Abortion

Definition of murder:Dictionary.com defines murder as "the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder), and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)."Clearly abortion is not murder as Pro attests, since the definition says "the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law". Abortion is not "specifically covered in law" as murder, because it is legal. Therefore, abortion is not murder. The government could make it murder by changing the law, but regardless of whether or not it should or should not do that it stands to fact that presently abortion is not murder no matter whether Pro would like it to be or not.Laws Against Abortion Are Slavery:1. If a woman is forced not to have an abortion the only option she has is to carry the pregnancy to term. This includes pain, at least during labor at the end and a lot of work and energy-spending she must go through to deliver the fetus. Technically, when the fetus is in the womb it is a parasite. A parasite is "an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment." The fetus gets its resources from the woman.So by not allowing the woman to have an abortion she is forced to carry out labor and to give her food to the fetus. Forced labor is slavery. By making the woman go through the pregnancy against her will the state is enslaving the woman to the fetus.The woman owns herself just like every person owns their self. Even if the fetus is a "person" she has the right to decide which persons are allowed within her property. As an analogy if you had a guest in your house and wanted them to leave you would have the legal right to do that even if outside your house there was no food, water, or transportation for miles and so by kicking out the guest you were dooming them to die. Since it is your property you could still kick out the guest. Similarly, it is the woman's body and she should have the right to kick out the fetus. Banning abortion is the equivalent(except worse since a person's body is more personal than their house) of not only forcing the owner to keep the guest but forcing the owner to feed and take care of the guest.Sentience:Furthermore, we must consider the root of human rights itself. We have rights based on personhood but other species do not. The clear difference is our ability to think and reason. A fetus does not even have a brain stem up until the 7th week of gestation.http://brainmind.com...For most of its development a fetus has less sentience than most animals, including animals that people hunt, fish, butcher, and eat all the time without legal ramifications.Legal Implications of Fetal Personhood:Recognizing fetuses as legal persons would legally require an illogical outcome. If abortion was illegal and fetuses treated as legal persons then when a pregnant woman committed a crime and was locked up in jail legally there would be 2 people locked up, and 1 of them, the fetus would be innocent and would be being held there without due process.When Life Begins:Abortion is often framed as an argument over when life begins, birth or conception. But that's beating around the bush. Life begins before conception. The sperm and the egg are both alive too. Arguing that killing an embryo is murder is like arguing that masturbation or menstruation is murder, because they involve the death of sperm and egg.