Being in favor of abortion and against the death penalty is hypocritical and typically liberal.

ateInteresting debate. I'm not going to address the notion that these positions are typically liberal because that seems to be a fairly obvious assertion. Many liberals are against the death penalty and are for the women's right to choose, I absolutely agree. First off, I'm going to start with some definitions since my opponent decided not to provide any. Merriam Webster defines the following as such: Hypocrisy: feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion Murder: The unlawful killing of another person The first definition seems to unhinge my opponent's argument. Liberals only say that they believe in these two things, not some all-encompassing belief in a right to life. Therefore to believe in these two things is not hypocritical. Interestingly enough, it is conservatives who profess this aforementioned "right to life", and yet favor the death penalty, but that is neither here nor there. I suppose by hypocritical my opponent means morally inconsistent. The second definition is where most liberals find their point of stasis from conservatives. They believe that the fetus is not a "person", and many people tend to agree. The US Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey states that a fetus only becomes viable after 22 weeks and upheld a woman's right to an abortion before that point. Neurophysiological definitions of personhood state that one must be a sentient being in order to qualify as a person. Therefore, it is not inconsistent to support abortion because those who do don't see it as the killing of a person, but rather a medical decision made by the woman. As far as the death penalty is concerned, there are a multitude of reasons why liberals and non-liberals oppose it. Oddly enough, none of them include letting "an evil person, that has proved to society that they are willing to kill others, live out his life." Many studies have shown that the death penalty is no more effective as a deterrent to murder than life without parole (1, 2). Moreover, since 1973, 127 people on death row in the US have been exonerated based on DNA evidence, and experts say that numerous other innocent people have been put to death in that time frame (3). Opponents of the death penalty argue that this provides too high a risk of executing an innocent person to justify the use of capital punishment. Finally, one more argument against the death penalty states that its application is unequal and discriminatory. A black defendant on trial for murder is 38% more likely to be given they death penalty than a defendant of any other race; and nearly 90% of all victims in death penalty cases are white, despite the fact that whites make up only about 50% of all murder victims (4). In conclusion, to say that supporting a woman's right to choose and opposing the death penalty is not only un-hypocritical, it is also morally consistent, as I have shown. 1.http://links.jstor.org...(197512)85%3A2%3C187%3ATIODII%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E 2.http://cad.sagepub.com... 3.http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... 4.http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org...