Abortion is Prima Facie Morally Wrong

Furthermore, I want to congratulate my opponent on his philosophical prowess - it's a rare sight among many theists ;). One important observation I want to note before diving into my arguments is that the resolution refers to the moral evaluation of abortion in terms of prima facie, which in Latin means 'at first sight'. I'll take it that he is supplying an argument that shows abortion to be intuitively wrong, in which I will do the opposite. I will demonstrate that on multiple levels that my opponent's argument is wrong, and that abortion is prima facie morally justified. I will borrow my responses from the works of Mary Anne Warren[1] and Jane English[2]. I will use Warren's psychological criteria of personhood to demonstrate a better determinant than my opponent's argument, and I will use English's arguments to demonstrate the falsehood of the second premise in his argument. Before I begin I want to lay down a very important note: the conclusions of Warren and English on the issue of abortion will be different, with Warren accepting most cases of abortion to be permissible while English accepting only some cases to be permissible (or in other words, a significantly less amount). However, this does not endanger my argument for the purpose of using these two is to demonstrate that it is not true prima facie that abortion is morally wrong - a position that unless clarified must be meant to say that all normal instances of abortion are morally wrong. ==================== Examination of my opponent's argument against abortion ==================== My opponent makes a central claim of saying that there personhood is an essential property of a fetus, and that unactualized potentials do not have any effect on such a property. He observes that attributes such as size or degree of dependency have no bearing on personhood, and on that issue I would agree. However, what he glosses over as being important is what Warren recognizes as psychological capacities - indeed, I would argue that to become a person a fetus must have some psychological characteristics. I propose that if an entity does not have ANY of the 5 following psychological characteristics, then it can't be a person: 1. Consciousness and in particular sentience 2. Reasoning 3. Self-motivated activity 4. The capacity to communicate messages with not only an indefinite number of possible type and on content, but on indefinitely many possible topics 5. The presence of self-concepts And prima facie, we would agree with this - is a zombie not in essence a human being? It has human cells, had human parents, and contains human DNA. However, the lack of any psychological capacities would have us deem it to be a nonperson. On another note, my opponent's second premise is that it is prima facie morally wrong to kill any person. Jane English makes an interesting point that this is not always the case. For example, would not self-defense be a legitimate example of when killing a person is justified? However, the abortion opponent could also claim that fetus' are innocent entities, but even then prima facie it would seem that self-defense would still be legitimate. Take the following thought experiment: say a hypnotist controlled several people who came at you with killing intent. Even though they are innocent, it would seem prima facie permissible for you to defend yourself by capacitate them with lethal force. In the same breathe, English states that it's permissible to terminate a fetus EVEN if it was determined to be a person. ---References--- See comments section.