Abortion is generally immoral

Pro's argumentPremise 2: Bafflingly -- or perhaps not, given the options available to him -- Pro continues to insist that I have the burden of proof to falsify this premise. He has not shown why the intrinsic value of post-birth humans establishes the intrinsic value of pre-birth humans; he has simply challenged me over and over to show why this is not the case. Pro has not even attempted to meet his burden, and his case fails for this reason alone.Premise 3: Pro failed to show a logical contradiction between premises 1 and 2 and the negation of 3a and 3b, listed above. Thus he has failed to establish the logical validity of the argument. Again, his case fails for this reason alone.Premise 4a: Pro asserts without argument or support that abortion having the primary effect of killing the unborn is "common knowledge." Something is common knowledge if and only if every rational person aware of all the facts agree to it. The NCHS[10], major OB/GYN textbooks[11][12][13], medical dictionaries[14] and even the Encyclopaedia Britannica[15] agree abortion is a procedure the primary effect of which is to terminate the physiological connection between the woman and the pre-birth human.Pro also asserts, "we do not have the right to kill someone to ensure they don't use our organs." This would entail that if an organ black marketer were about to operate on you to remove a kidney, and the only way to stop him from doing so was via lethal force, we would not have the right to self-defense in this case. No doubt Pro would object to characterizing abortion as self-defense, but this is hardly a new position in the abortion debate,[16] and in any case I am here only arguing that the instant assertion made by Pro is not necessarily true.Lack of harms argumentPremise 1: Conceded by Pro, albeit verbosely.Premise 2 - Values: Pro argues that he would rescue the child because he would have only seconds to act, and would not be able to make an informed decision. However, I submit that it would take more than a few seconds to come to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that any of the 100 embryos would survived if removed from the house in time, and we would not expect Pro to be aware of the relevant factors; we would assume that he would act on instinct, and his instinct would be guided by his values.But in any case, we can again modify the situation to account for this. Say that, instead of being on fire, the house had a ticking bomb in it; you are driving there as fast as you can, but will arrive in time to only save the canister or the girl. During the drive, however, you will still have time to consider the relevant factors that would go into a "triage" situation. I continue to maintain that any non-sociopath would save the girl rather than the canister.Premise 2 - Desires: Far from being ad hoc, the argument from ideal desires is based on the best logic put forth by the AAR community for fetal personhood[17].The slave and the brain-dead clone (provided the relevant portions of the brain have been removed) would still have the ideal desires, as I have defined them in my opening statement; were we to correct the cognitive distortion affecting the actual desires, the slave and the clone would actively desire to live. And again I must point out that this debate is not about human cloning.As for Uncle Bob, I am not saying that Uncle Bob has the right to live; he has already died. I am saying that the person who now inhabits the body of Uncle Bob has the right to live, and this is true by virtue of the fact that his brain is capable of creating ideal desires, a capability that a fetus does not have until the 25th week at the earliest.Moral obligations argumentPremise 1: If the consequent of the premise is untrue, then the antecedent would not be true; this is not in dispute. However, whether the consequent is true is precisely what is at issue in this debate; therefore, to avoid circularity, we must consider the antecedent.Premise 2: Already conceded by Pro; I fail to understand why he feels the compulsion to keep talking about it, especially considering the premium of space in his final statement.Premise 3 - Consent objection: Pro states that he has not conceded that abortions are morally permissible in the event of rape, and still believes they are not; nor has he conceded the debate. This can only mean that, <em>contra</em> his second statement, he does not hold consent to be a morally relevant factor, and thus drops the consent objection. (As for what he actually said about this objection, see the discussion of V1 below.)Premise 3 - Responsibility objection: Pro accuses me of not addressing his "baby machine" analogy; in fact, I did address it, by altering it in such a way that it is more morally relevant to both the case of the violinist and the case of pregnancy. He does not argue that C1 is less morally relevant than his original analogy, nor does he argue that C1 is morally irrelevant to either the situation of the violinist or the situation of pregnancy.Pro addresses V1 by saying that whereas the woman in V1 is not responsible for the violinist's condition, the parents of a pre-birth human are responsible for the child's condition. In the first place, V1 was offered to counter the consent objection, not the responsibility objection. In the second place, V1 is similar to the situation of pregnancy in all morally relevant aspects: we have an elective action that initiates a chain of improbable events culminating in the situation where her body is connected to that of another organism in a way that she foresaw was possible but did not intend. Pro did not dispute that the woman does not consent to being plugged into the violinist in V1. He cannot, therefore, merely assert that a pregnant woman does consent to pregnancy.Pro does not address any of the arguments that I actually did offer against his position that a pregnant woman is responsible for the existence of a needy child and/or the neediness of an existing child. He merely restates his various positions and asserts without argument in light of my rebuttals that they are correct. Thus, his defense of the responsibility objection fails.Premise 3 - Killing vs. letting die objection: Pro does not defend or even mention this objection in his closing, and thus again has dropped this objection. (He did bring up the dichotomy earlier in his statement, and I have refuted it earlier in the present statement.)One more thing to bear in mindThe right of the woman to unplug herself from the violinist does not stem from her right to enjoy what Pro has called the "convenience" of gamboling about, shopping for shoes, having sex, drinking wine, eating cheese, smoking pot, voting Obama, and otherwise behaving in accordance with AAR stereotypes of non-AAR women. Rather, it stems from her inalienable right to withhold and revoke consent to something or someone using her body. Pure and simple.ConclusionI have demonstrated that Pro's argument is invalid and unsound, and I have defended LOHA and MOA against his critiques and/or assertions regarding them. Pro has therefore failed to meet his burden of establishing the resolution that abortion is generally immoral.I thank KeytarHero for an engaging debate. I thank the readers for their attention, and ask them to vote Con.[10] Cunningham, F.G. et al, eds., Williams Obstetrics, 23rd ed. (McGraw-Hill Medical, 2010).[11] Annas, G.J. et al, eds., Obstetrics: Normal and Problem Pregnancies, 5th ed. (Churchill Livingstone, 2007).[12] Rock, J.A., et al, eds., TeLinde's Operative Gynecology, 10th ed. (Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2008).[13] Katz, V.L., et al, eds., Katz: Comprehensive Gynecology, 5th ed. (Mosby, 2007).[14] Stedman's Medical Dictionary, 28th ed. (Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2008).[15] s.v. "Abortion" (2012).[16] See, for instance, McDonagh, E.L., Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (Oxford, 1996).[17] Marquis, 1989.