Abortion can be demonstrated as immoral using Beauchamp's Principles

Thank you Kreakin for the debate. I shall now close with the following address of two points. First, as to maleficence through the deprivation of autonomy, I put forward, as I did before, that it is commonly accepted and in many cases ethically imperative that certain actions be prohibited from people because they deprive autonomy. Slavery certainly fits this description, as does every type of murder because murder is the deprivation of life and all the freedom therein contained. Certainly you can speak of the choice a person has whether to kill or not to kill. However governments worldwide, with consent of the governed, have agreed that this is not a choice that people have any right to make. Sovereign states recognize the right to life is not a right that is bestowed by a government but is innate. No person needs to give it to you for you to have it. You do not even have to choose it for yourself. It is yours without having to earn it and it is highly unethical and justly illegal to deprive a person of this right. Which transitions nicely to my last argument, the last word I will give to Justice. I have stated that all human beings, even those not practicing autonomy, have a right to equal protection under the law. You have stated many times in the previous paragraph that not practicing autonomy excludes fetuses from this basic protection. I want to postulate to all concerned that the practice of autonomy, what Mary Anne Warren calls Consciousness or Self-Motivated Activity, is an arbitrary factor, not a solid ground on which to deprive a person of life. My first evidence for this is that all people spend roughly one third of their lives in an unconscious state, sleep. However, being in a state of non-consciousness does not at any point deprive us of our basic human protections. It is not autonomy being practiced, as we are practing none, but rather Future Autonomy, the knowledge that the sleeper will awake and enjoy freedoms that makes murder objectionable even in this case. The second evidence, similar but more rare, is the case of a comatose person. Now I put forward two scenarios: In one, a comatose person is on life support but scientific evidence, such as a brain scan, indicates he will never awake. In the second, a comatose person is on life support but again scientific evidence indicates that in a very set amount of time this person will awake and enjoy the same freedoms as everyone else. Neither has a written will. Is it lawful to take either of them off of life support? Is it lawful to take both? I put forward, and believe that many will agree based on moral intuitions, that the person who will never awake should be taken off of life support but the person who will awake should be left on life support until he can support himself. Why is this? Neither is practicing autonomy and neither had the foresight to write a living will. What the first man lacks and the second person has is a Future of Autonomy. Even without consciousness a person's future autonomy is a valuable thing and that it constitutes harm to deprive him of it. Therefore, I put forward that the presence or absence of present autonomy, the criterion my opponent proposes as the critical factor for excluding fetuses from equal treatment to the rest of humanity, is an arbitrary factor and not a just cause to completely disqualify a person from legal protection. Thank you again for the debate. I look forward to your closing remarks.