Abortion should be illegal.

This is the concluding round. Con should not post any new arguments in this round because our team will not be able to respond. Are there advantages to the plan? There are many harms of abortion that outweigh the benefits of keeping it legal, and that has been shown through this debate. Pain As Con’s source #8 states, “there’s no evidence that the subcortex can provide for the pain experience”, but that does not mean you can safely assume that the subcortex can’t provide for the pain experience. To protect the embryo from any possible harm, a woman should get an abortion during the first four weeks of pregnancy, when the embryonic period hasn’t begun and it wouldn’t be considered an abortion by the terms of this debate. A later abortion would be risking harm to the embryo. Psychological damage Women who get abortions are 154% more likely to commit suicide than women who don’t. Since over a million people commit suicide every year, [1] this outweighs the 68,000 deaths from illegal abortions. Con objected to my statistics and provided an irrelevant link that doesn’t respond to any of my arguments, so it can be ignored. He also asserts that my evidence doesn’t apply to rape, but does not have any evidence to support that claim. My arguments regarding psychological harm to the partners of women who have had abortion were completely ignored. In conclusion, there is significant psychological harm caused by abortion. Disadvantages Con has argued that there are disadvantages to making abortion illegal, but I have proven throughout the debate that they are all either nonexistent or outweighed by the benefits. Rape Con claims that rape victims face nine months of immense pain and should be allowed an abortion to avoid the pain. This is false. Pregnant women experience little to no pain until the later part of pregnancy. If they aren’t ready to give birth, they should terminate their pregnancy during the first four weeks (which is not an abortion). Otherwise, they are causing harm to the embryo that could have been easily avoided. Any harm done to the woman here is self-caused and the violinist analogy is completely inaccurate. Back-alley abortions Con claims that the 68,000 deaths caused by unsafe abortions outweigh the 40-50 million embryos and fetuses killed in usually legal abortions, which is obviously not true, because 40,000,000 > 68,000. I proved earlier that in developed countries, those with abortion illegal or heavily restricted have lower abortion rates than other countries. Con had two objections, both baseless: 1. He claimed that abortion laws caused the correlation seen in the data, or that the same would apply to the United States. However, it can be reasonably concluded that based on the United States’ high abortion rate and the low abortion rates of countries with abortion illegal, banning abortion in the United States would most likely cause a significant decrease in abortions. 2. He pointed out that Uganda, which is a third world country, [2] has a very high abortion rate. However, the resolution states that abortion should be illegal in the United States or a similar Western state, and Uganda is most certainly not a similar Western state. Conclusion There are significant harms caused by abortion, and they greatly outweigh the few benefits of keeping it legal. Sources [1] http://www.suicide.org... [2] http://www.nationsonline.org...