very nature of being human belong in the kingdom of rational ends since humans can reason; therefore, they like other rational ends cannot be used as a means to an end. Under a Kantian framework, rape, spousal abuse, misogyny, and discrimination in general towards women is still wrong because the woman is a rational end used as a means to an end whether it is for pleasure, hatred, or whatever the case may be. The only problem with Kant’s kingdom of rational ends, however, is that it does not specify whether this rational nature must be naturally/intrinsically designed or actually present. If the former, then by the very nature of being a member of the human species, fetuses, men, women, children, the elderly, and so forth are all part of the kingdom of rational ends. If rationality needs to be present, then we arrive at an absurd conclusion that the severely, mentally handicapped, people in comatose states, and newborns themselves do not belong in the kingdom of rational ends and thus are on par with animals or creatures that can be used as a means to an end. It is with Aristotelian metaphysics of actuality and potentiality and Aristotle’s view that nature aims toward the good that we can say, sure, the fetus and patient A who is essentially brain dead cannot demonstrate rational activity, nonetheless they are rational beings as designed by nature or through their natural potentiality even though they cannot actualize that rational nature at the moment. In other words, they are still persons even though they currently lack rational activity. Sources: [1,2,3] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had. ” P.60 . http://sites.duke.edu...I hope this debate has been fruitful to Pro and the readers as it has been for me. Hopefully, in the future with less busy schedules, we can debate this topic again. I apologize for my format style (still getting used to it).