Resolved - Abortion Should Be Legal

Thank you for your acceptance. I look forward to a great debate. My arguments are as follows: A fetus should not have the same rights as a sentient human being. Simply because the fetus is alive, does not make it equal to a parent. Science shows that the traits that make a human, human, namely self-awareness, advanced cognitive thinking, and a certain degree of consciousness, does not develop until the fetus is 25 weeks old - this is just about at the end of the second trimester. (Some may argue this excludes the legality of third trimester abortion - however, the majority of these abortions occur because of life-threatening issues to the mother, or to both the mother and fetus. But I digress). One could then argue that before this stage, a fetus could be considered merely a parasite, dependent on its 'host' for life. An argument commonly made by the Pro-Life community is that 'if we found a single-celled organism on Mars, the headlines would read "Life on Mars". A baby in the womb is not considered alive'. However, this claim is a false conception. My argument is this: do we give the same consideration for single-celled organisms as we do human beings? We clearly do not. When we are infected by parasites, or viruses, do we stop and consider the moral obligation we have to keep it alive? No. We kill it with antibiotics, or our body fights it off. To argue that these are double standards between a fetus and an organism is untrue. Speaking of double standards... The Pro-Life community argues that a fetus is a human, from the moment of conception. But if this is true, aren't they focusing their energies on something more worthwhile for the protection of this human? Let's look at the math. From the moment of conception, namely, when a sperm unites with an egg cell, the fetus (or, at this point, the zygote) has a slim chance of surviving. The chances of implanting onto the uterine wall are slim - only 30-40% of zygotes do. The rest are carried out by the menstrual cycle and thus, by the logic of considering them humans, die. After implantation, there is approximately a 25-50% chance that the zygote is miscarried. This leaves us with, at best, only 30% of the zygotes conceived - at worst, only 15%. These are appalling statistics, since we are considering the zygotes to be people. By these numbers, we lose to the natural cycle over 1.5 million babies a year. In contrast, only 125,000 babies are aborted a day - that's approximately 7.8% of those lost naturally. Surely, given these appalling numbers, the Pro-Life community should be devoting, at a minimum, the same number of resources towards preventing miscarriages and other natural losses of life as they do towards preventing abortion. The fact that they do not suggests that either they truly don't consider the life of a zygote worth that much time and energy, showing they don't truly believe it is a human, or the attention towards abortion is actually aimed at a cause other than saving the zygote - perhaps to condemn pre-marital sex or slow the progress of women or something along those lines. But surely, if the life of the zygote is truly their #1 concern, this issue should take priority over abortion prevention. Thank you for your time.