Abortion Is Wrong

Yes, I am being very speciest. If speciesism was a real thing, then we should all be in jail- if you took a shower today and washed your hair, then you commited mass murder against tens of thousands hair mites. Shampoo is absorbed into the bodies of the dust mites until they explode. Are you telling me that we need to treat dust mites and humans equally so as not to be 'speciest'? Of course not! Speciesm does not exist! You might say that because human are more intelligent than they are we are therefore more valuable, but what would that mean with just humans? Is someone more intelligent more valuable than one that's less intelligent? So again: Speciesm is not a real thing. Who should be the first we kill if humans have no intrinsic value?Next, you said that we approach a grey area when we look at a one-year old's desire to live, and, because what you assert the thing that gives us the right to live is our desire for it, you really say that killing a one-year old is a grey area. Do you really mean that? And is that what you want everyone to believe? That when a mother drowns her one-year-old child in the bathtub, a court should have a hard time deciding whether what she did was wrong? This is your exchange for my "absurd conclusions"?I want to bring up a very important point. You say that it's the desire to live that gives humans a right to life. Why? You simply assert this like it's fact.Suppose I'm in a terrible car wreck in which I'm placed in a coma for 9 months. The doctors tell me none of my memories will be retained, I will have to touch a hot stove to know not to do that anymore, I won't know who my mother and father are, I'll have to relearn my motor skills, how to walk, how to talk, how to speak English etc. I am now in the same psychological position the fetus is in, right? So am I now allowed to be killed, due to my lack of desire to live? Michael Boonin, from whom it seems you grabbed some of your analogies and arguments would say be forced to say yes. And if you or he said no, what grounds would you have to stand on? It can't be my past experiences like you quoted, rather, it must be my human nature that stays your hands. I have a hypothesis of why our human nature is important to us, but it is from my religous views. So as not to turn this into a religious debate, I will refrain from explaining. I think it's self-evident that we do have this thing called 'human nature' however. Like I explained before, why, if all species are of equal value, would you eat? Eat anything. All animals are animals so they all deserve equal rights, correct? So maybe you're a vegetarian. But are not plants species as well, and aren't they living? So why are you condoning the killing of plants if you don't want to be speciesist? What I'm trying to prove is that why we would rather eat a head of lettuce instead of a head of a girl is because we all have a human nature within us, that absent of a desire to live, gives us the right to life. You said something later on about wanting to kill someone earlier rather than later because later, there will be human attachment. This is also an agrument that can't hold water. You don't have the moral justification to kill a hermit that walks into town from the mountains just because no one knows or cares about him. You can't convince a jury with that. And using that same logic, someone with 6 people showing up to their funeral was more valuable and had more of a right to life than someone with only 5 people. And it'd be better to kill someone who wasn't going to have anyone show up to the fueral than it would be to kill someone with one person coming. Lastly you say that it would be wrong to kill a one-year old because, "it's possible that it could desire to live." So can a fetus! Being conscious, being exposed to the world, having experience, and having concepts and desires for food and water are all things the unborn could possibly desire in the future! So according to your own logic, a fetus would have every right to life a one-year old would have. (I'd also like to point out that in the beginning of the round you said killing a one-year old was a grey area. Now you say it's wrong. What exactly do you believe?)Now the violinist analogy. Stephen Schwarz says, "The very thing that makes it possible to say that the person in bed with the violinist has no duty to sustain him; namely, that he is a stranger unnaturally hooked up to him, is precisely what is absent in the case of the mother and her child.” What if the woman woke up connected to her own two-year old? What kind of mother would willingly cut the life-line to her own child? And what would we think of her if she did? The analogy you make assumes a mother has no more duty to her own offspring than she does a total stranger. Secondly, the child isn't an intruder. If the child doesn't belong in the womb, where does it belong? Schwarz then says, "That a woman looks upon her child as a burglar or an intruder is already an evil, even if she refreains from killing her." Third, your analogy says abortion is the same as withholding support of the child, when really, it is an extremely violent, proactive murder. It is one thing to withhold support from someone, but it's an entirely different thing to poison, crush, or dismember them. Francis J. Beckwith says, "Euphemistically calling abortion the 'witholding of support' makes about as much sense as calling suffocating someone with a pillow the withdrawing of oxygen." "If the only way you can exercise your right to withhold support is to kill another human being, I may not do it," says Scott Klusendorf. Lastly, barring cases of rape, a woman can't claim she has no responsibility for the child. When a man and woman engage in sex, they engage in the only natural way to create another human being. Hence, she can't be compared to the woman plugged in against her will. In a debate against Dr. Meredith Williams, Scott Klusendorf asked her this, and I'd like to know how you'd respond, since this deals with women having absolute right to bodily autonomy: "Let’s say a woman has intractable nausea and vomiting and insists on taking thalidomide to help her symptoms. After having explained the horrific risks of birth defects that have arisen due to this medication, she still insists on taking it based on the fact that the fetus has no right to her body anyway. After being refused thalidomide from her physician, she acquires some and takes it, resulting in her child developing no arms. Do you believe that she did anything wrong? Would you excuse her actions based on her right to bodily autonomy? The fetus after all is an uninvited guest, and has no right even to life,let alone an environment free from pathogens." Please know that I'm not trying to influence anyone with merely quoting someone, I'm only wanting to give him the credit with the question because it wasn't me who came up with it. The reason I say abortion is permissible if the mother's life is in danger, is based only on a factual point of view. Paramedics, firefighters, police, all are trained, in dire situations like a family in a car going over a bridge, to save the most viable first. That means they would try and save the strongest, healthiest looking man before they'd take the woman or child. Why? It's due only on the fact that men are proven to survive more often than women or children, and so to save the most lives, they should make men their first priority. I use the same logic here: the mother has a much higher chance of surviving the pregnancy than the baby does, so measures should be taken to save the mother's life first, but only after all other options are exhausted to save both. I'm not claiming one is more valuable than the other, just that one is more likely to survive. And this would be my same response to the argument of two burning buildings, one with a child, the other with 2 fetuses. The child is statistically more viable. Lastly, when you talk about killing people in permanent comas, please note that first, it's highly controversial. Using an unknown variable to prove the validity of another unknown variable is illogical. Second, note that the fetus has a future to do all the things we value in life, while the person in the permanent coma has used up all of his, and all he has now is sleep, which we know none of us want to live in, and therefore you could argue we're doing him a favor. The comatose person has nothing to look forward to but death, the child has everything to look forward to in life. In conclusion, I have shown the flaws in the violinist analogy and shown that it does not successfully show that abortion is morally permissible, and I have shown that because the fetus is alive and human, it has a right to life becuase of it's human nature.