A pregnant person should always have the right to abortion, regardless of circumstances.

Response to C1aR2: Personhood (PianoSandwich) With the utmost respect, I must point out that PianoSandwich made a critical mistake in regard to the natural right to life in his counter. He/she said the following: "It is based on personhood, by which we assign creatures the right to life (protected by law)" (PianoSandwich, Round 2, Paragraph 6). This implies that the right to life is something that is defined by society. There is no doubt that a society can make statutory laws to define how the government will protect life. However, the natural right to life is something that cannot be determined by the human race. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, natural law is defined as follows: "a system of right or justice held to be common to all humans and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law" (http://www.britannica.com...). Regardless of the statues that a society can pass, natural law applies to every form of human life. The question of personhood is not one that can be solved scientifically or medically. It is strictly a philosophical question. My contention is that human life assumes personhood as soon as the human life cycle starts. Why? They have immediately obtained the rights that are defined under the fundamental natural law of human nature. Response to C1bR2: Choice In John Locke"s interpretation, humans possess three natural rights and these natural rights were clearly expressed in the Declaration of Independence: the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to pursue happiness. The role of statutory law in interpreting these rights is to ensure that one person"s exercise of their natural rights does not infringe on another person"s natural rights. When natural rights clash, they take the following precedence: the right to life over the right to liberty and the right to liberty over the pursuit of happiness. Since natural law inherent in human nature, it must begin at the start of the human life cycle: conception. Consequently, a fetus obtains the right to life at the moment of its conception since the human life cycle has begun. Going back to the precedence principle in the previous paragraph, a pregnant woman"s natural rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness do not give her the right or the moral justification to violate a fetus"s natural right to life. The fetus"s natural right to life takes priority over the other natural rights of the mother and her individual autonomy. Aborting a fetus may not be a violation of statutory law, but it is a definite violation of natural law. I don"t know how many people reading this are religious or believe in after life; however, the logical conclusion of natural law is that all humans will be held accountable for their treatment of natural law in after-life. How else could it be? A law is not a law unless there are consequences for breaking it. The consequences may not be immediate but there must be consequences for breaking a law. Otherwise, a law becomes simply a set of ideals that humans can choose to ignore at their pleasure. Response to C2 R2: Autonomy A woman"s choice over her body does exist, but not during her pregnancy. She must make her choice on her pregnancy before having sex unprotected by a condom to prevent pregnancy. Consequently, she must consider the consequences of a pregnancy and take appropriate steps to prevent a pregnancy without violating her fetus"s natural rights. By engaging in unprotected sex, she is essentially "signing" her consent before nature that she does not mind conceiving a child and bringing it into the world. Using statutory law principles here for a moment, the act of commission in consensual sex (in rape, the act of commission rests with the rapist) took place completely at the behest of the woman. In no case did the fetus have a chance to affect the process. Since there is no liability on the part of the fetus for acts of commission or acts of omission, the fetus did not have a choice on whose body it was going to inhabit. The liability (responsibility) rests with the woman (the rapist in rape cases). Going back to a previous section, the fetus"s natural right to life takes precedent over the mother"s right to liberty (control over her body). Furthermore, the mother exercised her right to control her body by allowing a male"s sperm cells into her body. Counter to C3 R2: Inevitability With all due respect to PianoSandWich, arguing that unintentional miscarriages that a human does not have control over can somehow be used to justify a deliberate termination of human life (abortion) is to completely eliminate the divide between natural forces and deliberate human interference. Natural law governs human actions. However, it cannot prevent natural forces. A miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy in the first 20 weeks, sometimes referred to spontaneous abortion in medical journals (http://www.babycenter.com...). Why do they occur? Between 50 and 70 of first trimester miscarriages normally are the result of chromosomal abnormalities in the egg (http://www.babycenter.com...). Other reasons may include an egg that didn"t implant properly in the uterus or an embryo that had structural defects. If you look at each of those causes, they are the result of "natural" mutations. There is no way a woman can affect them. She can only follow the advice of her doctors to ensure the most successful pregnancy possible. No one"s natural rights are violated in this case. However, if a pregnancy is terminated by human intervention, natural law governing human rights and human behavior has been violated.