Most Abortion is Murder

I find debates much more enjoyable when people respond quickly. While I applaud my opponent's detailed and logical entry, I am disappointed that they immediately jumped into rebuttals. The agreed upon debate rules clearly state that round 2 was for opening arguments only. Unfortunately, this makes things a bit lopsided going into round 3, but let us proceed nonetheless. Con gives an impressive presentation by assigning variables to certain ideas and demonstrating logical relationships between them. Unfortunately, they expended all this effort on points that were not intended as arguments. They are simply dictionary definitions, and I only used them to define life in general, not human life. In any case, Con did accept the third definition and did not even address the remaining three (medical, astrophysical, and my own proposed definition of human life) in any significant way, which leads us to assume they are accepted as well. I am perfectly willing to discard the first two definitions and work with the remaining four if my opponent wishes. As a result, I see no need to respond further to Con's rebuttals against the first two definitions, especially since they weren't even arguments to begin with. Con writes, "I would argue that a fully developed human is much more different than the sperm and egg cells . . . I don't think individual cells are important. " I agree. That is why we are not discussing sperm cells or egg cells, we are discussing the organism they create called a zygote. An egg only has 23 chromosomes, a sperm only has 23 chromosomes. A human has 46. I defined human life as a collection of living cells containing 46 human chromosomes. However, since my opponent advocates that these individual cells be tossed into "set B," the obvious follow on question is - at what point is it no longer ok to toss these cells into set B? When they become 4 cells? 8? 16? 200,000? As Con correctly identified, this debate considers where we need to draw the line. I draw it at conception. Con says that a baby is a wonderful and blessed thing once it is born - so I ask again, is it not equally as wonderful 30 seconds before it is born? How about an hour? A day? Where does Con draw the line? I will now address Con's reference to my admission that some termination of human life is not considered murder. It's obvious that defining murder as "intentionally ending another human life" inevitably opens the door to cases like war or self-defense, which are not considered murder. I acknowledged this up front in hopes that it would help us avoid collapsing into semantics. My opponent says that this "REALLY REALLY complicates this debate" I agree, which is exactly why I said "I hope we can both agree that such cases are outside the parameters of this topic. " If we can agree that most abortion is not in the same category as war or self-defense, then we can easily move on and get back to the substance of the debate. If we cannot agree to that, then we must muddle through the semantics. In the event that Con chooses the latter option, I offer the following: This debate is not about defining instances when ending a human life is or is not murder. Before we could even discuss that, Con would first have to admit that a fetus is indeed a human life, which I do not believe they are prepared to do. This debate is about proving whether a zygote/embryo/fetus should be considered human life. As my opponent said in their opening paragraph, "We are trying to determine if an embryo is human life or not. " We both agreed to accept the murder definition provided in round 1. As a result, all of our arguments operate under the assumption that murder is intentionally ending a human life. Period. Therefore, for the purposes of this debate, killing in war and self-defense is still murder by definition. Socially accepted manifestations of murder, yes, but murder nonetheless. If my opponent wants to debate why and when we should not kill soldiers then we would have to discuss Just War Theory, the principle of declared hostile intent, etc. .. While that is a highly interesting topic, it would be more appropriately discussed in a separate debate. The answer to Con's final question (What IS murder? ) can be found in round 1. You cannot agree that murder is "intentionally ending another human life" in round 1 and then say that intentionally ending another human life might not be murder in round 2. Con should have asked for a more specific definition before accepting the debate if they wanted to play that game. As I read over my opponent's round 2 entry one last time, there aren't really any arguments I can respond to other than the aforementioned definitional attacks. The most I can find is the brief comparison that a fully developed human is more important than a sperm or egg. My response to that is, first, this debate is not about some life being more important than other life. It's about if a fetus is a human life. Importance is irrelevant. Such logic suggests that only killing important humans is murder. Second, using a fully developed human as a comparison is meaningless to this topic. Technically, humans are not fully developed until after puberty when their reproductive systems mature. So, according to this reasoning then, is a fully developed adult more human than a 6 year old? If Con wishes to imply that the level of development factors into a life being human, they have given no evidence to support such a claim. In conclusion, I would like to remind my opponent that the burden of proof is shared. Con manages to say, "I of course, being con, do not consider the early stages of a fetus to be human life" but they have provided no evidence to show why this might be true. I look forward to Con establishing their position more in round 3.