If the fetus is a human person, then abortion is generally immoral

In my opening statement I showed that the unborn are human persons who possess the same basic rights that you and I have. Con does not dispute the humanity or equality of rights present in the unborn (because it was the debate resolution), but he instead goes after a much larger metaphysical target for his rebuttal. Rather than attacking the view that the unborn have the same right to assistance as born children, Con has argued for the extreme view that NO ONE has any right to assistance from anyone else. He writes, “The fatal flaw in this premise is that Pro does not establish that anyone has the right to life. In my affirmative I made an argument against the possibility of positive rights . . . ” Con is arguing for the ethical theory known as voluntarism, or the claim that I have no duty to aid anyone else unless I freely say I want to aid them. [i] Con also tries to impugn my argument as an act of question-begging. He writes: Pro makes assumptions like “humans have a positive right to life” and “it is wrong to kill an innocent human being” without backing them with any sort of analysis. These points are what Pro was supposed to be proving! Did I Beg the Question? Con claims that he has won the debate because I never defended the premise that anyone has a right to life, but that point was conceded in the debate’s resolution when we agreed that fetuses were persons. The idea that persons are a kind of being that have a right to continue existing is fundamental to the idea of what a “person” is. Otherwise, what is the point of saying that some things are “persons” and others are not? Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations just a few years after the unthinkable crime of the Holocaust. The Declaration boldly states (without need of philosophical justification) “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. ” I contend that the right-to-life for persons is as self-evidently true as the wrongness of trivial discrimination among persons. If we can generally trust our five empirical senses, even though we only assume they give us reliable information about the world, then why not with the same confidence trust our moral sense that says persons are valuable and have intrinsic rights? Con may object that persons don’t have a positive “right-to-life,” or a right to assistance to keep from dying. But, I can give a reason from Con’s own premises to support positive rights, at least for infants. Basically, if rational discourse is the source of our moral framework, then we must make sure that humans reach the stage of development where they can achieve rational discourse. Therefore, infants, who are incapable of rational discourse, but whose growth and development is necessary for it, must be kept safe until they can fend for and protect themselves. To put it simply, “If babies don’t receive assistance, then none would ever grow up into beings capable of rational discourse. In order to protect the stability of rational discourse as a foundation for ethics, babies must be aided to grow into rationally functioning beings. ” The Argument I Actually Made I essentially made the following argument in my affirmative speech that doesn’t beg the question on positive rights, but justifiably assumes their existence from moral experience (lest I be charged with only arguing for positive rights in this conclusion): “If born children have a right to assistance (or a positive right to life) from their parents, and unborn children have the same rights that born children have, it follows that unborn children have a right to assistance from their parents. ” I don’t feel any obligation to defend the first premise, “Born children have a right to assistance from their parents,” because it seems obviously true to anyone with moral reasoning abilities. Consider the following true story: (March 5, 2010) A South Korean couple arrested for allowing their baby to starve to death had been raising an online child, state media reported citing police sources. The couple, residents of a Seoul suburb, allegedly neglected their prematurely born three-month-old daughter, feeding her just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood internet cafe, the official Yonhap news agency reported. Police said the couple had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl character called "Anima" in "Prius Online", a popular role-playing game in South Korea. [ii] If you are like me, you intuitively know that when moral agents, like adult men and women, create helpless children, they owe those children assistance which, at its minimum, should protect those children from death or serious injury. But, if you thought that the baby’s right to be fed is “incoherent” because it denied her parent’s so-called right to “self-ownership,” and therefore it was moral for them to care for a virtual baby instead of their own child, then I can confidently say that your moral sense is simply broken. You are a broken human being. You are like a blind man who denies the existence of colors that everyone else plainly perceives. But if you concede that born children really do have a right to assistance, then I believe my argument for giving unborn children assistance by not aborting them is valid. Con’s entire case rested on denying the positive right to life that born children have. Even if I never defended this right in my opening statement, Con bears the burden of proof in denying the existence of a right and corresponding moral duty that seems patently obvious to nearly everyone. Con objects that a positive right to life leads to incoherencies when he asks, “Who has the duty to feed a starving adult? ” But just because we are unsure in one situation how to apply a right, how does it follow that there are NO situations where we are sure that a person has a certain duty towards another person? (Such as the duties parents have towards their own infants). Is the Fetus Innocent? Con also tries to impugn the fetus as not being innocent or as being unworthy of assistance. He writes, “A fetus occupying a mother's body against her will is violating her rights and cannot be called innocent. I would agree that if fetuses floated around us and deviously implanted themselves inside women, then forceful repulsion would be justified. But of course, fetuses (Latin for little ones) are created by the free actions of their parents. If parents own their bodies, then they must take responsibility for what happens “on their property,” including the creation of helpless humans who, through no fault of their own, naturally need them to live. Conclusion In conclusion, Con is wrong when he argues that moral duties imply that one person “owns” another person. Duties are the natural consequence of rights like “self-ownership. ” Rights are merely claims we have that others leave us be (negative rights) or that other people give us what we deserve (positive rights). The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island. ” As humans who live in community, we must accept the duty to care for one another. While we may disagree how to care for adults (such as whether to distribute public welfare money) surely moral people can agree that we should help defenseless infants and toddlers and not retreat into some cold, voluntaristic ethic of minimal obligation. And if we should help these persons (infants and toddlers), then we should help the most defenseless of persons, the unborn. Thus the resolution stands, “if the fetus is a person, then abortion (directly killing a fetus) is generally immoral. ” [i] . http://plato.stanford.edu... [ii] . http://articles.cnn.com...