Abortion is Wrong

First, I'd like to start by saying I agree with all your definitions, but there are many problems in the arguments you've posted. In your first argument, you said, "Do we have the right to force the mother to keep the baby solely because she consented to participate in these sexual activities? Do we have the right to take away another"s right as we continue to fight for other rights? Why do we take away the rights of a woman because she has the potential to have a baby? " Well you speak about rights, but only under the right of life do we have all of our others. We know this; therefore, we will strip away rights from people if they threaten the rights of others, especially if that right is our right to life. This is not a new concept: when a murderer threatens the life of anyone, we will take away his right to live in normal society and put him in jail. We may then later take his right of legally owning a firearm because he has shown he can't be trusted. This is why women don't have, "the right to choose", because their right to choose to end the life inside of her would be compromising the right to life the baby has. I understand this argument will be dependent on the fact that the fetus inside of her is two things: 1. Alive 2. Human Now we move on to proving the baby meets both the conditions above. To prove the baby is alive, using your definition, we have to see that it meets the requirements of "capacity of growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. " I will argue that the baby has/ will have all of these and therefore is alive. The baby inside of the mother has the capacity of growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. From the moment of conception, there is growth, I think we can agree on that. And though the fetus is not at that moment capable of reproducing, it will in the future. If that diminishes its value, then it will diminish the value of a girl under the age of 12 (roughly). A girl at that stage in her life is just as incapable of reproducing as a fetus is, but no one will ever argue that we have the right to kill her or give her less value. Functional activity is another one, if we gain our value from being able to move and function, we are stripped of our value once we cannot function. That means when we are sleeping, or if we are put into a coma. But certainly we do not propose we can kill anyone that is sleeping. Now you might say that the heart is still breathing and lungs are still moving, and the fetus does not yet have those capabilities, but once again, it does not have them YET. The value of life is not contingent on a life's level of development, otherwise a 15 year old will have more value than a 14 year old because he is more developed. Lastly, the fetus is changing and will soon die, hopefully about 80 years later, but it will die. So it meets all of the requirements of life. Moving on to the question of the baby's humanity. From the moment of conception the fetus has all 46 chromosomes of a human being. It also has its own unique set of DNA making it a completely separate body from its mother: not an extra organ. So when you talk about bodily autonomy: "Bodily autonomy is defined as the right for a person to control what they do to their bodies without the interruption or force of someone else," you neglect the fact that the baby is a separate human, apart from its mother. Therefore the baby has the "right. .. to control what they do to their bodies without the interruption or force of someone else. " So I'm not taking away rights as much as I am giving them to the right person. Next, you say "Do we force these teens to give birth to their babies, even if they do not want the babies for reasons unknown? If we expect them to give birth to the baby, do we then expect the mother to keep the baby? " My answer is yes, and then I don't care. We force these teens to give birth to their babies because any reason, known or unknown, is not reason enough to take the right of life away from the baby inside of them. Their choice to have sex at that age was irresponsible whether they had protection or not. If they didn't want a baby, they shouldn't have slept around. And next, if we expect them to give birth, do we expect them to keep him or her? I don't think this matters, if they keep the baby or give them up for adoption, it doesn't matter as long as the baby is given life. I don't want to talk too long about emotions because it'll take up space (I want to keep these short), and it comes second to the act of abortion itself. But my point is, women have had much more traumatic emotional challenges after they have an abortion, than after they've given a child up for adoption. One ends life, the other relays the life to someone else. Euthanasia. I haven't given it much thought but I think it's alright. You talked about the fetus' dependency on the mother is a parallel to the patient's dependency on the doctor or whomever. I don't think that's a good parallel, that patient is usually known to be in an extreme amount of pain or some other condition that makes death look more appealing, than life with that pain/condition. In contrast, a fetus is in no pain, and has no known condition. (There are statistics, but I'd argue you can't kill it because of the stats. ) Anyways, I don't want to spend much more time on this, it doesn't follow our topic of debate. To refute your last statement of killing animals versus people: We kill animals to feed ourselves and keep ourselves alive. We don't kill humans to keep ourselves alive because we have value. Humans have value simply because they are human. We have given this value to ourselves consistently throughout our entire existence, in every generation of every culture. I am constantly disappointed when I have to argue people on whether or not we have intrinsic value, when they themselves agree that we do. No one disagrees with that, they just don't know from where our value comes from. So we kill animals because they don't have as much value as humans and we need to survive. So the main point: The fetus is alive and human. Because it is human, we have no right to kill it.