Abortion is morally acceptable

Last argument, it looks like. "This is an odd concept, that killing becomes more morally acceptable if the victim is much smaller than the killer. If you are saying this, then you must admit that it would be justified for someone much larger than you, let's say that giants exist, to kill you. Would it be a valid justification for a giant to kill you because you are a tiny lump of flesh? Surely not. To summarise, highlighting the size of foetuses is irrelevant to this debate." Highlighting the size of the fetus is extremely relevant to this debate, as size generally has a causal relationship with development. When you have a fetus that is the size of the tip of a pen, it really highlights how underdeveloped it is. I was not suggesting that it was okay to kill someone just on the basis that they were smaller than you, and to say I was is merely grasping for straws. When I brought to light the size of the fetus when the predominant amount of abortions were performed, it was to show the sharp distinction between an embryo and an infant. A fault in a lot of people's thinking is that when they envision a fetus they imagine some six-pound baby, when really fetuses don't get that big until the third trimester of pregnancy--which, at that point, is only classified as a fetus because it exists in the mother's womb. "You are partially correct in asserting that human rights exist to reduce human suffering, but this isn't the whole story. They also exists to ensure the basic happiness of humans' lives. Indeed, it says in the preamble that the UDHR is 'determined to promote ...better standards of life'." You are picking at the wording of the statement and skirting over the point I was trying to make. With the reduction of human suffering comes basic happiness, so the two phrases are arguably synonymous. When you have a society with no crime (i.e., no technical human suffering), then it is a happy society. "To expand on this, article 27 states that: 'Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.' (1) This is not a right that reduces suffering (few people would actively suffer from not being involved in arts and science) but it is a right that defends one's basic happiness." Well, as I said before, the reduction of human suffering comes with additional benefit of increased human happiness. I would take a gander at saying a person completely isolated from their culture, a person who is not allowed to experience the beauty of art and the wonder of science, would live a miserably ignorant life and, with the mindset that suffering is caused by a lack of happiness, would indeed suffer quite a bit. "Abortion removes all the happiness from a foetuses life, and thus is immoral even if no suffering is involved." Pardon, but I was under the impression that a fetus literally had no conception of human emotion? Abortion would remove nothing except that little spark of life that is present in all living things, from an oak tree to a human cell. Saying that an action is immoral simply on the basis that it removes the possibility of happiness is a rather ridiculous notion. You could say that menstruation is immoral because the egg that is killed could have possibly been fertilized to make a zygote but it wasn't, thus eliminating all possibility of that zygote having happiness. And aside from that fact, what if the fetus would have been unhappy in its life? The abstract for a study done by the NCBI (1) says that, "The empirical evidence finds that states with the most antiabortion policies are also the same states that have significantly lower indicators of infant/child well-being." Their claim can be supported with simple logic--if a child is born unwanted into an under-prepared family, the child will not live a life that is as happy as that of a child born into a prepared family. Even if they are put in foster care, it has been proven that children in foster care are more likely to be homeless and/or abused (2), and adolescents who experienced time in foster care were two to four times more likely to seriously consider or attempt suicide (3). "You may question why deprivation of happiness is immoral, but let me illustrate this analogy: A child is going to be given a surprise birthday present; but a stranger, knowing that destroying the present will deprive the child of happiness, goes ahead and destroys the present. Is this not immoral? The child will not suffer (it was a surprise), he will just be deprived of basic happiness. This suggests that deprivation of happiness is immoral even if the one being deprived does not suffer." That analogy was not provided with enough information to be sound. If the stranger had been the one to get the present for the kid and then had second thoughts and destroyed it, the stranger retains the right to do so. But if the stranger had sneaked into the kid's house and destroyed the present, that is destruction of private property and is not only immoral but also illegal. "Also, if violation of human rights is justified if the victim does not suffer, then this would allow the sexual abuse of children whilst they are asleep, or the rape of someone in a coma. Nobody suffers in these examples, but does this make them morally acceptable?" Goodness gracious, you have quite the imagination. I didn't think this needed saying, but sexual assault is in and of itself immoral. Even if you, uh, raped a comatose person and they didn't suffer, the mere act of knowingly coercing or forcing, knowingly or not, someone into sexual contact is inherently immoral. "But an infant does not care about a right to leave the country, have an education, or be free to assemble. These rights are not applicable to infants (or most children, for that matter). Does this mean that human rights are null and void to children? If this was correct, children would not have a right to liberty, life and all the other basic human rights. This is surely not the case." You are confusing applicability with desire. For example, an infant child could be purposefully harmed (though such a thought makes me cringe) and therefore is applicable under the human right to not be have pain inflicted on them, though they might not care that such a right exists. However, embryos and fetuses, until viability, cannot be subjected to such harm, seeing as soon as they leave the mother's womb they die instantly and on top of that can't even process pain until their viability. Infants can both process pain and exist outside the mother's womb, making them an applicable subject to human rights. "The very fact that the woman is responsible for the foetus's existence gives her moral obligations to care for it." But see, the woman is not wholly responsible. That fetus has 46 chromosomes, 23 from the biological mother and 23 from the biological father. It is equally both of their moral responsibilities, and if the father is not present to care for it, then the mother should have no obligation on her end of the bargain. "You argue that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy when contraceptives are used. Yet in reality sexual intercourse is intrinsically ordered to cause pregnancy, and so participating in an act that is fundamentally intended to give a certain consequence is effectively consent for that consequence to occur." If sexual intercourse was only meant for offspring, it would not be pleasurable. Sex might be the way humans reproduce, but saying reproduction is the only use of sex is a vast oversimplification. Sources cited: (1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (2) https://www.fosterclub.com... (3) https://chronicleofsocialchange.org...