Pro Abortion

I will first address your arguements then move on to my own case: <> I fail to see how a woman wanting an abortion to prevent a child from living with a terminal illness is "selfish". This statement if very narrow-minded and without warrant. Believe it or not, the vast majority of abortions are not performed because of selfish reasons. < > Two points. Based on this logic, a seed is a tree, and if you squash a redwood tree seed you are committing a federal offense because the giant redwood tree is federally protected. God forbid you accidentally shuash a redwood tree seed in your world, because you would equate that to cutting down a full grown redwood tree. My second point on this logic: who are you to say that a one second old zygote is a human being? What ives you that right. Until it is written law, this is debateable. Even the top scientists disagree on this point, and this is the crux of my arguement. You make a point about unprotected sex and blame women for their own lack of self control and continue to punish them by forcing them to take care of a child (despite the situation they are bringind that child up in). Here is a statistic for you: over half of the women that get an abortion do so because the contraceptive they were using failed (according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute). So, since you do not give a source for your claim that the vast majority are just getting out of their responsibility and they have to be punished for that, your point is thrown out the window because there is no fact to it. If you want to punish a mother for having sex without a condem, dont use that baby as the instrument. That is selfish and narrowminded. You are forcing women to have babies that may have terminal illness that will live a painful life and possibly die a very young age. You are fporcing babies to be born into horrible conditions such as households that are below the poverty line and not able to financialy support that child. You are forcing babies to be born to single parent households. You are forcing 14 year old girls to take care of a child. Here are yet more statistics for you: 9 out of 10 pregnancies are terminated within the first trimester, partial birth abortion (as you allude to) is illegal and thus not within the scope of the arguement, the abortion rate is declining due to emergency contraceptive use. Based on your logic, you would make emergency contraceptive illegal because a one second old egg is a human. Here is my arguement: Since there is not a universally accepted time marker that legally and socially signifies the begining of a human life, we, as individuals, must look to our own moral standards to make that determination on our own, in private. This being said, I am pro-choice because I am completely against the government dictating morals in any way. Some may say that this arguement is absurd because it is immoral to kill a person, and the government enforces that morality. The difference is that legally and socially, every murder vitcim in the United States is legally and socially recognized as a human being, and thus protected by law. The United States does not yet have a legal definition for the begining of life, that being said, there is no legal precedent that would determine whether life begins in the first, second, or third trimester. Yes, the state governments do have varrying legal definitions that deal with this issue, and that is legally acceptable, but for the United States government to impose a ban accross the board on abortion (as has been advocated by Gov. Mike Huckabee), a national legal definition that establishes when exactly life begins must firet be passed. Until this happens, the government should not ban abortion because it is encoraching upon the right of the individual to make a moral judgement call on their own. I pose this question to my opponent: Who defines when life begins? The government? You? A moral expert? A scientist? Or, should a decision of this magnitude be left up to the person that will have to live with it for the rest of their lifes? Which sounds more moral and right? A government beuracrat, or a woman who will have to look at herself everyday in the mirror and remember that decision? In summation, you, I, and the government have NO right at all to dictate morals to another person. None what so ever. If you had it your way, you would have every abortion doctor convicted and thrown in jail as a murderr, and every woman that had an abortion thrown in jail as an accessory to murder. You say that women should be punished because of their sexual habits, and that the means of punishment should be a child. This is not right, and not moral.