Abortion is morally wrong

I will be defending your advances in their respective order. Defense for Criterion 1: Survival outside the wombPRO talks of how a fetus is 'unique, distinct, and self-developing', but does not continue to describe how that is the case. I could just as easily say that the liver is unique and distinct from other organs, and self-developing at the same time as it, like a fetus, grows with time and nourishment. Therefore, I fail to see how PRO's criterion of DNA combined with 'unique, distinct, and self-developing' holds up. Allow me to rephrase the importance of viability as a threshold between murder and not murder. One of the main incentives behind abiding by the law is the mutual, sort of quid pro quo social contract of behavioural equilibrium. This is what gives weight to the consequences of not abiding by said laws and regulations. To translate that into the context of this debate, people do not kill or inflict suffering on others is because for fear that they may get a taste of their own medicine by the people they are targeting. Similarly, a baby that is capable of surviving outside of the womb, and, by that stage, able to be aware of its surroundings, is eligible for this social contract as he/she hypothetically has the ability to emulate the act of killing a human being. Therefore, it is only coherent to argue that viability is the criterion to define the personhood of a fetus. I have never denied, in accordance to my line of logic, that pregnant women have four eyes, four feet, and for some, penises. In fact, I thank PRO for this insightful remark and welcome this new perspective on the body parts of pregnant women. This is in no way a refutation of my case. Defense for Criterion 2: Ability to feel painWhen I say that animals receive humane treatment due to their ability to feel pain, I am not making specific reference to the fact that animals are animals and not humans, but rather, alluding to the respect that they are treated with and perceived as when in the hands of humans. I argue that this humane treatment can be contrasted with the inhumane treatment of killing a fetus, which, in many respects (viability, consciousness, responsiveness), is identical to that of an animal. Therefore, I extend by saying that if a fetus can be paralleled to an animal in terms of the characteristics that give it its personhood, then that gives all the more reason for it to be considered a human based off of the criterion of 'pain'. I acknowledge that sentience is an insufficient criterion for humanity, but it must be pointed out that there is a fine line between 'pain' and 'sentience'. Sentience is subjective, and pain, while ostensibly subjective, is actually objective and quantifiable. Sentience is the ability to feel and perceive, but even these two terms are ambiguous, and even if we came to an agreement on what an individual needs to be able to feel and perceive in order to be sentient, it is still a daunting challenge to try and exactly lay down the boundaries for when an individual is truly feeling or perceiving something and when they are not. Pain, on the other hand, can be objectively measured with neurological signatures [1], and for the same reason, there is no dispute as to what qualifies as 'pain' and what does not. Thus, the sentient argument cannot be used in the context of my criterion. In response to your comatose patient contention, I would like to highlight the fact that some comatose patients do in fact feel pain [2]. There is no dispute as to their viability. Thus, this leads us to the conclusion that some comatose patients can be, relative to my two criterion, classified as human. PRO's contention is that ALL comatose patients do not feel pain hence ALL patients do not qualify as humans under my criteria, thus I have rebutted this point. Defense for On Pro's CasePRO tries to differentiate a zygote from any other cell because it has the potential to develop into a full-fledged human being. Once again, I do not contend this. For one, a unique genetic code alone (seeing that PRO here has not mentioned anything about 'self-development and 'uniqueness'), as I have said in the previous round, is not enough to warrant a human life. Moreover, we can only judge something and classify something based on their current status, our scope cannot be stretched to accommodate for what these things could potentially be. To put this in perspective, one would not argue that two cows were different in the sense that they are cows just because Cow A is going to be turned into steak and Cow B is not. It does not matter if a zygote is a specialised or developmental cell, it is a cell at the end of the day. Thus, my correlation between killing a zygote and scratching one's harm or pulling out one's hair still stands. Onto the issue of exceptional cases of abortion where abortion is justified. With reference to the motion, PRO has to prove that ALL cases of abortion, regardless of the moral implications, regardless of the circumstances, and regardless of the status of the fetus, is morally wrong. The burden of proof of my side of the house is to bring up and uphold the moral permissibility of at least one case where abortion is justified, which I have done so and is a burden that is not challenged by PRO. Strictly speaking, even if I am not granted a win in terms of my criterion for personhood, I have successfully negated the motion. For PRO to win on the basis of the content he/she has provided, the motion would have to be worded something along the lines of: "In some cases, abortion can be ruled as a justifiable murder", as PRO recognises him/herself. PRO argues that the motion should still stand based off of the fact that the killing of the fetus in the exceptional case of a life-threatening pregnancy should not be classified as 'murder' for the reason that it is a justified killing. I beg to differ for three reasons. Firstly, PRO has never explicitly stated that his yardstick for 'morally wrong' is whether the act of abortion is a murder or not. If he/she wishes to use that as a yardstick, then PRO should have defined the phrase 'morally wrong' in the first round as such. Secondly, no major dictionary source defines murder to be an act of unjustified killing. An overwhelming number of dictionaries, contrarily, define the term to be the unlawful killing of a human being (Dictionary. com, Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster). PRO needs to tell us, a) why unlawful is equivalent to unjustified, or b) why his definition overrides that of those in dictionary in terms of credibility and legitimacy, seeing that PRO has cited sources for just about every term he/she has defined with the exception of 'murder'. Thirdly, PRO has yet to demonstrate why the exceptional case of killing of the fetus in the instance of a life-threatening pregnancy is or should not be considered abortion. Seeing that PRO has not done so, it can only be said, in the simplest of ways, that because said exceptional case is a form of abortion, and that because both sides of the house evidently agree that it is morally justified, that there cases of morally permissible abortions do exist. In other words, the motion stands and stands on the agreement of both sides. Once again, big thanks to PRO for the most thought-provoking debate I've had in a while, and to those who vote on this debate. SOURCES USED[1] . http://www.rt.com...[2] . https://www.newscientist.com...