Abortion should be illegal.

I negate the resolution to show that abortion should continue to be legal. Building my own case: 1. Making abortions illegal doesn't mean they will stop Before abortion was made legal, illegal abortions were widespread. According to Associated Content, in 1932, 15,000 women died each year due to illegally and improperly performed abortions. [1] Making abortion legal, for the most part, removed the need to perform illegal, dangerous abortions in backwater clinics under unsafe conditions. However, a study by Planned Parenthood in 2010 of immigrant women found that due to poverty, women would try to induce an abortion by taking a beverage of alcohol and aspirin, throwing themselves down stairs and having someone punch them in the stomach. [2] Women also attempt to inject dangerous chemicals into their uterus or employ a coat hangar or other sharp object to remove the fetus. You must realize that just because you believe that "personhood" starts at the moment when the sperm breaches the ovum doesn't mean that other people do. And the people who do not believe so have empirically shown that they are willing to seek abortions, whether or not they are legal. At least when abortions are legal, they are subject to reasonable medical standards, and women don't need to die seeking unsafe back-alley abortions. 2. Alternatives The alternative to banning abortions is to promote safe sex using proper sex education. All the empirical evidence points to the fact that children will not stop having sex just because we tell them to do so. The Guttmacher Institute reports in 2006 that 13% of teens aged 15 and under admit to engaging in sexual intercourse, while 70% of 19 year olds admit to having had sex. [3] The problem is with abstinence only sex education programs, such as the one that Bristol Palin attended, which don't teach teens safe alternative to abstinence, such as condom usage. The Sexuality Information and Education Council reports that Congress has funneled $1.5 billion to abstinence only programs in recent years. [4] However, a British Medical Journal meta-analysis of 13 studies done to date found that all the studies point to the following result: that abstinence only education (compared to students not receiving ANY sex education) does not decrease the rate of vaginal sex or the number of sexual partners; does not increase condom use, and (unsurprisingly based on the former) does not decrease pregnancy or STD transmission rates. [5] If we taught children how to have safe sex, we could decrease the number of abortions performed. This is the most practical policy method for anti-abortion advocates to pursue, if they want the number of abortions to decrease. 3. Motives for abortion Despite some characterizations, women who get abortions are usually women who have already had a child, use birth control but had it fail, and cannot afford another child. The Center for Disease Control reports that 60% of women who get abortions have already had one child. [6] According to studies by the Guttmacher Institute. "a majority of women who report their reasons for seeking abortion say they can't afford a child or are unready to raise one. Women living below the federal poverty level are more than four times more likely to terminate a pregnancy than women earning above 300 percent of the poverty level. Latina women and Black women terminate pregnancies at two and three times the rate of white women." [7] Acclaimed economist Steven Levitt notes that when we legalized abortion, the crime rate started declining rapidly approximately 15-20 years later. His explanation is that unwanted children, whose mothers could not afford to raise them without sinking further into poverty, were instead aborted. These children would have been most at-risk for committing crimes or joining gangs. [8] It is a bad idea to flood society either with unwanted children or children that families cannot afford to raise. 4. Exceptional cases There is one case where no one can argue that abortion should not be legal: in situations where carrying the child to term will undoubtedly result in the death of the mother (and thus also the fetus). One such case is an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus is growing somewhere outside the uterus, usually in a fallopian tube. This pregnancy could not be carried to term – both the mother and fetus would die long before the fetus could survive on its own. Women on the Web reports that abortions to end ectopic pregnancies are allowed, even in places where abortion is severely restricted. [9] Responding to my opponent's case: 1. Abortion is murder If this is the case, women's bodies routinely murder their offspring. A woman's body knows to dispel a fetus if it has any serious mutations that would prevent it from becoming a functional human being. This is why babies are never born without major organs, since the woman miscarries long before the fetus is carried to term. Abortion is thus something that is routinely practiced by natural biological processes in nature. In addition, murder is defined as killing another person, not killing a living thing. All people agree that the fetus is living. Whether it is a "person" yet is up for debate. Webster's Dictionary defines a person as "being an individual or existing as an indivisible whole; existing as a distinct entity." [10] A fetus is essentially on life support from its mother and cannot survive on its own. Most moderate pro-choice advocates like myself are willing to concede that late term abortions should not occur, since at that point the fetus has fully developed lungs and heart, so it can survive on its own. But before the third trimester, the fetus cannot survive without the umbilical cord. In addition, Brian Elroy points out that the other distinctive feature of a "person" is what we know as "consciousness." [11] In many ways, killing an animal for meat is more inhumane than ending the contingent life of a fetus because the fetus cannot feel pain at that point in its development but the animal can. So an abortion ends a life, but does not kill a person (a distinct, conscious being). An abortion ends the life of a potential person, much as a women's body would in nature during a miscarriage. Consider the following thought experiment based on the one created by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. [12] In the middle of the night, a stranger drugs you and then attaches you to a dying person via a cord of some kind, through which flows many of your vital life giving juices. You are then told that the cord is necessary to keep the person alive and that if you sever the cord, the person will die. If you choose not to live the rest of your life attached by a short cord to this person and decide to sever the cord, can you really be said to have committed murder? 2. Adoption Not all babies get adopted. Remember from above that African American women terminate pregnancies at three times the rate of white women. And African American babies are the least likely to get adopted. The New York Times cites a study that Black, male babies are considered by prospective parents as the least adoptable. [13] NPR reports that 50% of children waiting to be placed within the foster children are African American. [14] I don't know how pro-lifers feel about this, but NPR continues that many African American babies are placed with gay couples because gay couples often times get last priority from adoption agencies. Living as an unwanted child in the foster care system is a terrible experience. HG Legal Directories reports that ""As many as 75 percent of all children in foster care, upon leaving the system, will have experienced sexual abuse." [15] Banning abortions would likely inundate the foster care/adoption system with more children that they are capable of handling. Many of these children will be racial minorities that are the most difficult to place in loving homes.