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

I am hoping that this will turn out to be a very good debate. Contention 1: A fetus and Personhood. I will begin by first addressing the personhood of the unborn fetus. Now, my opponent is more then likely state that a fetus is a human and therefore, has the right to life and I would agree with him. A fetus is clearly a member of the biological species Homo Sapiens. However, just being human does not intell that one should automaditcally gets rights. I will argue that 'persons' are the ones who are the ones who should be given rights. I will define a person as an entity individual entity,morally conscious being capable of forming a complex thought and possessing the capacity (but not nessasarily the ability) to comunitcate their thoughts through language. This definition includes no animals. All of the said requirements for personhood are far more valuable in determining personhood then apindages. A fetus has none of these, thus it can not be treated like you and I. It can not be treated as the same as a baby that is newly born because a baby has the capabily to do these things and it has the brain capacity to be an individual and form a semi-complex thought. So, since a fetus is not a person then it has no serious right to life. Contention 2: Self-Ownership Everyone has self-ownership. To deny it would be to deny your selves, and neither I or my opponent would be in this debate because we would most likely be doing whatever our government told us to do. So with this stated, women have complete dominion over their body's. If something is wrong with it then they have the right to fix it, if they want to make it better or worse in their eyes then that is their choice, and furthermore, if a fetus forms there without their permission then they have the choice on whether or not she is wants to let it stay there whether it be a human/person or not. Despite whatever "right to life" "pro-lifers" may claim it possesses, it has not right to be where it is unwelcomed and invited. Fetus's are not intitled to women's bodies, they do not own women's bodies, and neither do governments. Contention 3: Overpopulation I will start out my last contention with a quote by Christ Hedges who is a former "New York Times" correspondent and author of the article "We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction". In it he writes: "All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth," Hedges wrote. "By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. " [1] Now, I am sure that not to many people are actually aware of the population crises in America or the world for that matter, but in spite of the small amounts of media and news coverage the threat is very real. At our current birth rate by the year 2050 the Earth's population will be between 8 million people to 10 million people[1]. The U. S. has nearly quadrupled the number of people within its boundaries in the past century; if our population multiplies by that same amount within the coming century we will hold over one billion people. There are two factors that play a part in this and I will get to my point with this soon after. 1. The first being fertility rates, the U. S. has a fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman. the U. S. ’s highest fertility rate since 1971. (For comparison, the United Kingdom’s fertility rate is 1.7, Canada's is 1.4, and Germany's is 1.3. )[2]. 2. And the next is immegration. Immigration contributes over one million people to the U. S. population annually. The total foreign-born population in the U. S. is now 31.1 million, a record 57 percent increase since 1990 [2]. The following graphs further deminstrates the rapid growth in population in the U. S. U. S. POPULATION PROJECTIONS Year Projected population Percent changefrom population in2000 2010 310,233,000 10% 2020 341,387,000 21% 2030 373,504,000 32% 2040 405,655,000 44% 2050 439,010,000 55% Now immagine an overpopulated disaster in the U. S. Imagine lands that once could be enjoyed for their natural beauty are now concrete jungles, our country's children attend schools that are overloaded and lack the teacher to student interaction we once had, social infrastructures and systems are overloaded, natural resources are being depleted, and our environment is being tasked beyond its limits. Abortions, though not final solution to this problem can lower the birth rate so we can find a solution to it. That is all for now, I thank the people who read this. I will now await my opponent's argument. Solutions[1]. http://rense.com......[2]http://www.npg.org......