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

I primarily defended the personhood of the unborn in my opening argument because I feel that their intrinsic value carries significant weight against the bodily-rights argument. I also did not know which variant of the bodily-rights argument my opponent would use and chose to wait until this rebuttal to offer my thoughts on it. I have attempted to reconstruct Con’s opening argument into this form: We are having an argument. An argument is meaningless unless the arguers participate freely. Arguers cannot be free unless they have control over their choices and property. Control over choices and property is guaranteed by property rights. These rights can never be violated if rational discourse is to be maintained. Our bodies are our property. We maintain full control over our bodies. Abortion involves a woman controlling her body (her property) and her right to abort can never be limited without limiting her property rights. Therefore, abortion is not immoral. I believe Con’s argument fails to justify abortion rights because it requires us to assume the truth of premises that are even MORE controversial than the conclusion of the argument. Point 1: Freedom and Arguments While premise one is obviously true, it is not true that an argument itself depends on the freedom of the arguers (premise two). It is true that having an argument, where the goal is to change patterns of thinking, would be meaningless without freedom. However, “having an argument” or “rational discourse” is not the same thing as an argument itself. An argument is merely a series of premises used to support the truth of a conclusion. When conducting an argument, the parties only assume that laws of logic, such as “a=a,” or “A statement cannot be true and false at the same time in the same sense,” are true. Arguments would indeed become meaningless without these assumptions, but freedom is not a presupposition required for an argument to be true. After all, if I presented an argument in defense of concentration camp victims’ right-to-life to an SS officer while imprisoned at Auschwitz, my argument would still be correct even though I have no real freedom to present it or have it rationally considered. Point 2: The Limits of Property Rights By far, the most counterintuitive portion of Con’s argument is his strong claims about property rights and positive rights. Con writes, “ . . . we may not violate the property rights of other people if we hold discourse to be a rational means of normative inquiry. ” Bu this clearly seems to be false and I can provide several examples to show that property rights are routinely curtailed in the interest of more compelling rights. For example, Animals are considered property, but we arrest people for practicing animal cruelty. Owners of private property must keep their establishments safe for other people. In particular, owners of property that contain attractive nuisances, or hazards that attract children, can be held liable for injuries children receive, even when the children are trespassing. [i] My property can be commandeered by police to pursue a suspect[ii], I can be compelled to sit on a jury, and I could be drafted by the government in the event of a national emergency. [iii] I own my speech (intellectual property) and the body that utters it, but the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1914 that even a basic freedom like speech can be curtailed in the interest of public safety. The Court ruled that free speech does not give someone the right to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater because of the danger that the speech creates. [iv] Most states outlaw prostitution and drug use because individual property rights are trumped by the need to protect the common good. Point 3: The Existence of Duties and Positive Rights Con claims that positive rights are incoherent and therefore do not exist. He writes, “A positive right is a claim to have an act performed by another person. The existence of such a right would automatically violate the negative right of self-ownership of someone else through binding him to act in a certain way and would therefore be unacceptable. ” But consider this thought experiment analogous to sex and pregnancy: Imagine a room with black and white tiles. 85 percent of the tiles are white and 15 percent are black. At the end of the room is a machine that creates either a delicious dessert or a baby. Stepping on a white tile causes a baby to emerge, while stepping on a black tile causes the dessert to emerge. A person who simply walks across the room to use the machine will have an 85% chance of causing a baby to be created. Some people use awkward tile-jumping techniques that drop the percentage to about 60%. Others use anti-pressure socks that usually don’t activate the tiles and only fail 15% of the time (but they feel uncomfortable to wear). Still others use hover shoes that only fail 1% of the time (but they are made of a metal that causes irritability, bloating, and decreases libido). Regardless, anyone entering the room knows they stand some chance of creating the baby. What would we think of someone, whether they intended to or not, who stepped on a white tile and simply walked out of the room and let the baby that was created die? They might say, “The baby has a negative right not to be shot, but it doesn’t have a positive right to demand that another person, like me, feed it. ” If you believe that this baby has a positive right to be cared for because they were created by a moral agent, then I cannot see how a fetus is not entitled to similar care. Point 4: The Rights of the Fetus Con claims that the woman does not enter into a contract with the fetus so no duty towards the fetus is required, but contracts only apply to moral agents (like human adults), not moral patients. Moral patients, like animals, fetuses, infants, the handicapped, ecosystems, or even future generations, may not be able to act morally themselves, but their nature may still require us to act morally towards them even if no contractual arrangement is arranged between either party. [v] I would agree with Con that a woman has the right to expel anything that is not a person (such as a tumorous growth) from her body. But I provided compelling evidence that a fetus is a person and therefore this person would have property rights over his own body that an abortionist may compromise. Because the woman has caused the fetus to need the use of her body, and because pregnancy is an ordinary way we provide care to fetal persons (unlike general organ donation), then she is obligated to provide that care. The father is also obligated to provide the child with material resources because he is involved in the child’s creation. Neither mother, nor father, should be permitted to use the fetus’ body without his consent (through aborting it) as a means to have sex and not give birth to a child. Con may object that while a baby has a right to material assistance, a fetus has no right to physically use a woman’s body. But if the fetus is a person, then it has a right to life. And a right to life for a fetus means a right to the basic elements of its survival (just as my right-to-life includes the right to not be placed against my will inside a volcano). There is only one place where a fetus can meaningfully have this basic right -- the womb. Therefore, if we affirm that the fetus is a person, then it follows that he does have a claim against the moral agent (woman) who created him and a right to live in the womb in which he can naturally survive. [i] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [ii] . http://www.slate.com... [iii] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [iv] . http://en.wikipedia.org... [v] . http://www.blackwellreference.com...