Resolved: The United States Government should make abortion illegal.

Thank you for your rebuttals Evangelistic Omega, and I applaud you on staying away from my strengths in the art of debating, and identifying them before the debate. I will now first like to defeat any religious arguments on this debate with this fact: Although the Catholic and Lutheran churches oppose abortion, more of their members believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases versus illegal in all or most cases (51% vs. 45%, Lutheran; 48% vs. 45%, Catholic). [1] This fact would defeat any religious arguments because it states that religious churches, do not actually oppose legalizing abortion. Now that I have defeated any religious arguments I would now like to move on to rebuttals. I"m probably not going to convince you that a fetus isn"t a life, as that"s basically the most intractable part of this whole debate, so I"ll be brief. A fetus can"t survive on its own. It is fully dependent on its mother"s body, unlike born human beings. Even if a fetus was alive, the "right to life" doesn"t imply a right to use somebody else"s body. People have the right to refuse to donate their organs, for example, even if doing so would save somebody else"s life. The "right to life" also doesn"t imply a right to live by threatening somebody else's life. Bearing children is always a threat the life of the mother. A "right to life" is, at the end of the day, a right to not have somebody else"s will imposed upon your body. Do women not have this right as well? In your rebuttals you stated that you would rather have a child alive and in an orphanage. This implies that the only reason a woman would want to get an abortion is to avoid raising a child, and that isn"t the case. Depending on the circumstances, the mere act of having a child in a hospital can cost between $3,000 and $37,000 in the United States. Giving birth is dangerous, too: In the United States, pregnancy complications are the sixth most common cause of death for women between the ages of 20 and 34. Even before birth, there are costs to pregnancy. In addition to the whole "carrying another human being around in your stomach for nine months" thing, many women, particularly teens, are shunned and shamed for their pregnancies " not only by friends, families, employers, and classmates, but also by advertisements in the subway. There's also the risk of violent retribution from abusive partners and parents. In short, there are a lot of reasons a woman might seek an abortion. Adoption doesn"t address all of them. Now I will move on to my constructive speech. A woman's risk of dying from having an abortion is 0.6 in 100,000, while the risk of dying from giving birth is around 14 times higher (8.8 in 100,000). [2] The mortality rate of a colonoscopy is more than 40 times greater than that of an abortion.[3] The US Supreme Court has declared abortion to be a "fundamental right" guaranteed by the US Constitution. The landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade, decided on Jan. 22, 1973 in favor of abortion rights, remains the law of the land. The 7-2 decision stated that the Constitution gives "a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy," and that "This right of privacy... is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. [4] Women who receive abortions are less likely to suffer mental health problems than women denied abortions. A Sep. 2013 peer-reviewed study comparing the mental health of women who received abortions to women denied abortions found that women who were denied abortions "felt more regret and anger" and "less relief and happiness" than women who had abortions. The same study also found that 95% of women who received abortions "felt it was the right decision" a week after the procedure. [5] Studies by the American Psychological Association (APA), the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC), and researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health all concluded that purported links between abortion and mental health problems are unfounded. [6] Women who are denied abortions are more likely to become unemployed, to be on public welfare, to be below the poverty line, and to become victims of domestic violence. A University of California at San Francisco study found that women who were turned away from abortion clinics (because they had passed the gestational limit imposed by the clinic) were three times more likely to be below the poverty level two years later than women who were able to obtain abortions. 76% of the "turnaways" ended up on unemployment benefits, compared with 44% of the women who had abortions. The same study found that women unable to obtain abortions were more likely to stay in a relationship with an abusive partner than women who had an abortion, and were more than twice as likely to become victims of domestic violence. [7] [8] Abortion reduces crime. According to a study co-written by Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt, PhD, and published in the peer-reviewed Quarterly Journal of Economics, "legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions." Around 18 years after abortion was legalized, crime rates began to drop abruptly, and crime rates dropped earlier in states that allowed abortion earlier. Because "women who have abortions are those most at risk to give birth to children who would engage in criminal activity," and women who had control over the timing of childbearing were more likely to raise children in optimal environments, crime is reduced when there is access to legal abortion. [9] It is for the reasons that I have stated above, and in my previous speech that I would encourage a vote against the resolution. I look forward to my opponents rebuttals and speech in the next round. Below you will see a list of the resources that I have used to write my rebuttals and speech. Thank you for your time. Resources: [1]Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, US Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Beliefs and Practices: Diverse and Politically Relevant, religions.pewforum.org, June 2008 [2]E.G. Raymond and D.A. Grimes, "The Comparative Safety of Legal Induced Abortion and Childbirth in the United States," Obstetrics and Gynecology, Feb. 2012 [3]American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and American Medical Association, "Brief of Amici Curiae [in Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services et al. v. Attorney General Gregory Abbot et al.]," acog.org, Dec. 19, 2013 [4]Roe v. Wade (342 KB) , US Supreme Court, lp.findlaw.com, Jan. 22, 1973 [5]Corinne H. Rocca, Katrina Kimport, et al., "Women's Emotions One Week after Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion in the United States," Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Sep. 2013 [6]Susan A. Cohen, "Still True: Abortion Does Not Increase Women"s Risk of Mental Health Problems," Guttmacher Policy Review, Spring 2013 [7]Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), University of California at San Francisco, "Turnaway Study," ansirh.org (accessed Apr. 22, 2014) [8]Annalee Newitz, "What Happens to Women Denied Abortions? This Is the First Scientific Study to Find Out," io9.com, Nov. 13, 2012 [9]John J. Donohue, and Steven D. Levitt, "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2001 (Despite admitting to an error in one of this study's tables, Levitt has stated that "the story we put forth in the paper is not materially changed by the coding error." See Steven D. Levitt, "Everything in Freakonomics Is Wrong!," freakonomics.com, Nov. 28, 2005)