Abortion should be allowed

I interpret the Resolution to mean, "Abortion should be LEGALLY allowed." Next I will remind voters that they should vote based on the arguments made and not their personal opinions. If I were judging this debate, I would have no idea which side to vote for prior to finishing reading all the rounds. First I will address your arguments: 1) You say the woman has the right to treat her body as she chooses. I agree with this 100%. However, in a civil society, we must recognize that rights regularly conflict. This conflict means we must critically evaluate the priority and nature of individual rights to determine the most just course of action. An easy example: Nearly everyone agrees that people have the right to free speech. However, this right is curtailed when it endangers the safety and well being of another person, such as in the case of yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater. Simply stating that woman has the right to her body doesn't necessarily guarantee the right to an abortion. Critical analysis of conflicting rights must be done. 2) You say that people who oppose abortion should still allow the woman her choice in the matter. This would be a legitimate point if abortion were not a case where multiple people's rights conflict. The conflict of different person's rights means that other people need to get involved in order to preserve justice. For instance, people can't simply sit by and allow a thief to steal if he chooses because he is violating other people's rights. 3) You say every child should be wanted. Again, no one will disagree with you on this. However, this normative statement does nothing to impact the abortion debate IF abortion is indeed in conflict with a fetus' right to life. If a fetus has a right to life, then there is no difference between killing a fetus and a two year old. It is obviously unjustified to say that killing a two year old is legit because "every child should be wanted" and that particular two year old isn't. The only relevant issue is the right to life and woman's right of body. 4) You say if abortions were made illegal, more back alley abortions would occur. This is an argument we cannot take into consideration. If women chose to endanger themselves in that matter, it is their own choice and they bear responsibility for it. Many agencies exist that aim to help young women dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. These agencies did not exist prior to Roe v. Wade and would work to make back alley abortions less attractive and less likely. There is also no way to weigh this issue. No one knows how prevalent back alley abortions would be or if they wouldn't even be used at all. The complete absence of compelling informative statistics means that this is an issue we simply are unable to consider. While we do not know what the prevalence of back alley abortions would be, there are statistics documenting the deaths caused by illegal abortions. In the 1960's the number of deaths caused by abortion was around 200-275 per year. This number pales in comparison to the 1 million plus abortions that occur each year. Furthermore, "back alley abortions" were usually performed by licensed doctors who chose to break the law. When one looks at the decline in deaths cause by abortion, the most obvious correlation to the decline is advances in medical practices NOT the legalization of abortion. Once again the issue of rights trumps this issue. Rights must be protected no matter what the consequences. Now for my own arguments: 1) The right to life outweighs the right to privacy. The most valuable thing a person can have is his or her own life. Life is a thing of ultimate value and thus its protection should be of the highest priority. Other rights depend on life. In order to have a right to privacy or the right to one's own body, one must have life. The right to body and privacy inherently presupposes the right to life. Once you are dead you do not have a body to have a right to, you do not have a life or interests to hold private. 2) The value of life is so high that we must err on the side of caution. If a fetus does have a right to life, over one million people are being legally killed each year. This evil is so great that we should err on the side of caution. If the legal system is wrong, we are killing people on a magnitude comparable to Hitler and Stalin. As a society, we should do everything in our power to avoid being responsible for such a horrendous act. The sheer magnitude of the possible evil of abortion is so great that it overwhelms the inherent uncertainty. Lets imagine a button that, if pressed, has a .001% chance of nuking New York. Even though there is only a small chance that any harm would actually be done by pressing the button, the magnitude of the disaster overwhelms uncertainty. No one should ever press that button. 3) A fetus has a right to life. i)A fetus has the potentiality to become a full grown human. A fetus relates to an adult in the same way that a two year old relates to an adult. Neither is fully-grown, but both will become an adult, barring death. ii)What makes murder wrong? The great evil of murder is that it deprives us of our future. It prevents all the experiences of happiness, pleasure, love, and success. If murder did not deprive us of our futures, it would not be wrong. Thus we can determine if an action is murder or is unethical on the same magnitude as murder by evaluating if the action deprives a thing of a future like ours. A fetus undoubtedly has a distinctly human future, a future where it will smell flowers and listen to music and swim. Depriving the fetus of that future is unethical on the magnitude of murder. iii)The pro-choice defender must demonstrate a morally relevant difference between a fetus and an adult if they are going to assert that a vast moral difference such as absence of a right to life exists between a fetus and an adult. Furthermore, they must explain HOW that moral difference means that the fetus doesn't have a right to life. Again I would like to emphasize voter impartiality.