Abortion should be legal

I and V. The right to not have a child if you don't want to. In this round, Pro combined I and V into one argument. In the previous round, he had dropped I. That argument was circular, but V had a missing premise. I attempted to provide a premise that would make the argument valid, but Pro rejected that premise. He didn't replace it with anything else, though, so that leaves his argument invalid. He essentially just pounds the podium, and says, "The government should not force pregnant women to have a child," which is the issue under dispute. II. Unsafe abortions. In the original round, his argument from unsafe abortions was invalid because there was a missing premise. In the next round, he just restated it without defending it against my critique. In this round, he restates it, but then adds that the government should protect the life of women over that of fetuses. But the problem with this argument is that unless a woman's health were seriously at risk, abortion is optional. The government wouldn't be endagering women by prohibiting abortion. Women who chose to have illegal abortions would be endangering themselves. Moreover, if abortion is a serious moral crime, it doesn't make sense to keep it legal to protect those who choose to do it. Should we make burglery legal so that it will be safer for people to rob homes? Surely not! IV. Protests. Earlier, I made two points: (1) that there would be protests whether abortion is legal or not, and (2) this is irrelevant to whether abortion should be legal or not. In answer to 1, Pro doesn't deny that there would be protests either way; he just says there would be more if abortion were illegal. I concede that point. However, it is still irrelevant to the question of whether abortion should be legal or not. VI. might become a criminal. (I accidentally labled this V in the last round. )Earlier, I said you can't kill criminals. Pro corrected me by saying you can kill some of them. But that doesn't help his case because my point was that if you can't even kill criminals who are guilty, then surely you can't kill the unborn who are innocent. Even if there are some criminials who it's okay to kill, it doesn't follow that you can therefore go ahead and kill the innocent, too. He elaborates on how aweful it would be if there were more criminals, but he still doesn't answer my objection. In what universe is it okay to kill the innocent just because they might some day become criminals? That makes no sense. VII. Time, work, and money (I accidentally labled this VI in the last round. )Pro neglected in the last round to explain how it follows that it's okay to kill the unborn if it takes a lot of time, work, and money to raise them after they're born. In this round, he still didn't make that connection. Instead, he said the fetus is not a human. Well, that's a different argument altogether. I'll deal with that in a minute, but in the meantime, he still needs to provide the missing premise that explains how it follows that it's okay to kill the unborn as long as raising them takes a lot of time, work, and money. VIII. The unborn are not humanIf the unborn are not human, then that renders all of Pro's previous arguments null and void because if it's not human, then you don't need all these justifications for killing it any more than you need justification for any other elective surgery. A person born with an extra finger doesn't need any justiication to have it removed other than the fact that he wants to. But his claim that the unborn are not human is plainly false. Does he imagine there's a possum in there? Or perhaps a tomatoe? We know it's a human because its parents are human, it has human DNA, and if allowed to it will go through every stage of human development. He cites an online dictionary to prove that fetuses are not human, but if you click on over, the definition does not actually exclude fetuses from humanity. So his source does not support his argument. IX. Pro-lifers are hypocrits because they are okay with abortion in the case of rape and incest. That's true of some pro-lifers, but not all. Anyway, this arguments commits the ad hominem fallacy because he's attacking the character of pro-lifers rather than their arguments. This is the mother of all non-sequiturs. It doesn't follow that because some pro-lifers are hypocrits that therefore the pro-life position is false. And it certainly doesn't support his claim that abortions ought to be legal. We can dismiss this argument as irrelevant. ConclusionPro dropped III in the last round, and he hasn't picked it back up. That's nine arguments so far, and every one of them has failed. I wonder if we'll get some new arguments in the next round. Or maybe he'll patch some of these up a bit. We'll see.