Abortion Is Morally Permissible

At this point, I would for the most part be reiterating my arguments. So I’ll try not to take up too much space as what I need to say has basically been said already.1. Sanctity of Life 1. I have explained that since the irreversible unconscious do not have a Future-Like-Ours, we are morally justified in pulling the plug. The person they are is gone, whereas a fetus still has a Future-Like-Ours that makes them valuable. I have explained this several times. I don’t know why Freeman keeps missing it. The Future-Like-Ours view clearly makes Freeman’s attack of Premise 1 baseless. He has relied on appeals to authority and misquoting or misrepresenting pro-life advocates (Josh Brahm and Trent Horn) in order to try and support his attack. I have very clearly responded to his claim. Under theSubstance View, all human beings have a right to life. This means you must have a morally justified reason for ending their life. The brain-dead individual and irreversibly comatose are essentially dead. The person they are is gone. They have no future like ours. The unborn do. Additionally, I did not appeal to Trent. Pro did. I was showing that Pro’s appeal to Trent was dishonest, as were his appeals to Josh. 2. Pro has simply ignored my argument. He has not offered a reason for why sexism or racism is wrong. I have offered a reason, that we are all humans. The reason sexism or racism is wrong is because you are discriminating against humans for unfair reasons (as abortion rights discriminates against the unborn). 3. I have already responded to this. My qualities for human value are not fallacious, and Pro has not proven them wrong. If there were a possible world in which humans don’t have the qualities that make them valuable, then they would not be valuable. 4. I never attacked the usefulness of thought experiments. I attacked the usefulness of thisthought experiment. Like Trent and Josh, Pro is now misrepresenting my own argument. I really don’t think we can take Pro’s assertions about pro-life philosophers seriously since he continues to misrepresent the words or arguments of pro-life advocates. See my last round argument for my response to this argument, which Pro has not disputed. Pro is not representing Brahm’s position honestly. Brahm only agreed for the sake of the debatethat aborting anencephalic fetuses was acceptable only because they were extremely rare. Pro is being dishonest by stating that Josh believes aborting anencephalic fetuses is morally justified. 2. Personhood of the Fetus As Freeman states, person means “a being with a right to life. ” Blacks in the south were not “beings with a right to life” and so were not persons under the definition Pro has given. However, the pro-life view is consistent, that all humans deserve a right to life and so all beings should be considered persons, whether or not society accepts them as such. The anti-slavery view was the pro-life view. 1. Pro has not given his acceptance or rejection of infanticide. The reality is that if we accept Warren’s critera for personhood, we must also accept infanticide. Pro says that birth marks a very good spot to grant right to life. So Pro’s argument is contradictory. He must either acceptinfanticide, or reject Warren’s criteria for personhood which would also mean that infanticide were morally justified. Con has now shown that my criteria for personhood, that the unborn have theinherent capacity as moral, rational agents , should be rejected. As such, I extend this criteria and reject Freeman’s as contradictory. On a side note, birth is not a good place to grant a right to life. This would mean that a child born at seven months (two months premature) would be more valuable than a child nine months in the womb. The two month premature child would have a right to life while the nine-month-old childin utero would not. 2. My objection here does not fail. If conscious experiences in the past were essential for a right to life, this would grant the irreversibly comatose and brain-dead humans a right to life. Pro cannot reject this just because he says so. This obviously cannot be morally significant in granting aright to life. 3. We are pretty much in agreement here, although I’m not sure it could ever be proven that a robot is truly self-aware and not just mimicking self-awareness (think the Chinese room experiment). 4. Even if we grant that conjoined twins (notice that even Pro uses the plural here) are one organism, this doesn’t follow that they’re not two separate individuals. They may share one organ but two people are obviously present. In some cases, they just couldn’t be separated without killing one or both of them. It is not irrelevant what the twins think about themselves. The fact that the two twins are capable of independent thought would lend support to the fact that they are two separate people. 5. Pro has not offered a defense against the indoctrinated slave or child with an inheritance, despite his assertion. One does not need actual desires to have an ideal desire. We cannot assume a fetus would not desire to live, just because he currently does not have “actual desires. ” This is the height of arrogance. There is absolutely no reason to suppose a child would not want to live, just because he does not currently have a desire to do so, whether he or she has current desires at all. Conclusion Unfortunately, Pro has relied on shotgun argumentation to support his case so I couldn’t give any of the arguments the attention they deserved. But suffice it to say, the pro-choice position is the one with insurmountable problems (which could more easily be shown if I had many more characters to argue with). The fact of the matter is that the pro-life position is the inclusive one. We accept all humans, regardless of their differences, as valuable and possessing a right to live. We believing in protecting those rights, and only taking them away with a morally justifiable reason. The pro-choice position is inherently flawed and discriminatory, not to mention contradictory. The pro-life position says that all humans are valuable from fertilization. This does not change from human from human. No matter where a pro-choice advocate decides to place basic human rights, there will always be clear counterexamples that applies to someone outside the womb (as Pro’s tacit support of infanticide by accepting Warren’s criteria for personhood).