Abortion is Murder

It is simply false that everyone knows what murder is and is not. Like many concepts, murder is 'fuzzy round the edges'. There are instances where we can all agree that X is murder, but there are also instances where there is widespread disagreement about whether a given instance is murder. In fact, I would argue that most people do not agree that abortion is murder. If people seriously believed that what developed countries were doing was morally equivalent to the holocaust, surely there would be widespread civil uprising, rioting and violence to try to prevent it. People might hold as a religious or ethical belief that abortion is equivalent to murder, but they do not act as if this were the case. I used anencephaly to illustrate a point. Pro misconstrued this example as an irrelevant digression in euthanasia. This is not the point. The point was that an anencephalic infant is a human being. If we can agree that an anencephalic infant does not have a right to life, then as a simple logical consequence, being a human being cannot be a sufficient condition for having a right to life. We require something in addition to being a human being to have right to life. I argue that this additional characteristic is personhood. If Pro is to remain consistent, he must either provide an alternative characteristic which grants something a right to life, or maintain the absurd position that we ought to sustain the life of an infant with anencephaly for as long as possible because that infant has a right to life. Counterpoints Human life begins at conception. As a biological fact this is obviously true. As Pro points out, I do not consider this the important point. What matters is whether being human is a sufficient condition for having a right to life, and I think it's obvious that this is not the case. 1: Pro points out that most fetus' have the capacity to develop into persons. This is true: it just isn't important. There are a multiplicity of reasons for rejecting the belief that the capacity or potential to develop into a person is not sufficient to grant something a right to life. The most devastating, in my opinion, is this: if we take this belief to its logical conclusion then we are literally murdering potential persons by not having sex at every possible opportunity. Taken together, every single sperm from every single fertile man combined with every fertile female ovum constitutes a potential person. There is no reason to arbitrarily endow a potential person with a right to life from the moment of conception, for potential persons arise far sooner that that. However, this is clearly not a sensible point to maintain since we don't regard all the potential people that never come into existence as a moral tragedy. 2a: Killing people who are under a general anaesthetic or in a coma would violate their preference to continue living and have the opportunity to wake up prior to entering the coma or being knocked out. Furthermore, they have already acquired the characteristics for personhood even in those characteristics are temporarily not present. Finally, it isn't obvious that they do lose those characteristics while in a coma or knocked out. They might be present but to a lesser extent. With regards to mentally disabled people: if they are so mentally disabled that they possess one or less of the characteristics of personhood, they are borderline brain dead and I agree that they should not be given a right to life. 2b. The small collection of cells after fertilisation obviously possesses none of the characteristics of personhood. I am inclined to think that personhood is gradually acquired throughout development. However this simply need not detain us: Pro is defending the position that abortion is murder. If there are cases where it is not, such as early in pregnancy, then the resolution is false. Personally I am agnostic towards late-term abortion. 3. I have already addressed this in two ways: firstly, I gave two examples in favour of the view that personhood is what we value. The examples were anencephalic infants, which clearly do not have a right to live yet are human being and possess human DNA. The second was a race of alien persons, who are neither human nor posses human DNA yet we would plausibly extend rights to them. This implies that the relevant distinction to draw between beings that have a right to life and those that do not is that they are persons. I am not committing a fallacious appeal to authority as Pro seems to imply. Rather, I maintain that reflecting on various ethical cases leads us to the conclusion that personhood is the important characteristic with regards to a right to live. 4: The comparison to Nazi's is an utterly fallacious argument anyway: it's a blatant example of the fallacy of guilt by association. Merely because X bad person believed Y does not entail that Y is false. Hitler probably believed that Britain is a country. Just because he was evil does not make that belief false. However, aside from that Pro's argument depends on the assumption that I have given no reason to regard personhood as important: this is begging the question. I already provided arguments as to why that is the case. 5: Pro points out that some Pro-choicers use the examples of rape and incest. This is a strawman - I did not bring those examples up and so there is no point in Pro refuting them. He also says that the the majority of abortions are performed for convenience. However, this is irrelevant. If the developing embryos do not have a right to life then killing them is not murder, even if it is just for convenience. 6: Pro ends by tarring all pro-choicers (abortionists is misleading because pro-choicers are not in favour of abortions per say - most would like the number of abortions to decrease - but rather the freedom to choose to have an abortion) as people who are trying to justify their own screw ups. Well, speaking from personal experience this is false. Whenever I have sex I use double protection and it is unlikely that I will have children for a long time, or that I will get anyone pregnant for a long time. I hold the position that abortion should be allowed because I think it is the most rational position to take.