Abortion should be illegal.

First of all, I would like to mention that Mr Vindication has joined our team.FrameworkFor the sake of the debate, I will be basing my moral arguments on utilitarianism. This means that I will weigh the benefits of abortion against the harms, and if I can prove the harms to be greater than the benefits, I win the debate.Argument: Abortion is objectively immoral.Murder is "the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought". [1] According to utilitarianism, murder is immoral for three main reasons:1. Every human being desires happiness, and murder prevents a person from achieving happiness, so murder is harmful to the victim.2. In some cases, people might be dependent on another person, so if that person dies, anyone who is dependent on that person is harmed.3. Death causes emotional harm to many people, especially the friends and family of the victim. Now let"s see if abortion meets any of these criteria:1. At the beginning of the embryonic period of pregnancy (week 5), a newly formed embryo is already developing a nervous system, which means it starts to feel pleasure and pain. [2] Humans don"t experience a wide range of emotions until they are a few years old, but embryos* can still feel happiness in the form of pleasure. Pain, of course, denies them that pleasure. An abortion causes pain to an embryo, so an abortion, like murder, causes harm to the victim.2. No one is dependent on an embryo, so this doesn"t apply.3. Abortions often cause emotional harm to the woman receiving the abortion as well as the woman"s partner. "A 2002 peer-reviewed study published by the Southern Medical Journal of more than 173,000 American women found that women who aborted were 154% more likely to commit suicide than women who carried to term." [3] "An Apr. 1998 Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology study of men whose partners had abortions found that 51.6% of the men reported regret, 45.2% felt sadness, and 25.8% experienced depression." [4]Additional Contentions Contention #1: A fetus is alive and a human being.A human being is any organism of the species homo sapiens. [5] A species is distinguished from another by its DNA sequence, [6] and human embryos have DNA sequences that match those of adult humans, so embryos are human beings. Since all human beings are alive until they die, embryos are alive. Killing a human being is illegal, so abortion should be illegal. Contention #2: The Hippocratic oath bans abortion."I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion." [7] Doctors should abide by this oath, so they should not perform abortions.ConclusionAbortion is objectively immoral for many of the same reasons that murder is immoral, so it should be made illegal to protect those who are harmed. In addition, it violates the oath that every doctor takes and it is no different than murder, which is illegal.Sources[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com...[2] https://www.nlm.nih.gov...[3] http://abortion.procon.org...http://abortion.procon.org... [4] http://abortion.procon.org...http://abortion.procon.org... [5] http://www.britannica.com... [6] http://anthro.palomar.edu... [7] http://classics.mit.edu...