Partial Birth Abortion Should Not Be Allowed Even If A Woman Was Raped.

President Bush in 2003 prohibited doctors from knowingly performing a "partial-birth" abortion. However partial-birth is hardly a medical term. It's a clear political one, and greatly confusing at that. Both parties (pro life/pro choice) differ on the number of procedures that take place, at what stage in pregnancy, and the precise procedures the law prohibits. It was first phrased by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in 1995 describing a relatively recent medical procedure to remove foetuses from the womb - also known as dilation and extraction, or D&X, and intact D&E. "An abortion in which the person performing the abortion, deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus. (18 U.S. Code 1531)" Note there are no developmental stages or periods of development inherent in the definition. Legal Precedents: 1.The Roe Court (Roe v. Wade) deemed abortion a fundamental right under the United States Constitution. "..right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." 2.Stenberg v. Carhart The Court struck down the law, finding the Nebraska statute criminalizing "partial birth abortion[s]" 3.Planned Parenthood v. Casey "..upholding what it called the "essential holding" of Roe. .. the right to abortion is grounded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, .. "[i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." == Abortion is a moral right, which must be left to the singular judgment of the woman concerned. Abortion is a right - the conclusion from recognising a woman's body is her own, and her own to do with as she pleases. A woman is a self-governing living being with the rational capacities that make it relevant to regard her as having rights and rights are derived from the nature of man. They are pertinent to beings with certain characteristics. Rights are founded on the reality that the employ of force against others is an unreliable means of gaining values, while dealing with others by production and trade is. Given this, the rational conclusion is to prohibit force from normal, value-seeking interactions with others, and to constrain its use to self-defence and objectively controlled retaliation. Individual rights, then, define the areas or aspects of action which should be free from force. There is the singular right to one's life, and the freedom of endeavour that one requires in order to achieve happiness in it. One's rights to property, contract, and freedom of speech are all consequences or functions of this basic right to life. This right is not a positive claim on anyone else, and it is not bounded to a limited scope of action. As they are incapable of supporting themselves by reason, we cannot extend this right to infants or the unborn in a clear-cut manner. An infant may have a developing rational mind, but it cannot use it to support its life - in reality, it needs so much care that to impart to it the full right to life and liberty is to relegate it to death. There are no reasons to deny people a choice in accepting great obligations. A protected legal right to abortion ensures that the commitment of pregnancy and parenthood can be met and chosen on their own qualities, and not carried out unwillingly. Naturally this would matter little if it could be demonstrated that a foetus is a creature with rights, to which obligation is automatically incurred. However it is not such a being. == Implications with rape: It seems pointless to argue rape as a clause for abortion in this debate. If the foetus is aborted, the manner of conception is irrelevant. Instead I shall follow the logical conclusion of Pro's resolution; that being the forced (legally) birth of a child conceived from rape. If the state mandates the birth of the child through force by legislation (i.e. criminal prosecution as foeticide on the advent of abortion) then the state has committed a grave violation of the mother's rights - as indicated earlier it expressly violates an individual's right to privacy. There are however other implications to this act. The state, by enforcing a birth against the will of the parent, must then accept the born child as one purely of the state. It has every responsibility to remove the child from the parent and ensure its welfare at the states cost. To do otherwise is to penalise the mother 18 years of cost, health, time and potential for the non-crime of being raped. The second implication is that by forcing the birth of the foetus; upon its birth, the state has engaged in a process of profiteering directly from the crime of rape. A child is a citizen, and a citizen has the potential to be a productive entity in society. In fact the state actively pursues this interest in all children through health and education. This productive citizen, a child from rape, born by state enforcement, provides the state with revenue i.e. taxes. The state benefits to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the citizen's productivity) - it is direct profiteering through crime -the rape in this case (taxes are for another day). ;)