Rape Should Not Be An Exception In Abortion Policy

Rebuttal 1: It Does Not Follow That Because Philosophical Issues Are Involved That We Can Not Enforce LawsMy opponent says "I personally think that our perspectives on abortion typically begin with whether we view a human fetus as a life that was meant for the world, or a lifeless fetus whose existence is yet to be decided." and then goes on to say "However the answer to this question is merely philosophical, and will likely never be answered by science or any other objective measure.""Being that we as a society will likely always have some level of disagreement on this issue, we can not enforce laws based solely on either of these positions."Yes, we can. It may be that neither side can prove itself definitively it is necessary for a stance to be taken one way or another to prevent chaos and anarchy. The state must either allow abortion, thereby prohibiting the enforcement of the view that the fetus is a life with rights onto those who would disagree, or it must disallow abortion thereby actively enforcing that view against those that disagree. Either way is equally unfair. Which side is ultimately correct depends on your point-of-view.Furthermore, all legal and political arguments ultimately rest on some assertion of rights be it the right to life, right of freedom of speech, etc. It is simply not possible to have a politics that has a purely objective base. It must all boil down to human perspective. But that does not mean we can just say "anything goes", because that invites tyranny and lack of accountability. Some stable set of core rights and values must underly public policy. In short there must be some level of consistency in how arguments are implemented to make public policy or else the whole thing risks tumbling like a house of cards. Rebuttal 2: Implications For Property Rights Con points out that a fetus must remain inside of the mother to survive and states that the right of a woman to choose what she does with her own body has a higher value. This opinion is fair. One may hold that a fetus has a right to life, but that the right to property(in the woman's own body) outweighs the right to life.Con then claims that we could say the woman's right to property over her body only trumps the fetus' right to life in cases of rape and this would be fine, because she allowed the pregnancy to happen in cases that were not rape. But let's look at the implications of this sort of reasoning with a comparison to a more familiar form of property, a house. If a person has a right to property in their own home clearly they have an even stronger right to property in their own body, the body itself being the most personal thing a person owns.Compare "consentual unprotected sex" that results in a "baby" to "leaving the door to your house open" that results in a "stranger walking in from the cold to get shelter and heat".To make them more comparable let's say it is extremely cold out and the stranger will die in the cold if he is turned away. Because of the importance of property rights particularly in one's own home the fact that the person left the door open does not give the stranger a right to stay. Even if the stranger were explicitly invited in the owner of the home would still be within their rights to tell the stranger to get lost, even knowing the stranger will die out in the cold without shelter.Rebuttal 3: We Must Not Create 2nd-Class Citizens Or Punish The Child For The Father's Crime To say that the fetus has a "right to life" but one that can be trumped by a woman's "right to property" in her own body if it occured because of rape it is to recognize in effect that the fetus has some of the rights of personhood, but that those rights are waivable in the case that its life was the product of rape.This has 2 unfortunately implications. One is that the fetus is effectively put into a gray area between person and non-person, a sort of 2nd-class citizen. Recognizing a category of second-class citizens in our laws would set a dangerous precedent. Historically at many times various groups of people were treated as second-class citizens, including blacks and women. We do not want to reopen the possibility of creating 2nd-class citizens. It is better to keep it simple, either a human being is a person with the right to life or it is not.The other implication is that the fetus' right to life is upheld except when it was the product of its father's crime, rape. This establishes a precedent that it is valid to consider someone's life "forfeit" as a result of the crimes of a parent. The fetus did not commit the rape and should not be singled out and effectively punished for something it did not do. Arguably this is not punishment, because the fetus has no right to life but if you assert that fetuses in general have a right to life that the government can legitimately protect then effectively you are waiving that right for certain fetuses as a result of the crime committed by their fathers.