Abortion is always Morally Permissible

Thanks, Envisage! I will now, as per the rules, present a constructive case.INTROIn my case, I will examine three ways to approach the topic of abortion and morality. There may be some overlap between ideas, but I intend for them to operate with a fair amount of independence; by this I mean that just one of these arguments should be sufficient to negate, and that each one is distinct enough to have to be addressed individually, vice lumped together and rebutted as a cluster. I also will take this moment to point out that even if I win none of the arguments that I am about to present, that does not mean I lose the debate. Since Pro bears 100% of the BOP, unless he can persuasively uphold the resolution, he loses. I do not need to negate; merely, I must prevent Pro from affirming. With this laid out, I'll transition into the body of my arguments.P1. PERSONHOODThis is, perhaps, the most common objection to abortion. I am using personhood as a term that applies to an agent or thing that has inherent moral worth; the moral worth creates a presumption against killing, because to kill is to essential obliterate the moral value of a person, creating a net negative in moral output. There are cases where this presumption can be overridden, but as long as the presumption succeeds at least once, it's sufficient for me to win. The first thing that needs to be established, then, is that humans, or, at a minimum, the average human, has personhood status. We can do this in a variety of disparate ways; the following is more of a list of possible ways to valuate humans, rather than individual arguments. Utilitarians might argue that the human capacity for pleasure and pain makes gives humans moral significance. Certainly, pleasure and pain are key factors in determining our self-interest, and so under an egoistic framework, these feelings take on moral weight. Kantians might assert that human's capacity for autonomy gives us moral worth. The difference between myself and a chair, or the difference between myself an a gold fish, is that I can make moral decisions. This capacity to make moral decisions is what makes us unique, and conveys upon us this moral worth. Sociobiologists or Darwinian Ethicists might claim that life is valuable because it helps to advance the species. Morality has arisen as a survival mechanism for humanity, and the idea of "survival in numbers" encourages placing a value on life and procreation. Finally, still others might claim that our future is what gives us moral worth (more on this later.) Whatever your justification, it is intuitively obvious that life has to have some kind of moral value, and that there ought to be a presumption against killing.Following from that, it is not hard to make the claim that, if personhood can be applied to a fetus, abortion is wrong. This logical can be displayed more formally: P1. Persons ought not be terminated.P2. Fetuses/Embryos are Persons.C1. Fetuses/Embryos ought not be terminated. It is my contention that there is no good post-implantation/fertilization criterion that exudes fetuses from personhood and so, unless Pro can proffer such a criterion, there is a moral presumption against abortion. To expound on this argument, I will refute two common criteria used to determine what is/is not a person: (1) survival outside of the womb and (2) full development. Also, just so no one accuses me of plagiarizing myself, I am arguing view here I floated in an earlier thread on DDO.Fetal ViabilityMy primary concern is that this brightline is changeable, and that implies arbitrariness. Let's take a look at two identical mothers (A and B), with two identical fetuses--the only difference between them is one mother is pregnant in 2014, and another is pregnant in 2020.Both have their babies during the 23 week of gestation. Due to insufficient technological advancement, mother A's fetus doesn't survive. Yet, six years later, the technology has grown enough that mother B's baby does survive. Under the fetal viability threshold to personhood, the first baby isn't a person, but the second baby is. It seems to unacceptably tie whether something is a person to how advanced we are technologically...and technological prowess doesn't seem like it should have anything to do with the issue.Full DevelopmentBy "full" development, I don't mean to adulthood, but rather, I mean until the fetus has developed all or almost all of the biological facets of a recognizable human. "Full" might be a confusing term for me to use here, a bit of a misnomer, but it's the best I can come up with for the time being. Looking at the pattern of fetal development, I would say sometime around week 31 a fetus has reached this stage of development. [1] This standard, too, is untenable because it would seem to imply that fetuses born before the 31st week and who manage to pull through are somehow not persons when they're born, still alive. Moreover, there is the infamous alien argument. If an alien, who had all the faculties that humans had, were to fly down to Earth and mingle among us while looking nothing like us, could we justifiably deny this alien personhood? The answer is no, because it seems as if there is no morally relevant difference between himself and us. Appearance is not a moral trait--and someone ought not to have personhood denied to them on the basis of how closely they resemble us.P2. MORAL WORTH AND FLOThere are two questions I want to pursue at this juncture. First is, "what makes killing wrong," and second is, "how can the answer to the first question enlighten the debate on abortion."The first question is perhaps one of the most vexing questions philosophers can ask. Some might suggest that killing is wrong primarily for the wrong it does to others (e.g. the family of the victim, society, etc). But, what if the victim was a hermit, or despised by his compatriots? Still others might claim that the wrong lies in the idea that killer is brutalized in the act of killing, yet, it seems that the wrong to the victim explains this transformation into savagery, not vice versa. Perhaps the most plausible of accounts of the wrong of killing is that it "imposes upon us the misfortune of a premature death." [2] In other words, it denies us a future. An early death is harmful because it denies us future goods. "The goods of life are whatever we get out of life...The goods of life are what make life worth living...An individual's future will be valuable to that individual if that individual will come, or would come, to value it...Thus, killing someone is wrong, in general, when it deprives her of a future like ours." [2] This is the FLO argument, and applies whether or not one believes a fetus to be a person or not; so long as the fetus has a potentially valuable future, it would be wrong to deny the fetus the opportunity to engage in that future. In this way, murder and abortion--while not necessarily the same under this view--are wrong for the exact same reason: the denial of a FLO.We can look to FLO for a number of reasons. FLO seems consistent with our idea of a moral hierarchy of crimes: i.e., that killing is worse than most other crimes. Killing is the total loss of a FLO, whereas crimes like robbery and theft are harms that, while they may impact our future, do not delete our future altogether. FLO also appears to reflect a considered, logical judgement on the nature of why we believe killing to be wrong. Moreover, FLO does not seem wholly inconsistent with a morally egoistic position--certainly, to be egoistic, we must evaluate our self-interest. This oftentimes can best be done by examining what will make us better off in the future--in other words, value is placed on the future. P3. SOCIETAL BENEFITS ARGUMENTSEven if you buy none of the arguments I've presented so far, we can make the argument that abortion makes life for those already living worse off, and is thus unfair and unjust for them.Discrimination and Selective AbortionsDiscrimination on the basis on immutable characteristics is not only unfair, but widely regarded as immoral. A person cannot help being male or female, black or white, and so it is unfair to accord them more or less moral significance. What's more--it's harmful to society. For example, "[r]esearchers in India...for the Lancet journal said prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year...the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000." [3] This creates a dangerous imbalance in the male-to-female ratio, which can, in turn, have broader negative side effects. So, for young men already born, they could be being denied a future bride, because people currently reproducing are not producing enough women. Moreover, this will make it harder for girls, because they will be an even greater minority in India, which could only make instituting gender-biased policies easier. There is a similar risk of this happening in the U.S., but on a racial level. "In the United States, black women are 3.3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute." [4]AdoptionsAbortions reduce the number of adoptable babies which hurt those couples who would like to adopt.Harms to the MotherEvidence shows that prior abortions can increase the risk of pregnancy and diminish the chance of successfully carrying to term in many mothers. Furthermore, evidence shows that abortions can result in psychological trauma for many mothers that has actually been linked to higher suicide rates.SOURCES1 - http://www.nlm.nih.gov...2 - "An Argument that Abortion is Wrong" by Don Marquis. Found in "Morality and Moral Controversies: Readings in Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy," 8th edition, edited by John Arthur and Steven Scalet (2009)3 - http://news.bbc.co.uk...4 - http://abortion.procon.org...