Abortion and the right to life

I will simply rebut Con's last points that need mentioning. I would like to thank him again for his thought-provoking responses. He has unfortunately created another strawman argument against me by claiming I make pregnancy into a contract. While, yes, I agree that we are not morally obligated to provide an organ to someone we are not responsible for, I have shown that when a couple has sex they are responsible for the child they create. Con has not refuted this; in fact, he has actually side-stepped my arguments. Sex is not a crime. I am not punishing anyone by saying a couple should not be able to abort their unborn child. I am stating that the couple should take responsibility for the life they create through an act that was consensual. I have also shown that I believe the man to be equally responsible and should be forced to pay child support at all points during her pregnancy. I am not singling out women and calling me sexist for it is an ad hominem, plain and simple. Con says there is no punishment because the man can just walk away, but he has ignored what I said. I said that I believe a man should not be able to walk away and should be forced to give child support at all points during the pregnancy. I don't believe recreational sex is immoral, as long as if a child is conceived the couple takes responsibility for it. Citing the U. S. Supreme Court to prove Con's case is an appeal to authority. Slavery used to be legal. What is legal is not always right and what is right is not always legal. Additionally, I never said that contraceptives were immoral. I would rather a couple use contraceptives to prevent conception than to abort a preborn child once conceived. But using contraceptives is irrelevant because there is still a chance they can fail. You just can't assume you'll never get pregnant even using contraceptives. There's always a chance it may still happen. The fact of the matter is the U. S. Supreme Court is not an authority on morality. In fact, in the landmark Roe v. Wade case the supreme court ruled in favor of abortion due to faulty reasoning. Former president of NARAL (and one of its founders) Dr. Bernard Nathanson has come out and shown that the figures used by the pro-choice side during the Roe v. Wade trial were greatly inflated. [1] Additionally, forty years before Roe v. Wade was voted on by the Supreme Court and they made the statement that "no one can tell when life began," Alan Guttmacher, former president of Planned Parenthood, wrote the following regarding the scientific fact that human life begins at fertilization: "This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge. " [2] The Supreme Court is not an authority on morality, especially when it comes to abortion. Now we come to where Con has side-stepped my arguments. Notice how Con didn't answer my question about whether someone who pushes a button for a pleasurable experience would be responsible for a baby created by his pushing the button. The obvious answer is yes. Con obviously didn't respond because the answer would be detrimental to his case. Con, in response to my baseball analogy, considers abortion to be "cleaning up the mess" of pregnancy. But this is ridiculous. Abortion would be "cleaning up the mess" only if in my analogy I knocked out the wall the window was in so that the broken window wouldn't be noticed. The analogy shows that even though I didn't consent to breaking the window, I bear responsibility for fixing it. An act of violence (abortion) is not a fix for an unplanned pregnancy. Con has also indicated that you bear responsibility for the window because it is not your property. But there is another human here that abortion affects. We don't have the right to do just whatever we want to our own bodies. In fact, thalidomide is a drug that was used to ease morning sickness in pregnant women but it resulted in deformations of the child. They were often born without limbs. Doctors will not prescribe thalidomide to pregnant women anymore. The argument "it's my body" doesn't stand because there's another human being affected by these actions. Con has not shown why a pregnant woman bears no responsibility for her unborn child so her responsibility stands. In actuality, we do consent to negative consequences to actions that we do. For example, people die in car accidents. Unless Jesus happens to wander by that day, you're not coming back from that. While yes, doctors can help repair damage done to you, there are some things they can't fix. You must be prepared to accept some consequences for your actions. Becoming pregnant is different than accepting negative consequences to yourself because there's another living human at stake. Human beings are being killed in the name of convenience. Regarding my argument of the guy in the coma, Con seems to have misunderstood my argument. He certainly didn't refute it. What the machine or the mother is, is irrelevant to this example. I was showing that a person in a coma has a right to life despite being completely dependent on a machine for survival, and an unborn child has a right to life despite being completely dependent on the mother for roughly nine months. Finally, regarding the child in the dumpster, Con has not shown that we only have a moral obligation to save independent humans. My example of the guy in the coma shows that there are cases in which a human is completely dependent yet has a right to life. Saving a kid thrown away in a dumpster seems contradictory to Con's claims that we should kill unborn children because they may grow up to lead lives that are less than ideal. In closing, I will reiterate that I have shown a mother bears responsibility for her unborn child, especially considering that in the vast majority of cases the child has been conceived through a consensual act between her and her partner. Independence is irrelevant because people in comas bear a right to life. I thank you for reading and hope that you have found this debate enlightening and interesting. [1] . http://www.aboutabortions.com...[2] Guttmacher, Alan, Life in the Making: The Story of Human Procreation, New York: Viking Press, 1933, p.3.