Legalized Abortion Has Done More Good Than Harm.

Exhibit A: Fetal Personhood - Defining when life begins is perhaps the most important portion of the abortion debate. Con contends that it is at the point where sentience first becomes possible, if unimpeded. You claim that fetuses are persons because they would become sentient in the future unless interrupted. Can't the same be said for the all the sperm that do not fertilize a given egg? The sperm expelled during masturbation is another story, but surely a sperm destined for an egg, uninterreupted, would likely fertilize that egg and eventuallly become sentient. Does this mean that every single one of these spermatazoa are "persons" and thus a life is being foregone. I think it is safe to say that this is not a sound definition for when life or "personhood" begins and thus needs to be redefined. Exhibit B: Bodily Autonomy This is simply a fallacious analogy. It immediately breaks down because there are many cases where a birth will kill the mother if the baby is not aborted, without collateral damage such as the entirety of New York City. This example would, perhaps be applicable if Joe invited the terrorist over for dinner, a game of chess, and to watch Breaking Bad. However, if the terrorist, as terrorists often do, forced his or her way into the space station and used violence to place this bomb in Joe's hand, surely it would not be fair to force him to die over this. Exhibit C: Harm vs. Good The first sentence of this argument is straight up beggining the question and presupposing your conclusion as your premise and, thus, must be disregarded. Now, a few quotes to combat this 'Exhibit' from scholarly sources: - Compared to states that support women"s health, those states that oppose safe and legal abortion spend far less money per child on a range of services such as foster care, education, welfare, and the adoption of children who have physical and mental disabilities (Schroedel, 2000). - The states that have the strongest laws against safe and legal abortion are also the states in which women suffer from lower levels of education and higher levels of poverty, as well as from a lower ratio of female-tomale earnings. They also have a lower percentage of women in the legislature and fewer mandates requiring insurance providers to cover minimum hospital stays after childbirth (Schroedel, 2000). - Following the legalization of abortion, the largest decline in birth rates were seen among women for whom the health and social consequences of unintended childbearing are the greatest " women over 35, teenagers, and unmarried women (Levine et al., 1999). Today, 26 percent of the abortions in the U.S. are provided to women over 35 and to teenagers (CDC, 2014). - Today, less than 0.3 percent of women undergoing legal abortion procedures at all gestational ages sustain a serious complication requiring hospitalization (Boonstra et al., 2006; Henshaw, 1999; Upadhyay, et al., 2015). Among women undergoing legal first-trimester aspiration procedures, the percentage sustaining serious complications drops, with recent studies showing major complication rates ranging from 0.05 percent to 0.16 percent (Upadhyay, et al., 2015; Weitz et al., 2013). - About half of all pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended, and four in 10 of these are ended by medically safe, legal abortions. In 2011, an estimated 1.1 million abortions took place, a 13 percent decline from 2008. The abortion rate in 2011 was the lowest rate since 1973 (Jones and Jerman, 2014). From 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred (Guttmacher Institute, 2014).