Abortion should be legalized

Thanks for your opening statements, Pro. I look forward to our discussion.Introduction Before I begin, I should note that I'm Pro-abortion. Meaning that I think abortion is morally permissible. However, for the fun of it, I will be playing devil's advocate in this debate. Today I will be defending two contentions in this debate. The first is that abortion is immoral, and should therefore be illegal. The second is that Pro's justifications of abortion are not satisfactory, and should therefore be rejected. With that said, let me begin. Future-Like-Ours ArgumentHere I will be using Don Marquis' future-like-ours argument to defend the anti-abortion position. His argument can be put forth as follows: Premise 1) Killing a being with a future-like-ours (FLO) is immoral. Premise 2) A fetus has a FLO. Conclusion) Killing a fetus is immoral. Defense of Premise 1 I believe this view gives us a good reason for why we believe killing other human beings is morally wrong. When you watch the news and hear family members of a murder victim talk about their deceased relative they often say, "he had his whole life ahead of him" or "now she will never be able to walk down the aisle." The point here is that killing deprives us of a valuable future that we would have experienced had our lives not been cut short. This is why we view killing a normally functioning human being without their consent to be one of the worse if not the worse crime somebody can do. Another good thing about this view, is that it avoids absurdities such as ending the life of a human that is permanently comatose or an anencephalic newborn. On the FLO argument, we can simply argue that the permanently comatose and anencephalic newborn don't have a FLO, and therefore it's not immoral to end their lives. This view on why it's wrong to kill other human beings aligns with our moral intuitions. After all, I think very few people actually believe that it would be immoral to end the life of somebody who would never develop consciousness. Lastly, the FLO argument avoids speciesism, which is the view that a being is valuable only because it is human.Defense of Premise 2 This doesn't really need much defense here. It's quite obvious that the fetus does have a future-like-ours, and that if it was left alone to develop properly, it would have a future filled with pleasurable experiences. Since both premise 1 and 2 are true, the conclusion that killing a fetus is immoral follows. And because abortion directly kills the fetus, abortion is therefore immoral. I will now quote some of the justifications my opponent offered in support of abortion, and respond to them. "If a woman does not want/isn't ready for/cannot raise a child, then why should she have to go through giving birth to it?" -Pro If she does not want/isn't ready for/cannot raise a child then she can give the child up for adoption when it's born. We shouldn't turn to violence in order to solve our problems. "An unborn child doesn't have a birthday, a name, and depending on how far into the pregnancy the woman is, not even a gender, let alone a conscience mind or emotions." -Pro Why do you have to have a birthday or name in order to have moral value? Just because the fetus has no name or birthday, doesn't mean it has no moral value. A human being who is temporarily comatose is also not conscious or experiencing emotions, does this mean it would be morally permissible to end his life without his consent? No, it wouldn't be. Since his coma is temporary, he still has a FLO and therefore it would be wrong to kill him. "If we refuse a woman to choose what happens to her body, we are stripping her of a right that all people are entitled to." -Pro The fetus is not a part of the woman's body like an arm or a leg. Because if that were the case, then that would mean half the time women are pregnant, they have male genitals. The fetus does use the woman's body to live, but it's not an actual body part of the woman. ConclusionIn this paper I have argued successfully that abortion is immoral, and showed that my opponent’s rationalizations for abortion are unconvincing. Since the law ought to make things that are immoral illegal, it follows follows that abortion should be illegal since it deprives the fetus of a future-like-ours. The resolution is negated.Source:http://bama.ua.edu...