Abortion is morally acceptable

Good response! Your point that a slave desires freedom and can comprehend the concept is pertinent. But it does not justify the violation of a foetus's life just because it cannot comprehend or express a preference to live. This is because one does not need to be able to comprehend their rights to be entitled to them. To illustrate this, let us look at paedophilic sexual intercourse. A young child cannot comprehend sexuality, sexual intercourse or sexual consent, yet that does not mean that the child does not have the right not to be statutory raped. I reassert my earlier point, that human rights are possessed by all humans by virtue of definition; there is no reason to suggest that they are only possessed by those who can comprehend them. You may argue that a foetus has no interest in life or living, but neither does a severely depressed person and we would not be morally justified to kill them. Moreover, a foetus only lacks interest in life because it does not have the cognitive ability to know what life is, if it had the intelligence to do so, it would undoubtedly choose to hold their right to life. Human rights are granted to humans as default and they can only be removed (if ever) if someone chooses to forfeit them. It is fallacious to equate a foetus"s lack of ability to be interested in their rights to an active forfeit of them. "The right to life is a very important thing, and I would agree, it is one of the most important human rights, but I would argue that in the case of abortion, the right to liberty is more important than the right to life. Let me explain: you say that in order to preserve a life, the liberty of another life (in this case, the mother's) is compromised to uphold the right to life. Now, let's say I agree that a fetus is a viable person entitled to all human rights (though, as I have said, I do not). The mother of that fetus is forced, by law, to carry the baby to term, completely giving up her bodily autonomy and liberty to uphold the most important right, the right to life." That would only be in the case where a mother"s life is in danger, which I am not arguing against anyway. As long as she isn"t in danger then she has the liberty to uphold her right to life. She is also not giving up her bodily autonomy because she didn"t have the bodily autonomy to harm anyone in the first place. She cannot use her bodily autonomy to hurt anybody when she is not pregnant, so she is not giving up any bodily autonomy when she becomes pregnant and cannot abort. For example, I have the bodily autonomy to go to the toilet, run a marathon or brush my teeth because these things do not harm anyone. However, I do not have the bodily autonomy to strike someone, throttle them or harm then in any way using my body. As abortion is harming others (the foetus) one cannot cite bodily autonomy as the justification for killing it. "Now, let's say that there is a girl in desperate need of a liver transplant. A boy shares the same blood type as her, and doctors say he can save her. For whatever reason, the boy says no, he does not want to give up a part of his body to save her. It might be because the surgery is painful and expensive, or the boy didn't like the girl, or he can't afford to take any time off of work/school, but regardless, he cannot be forced into giving up his liver. You say that the right to life is more important than the right to liberty. That means that in this situation, you think that the boy should be forced to go through the procedure and have part of his liver removed to save the girl even though he doesn't want to. He will be forced to have an invasive surgery to remove one of his vital organs because if he doesn't, he'll be severely punished." This is one of the classic pro-choice thought experiments. I"ll explain where it fails. In the example, the boy is not responsible for the girl being in a needy state and so has no obligation to help her. However, this is not analogous to pregnancy as the pregnant women caused the foetus to be in a needy state by engaging in sexual intercourse (an act intrinsically ordered towards procreation) and so is responsible for helping the foetus; for she is responsible for the foetus"s needy state. Returning to your thought-experiment, if the boy had spiked the girls drink with 100% alcohol and so caused her to be in need of a liver transplant, it would not be immoral to expect the boy to then donate blood to her. You might argue that this does not apply in the case of rape, but the analogy would still then only apply to 0.54% (1) of abortions, which is hardly morally justifying abortion. Nonetheless, the analogy is still not analogous to abortion in cases of rape because in the analogy the boy would be suffering only if he did choose to donate blood, and would not be suffering if he chose not to help the girl. However, in rape cases the mother"s suffering is not removed by abortion; the abortion does not make the woman forget the rape or "undo" it in any way, and having an abortion is just another act of violence that could further harm her mental health. In fact, 80% of women regretted aborting the child of their rapist(2), which would suggest that abortion does not help the victim of rape and so cannot be justified in cases of it. "The concept of intelligence is highly disputed. It is defined as "the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations". I apologize, I should have been more explicit in defining what I mean by intelligence, my mistake. Babies, dementia patients, and mentally retarded people technically have human intelligence." Well, according to your definition of intelligence, dementia patients, babies and severely retarded people are not intelligent, because they cannot understand things or deal with new situations. "Besides, you can't compare fetuses and people with dementia and mental retardation; all people were once fetuses, but not everyone is mentally disabled." I can compare them because I was not comparing them in the respect to whether all people once were them; I was comparing them in respect to their lack of intelligence. I was making allowance for your highly dubious premise that right to life is qualifiable on intelligence. (1)http://www.johnstonsarchive.net... (2) http://afterabortion.org...