This House Concludes that Abortion is Murder

As a type this at almost 10:00 PM on a Saturday night, after a day of studying, I realize that I have no life. Self deprecation aside, let's begin after some introductory remarks. Introductory Remarks: After reading that little note PRO left me above, this is kind of awkward for me because above I did distinguish abortion and murder, such that there is no way my opponent can recover from it. This is due to the state of objective reality, in fact, not regarding abortion as murder. Also, I don't like a lot of emboldened or italicized text in a debate, or a lot of images. I think it's in poor taste, and that the thrust of argument alone should be good enough to stand alone -without the unnecessary ostentation of adornment. Now, to my opponent's new arguments: PRO seems to be under the impression that laws which keep abortion legal are unconstitutional. This is not the case, because the Supreme Court has found that laws which restrict abortion before the point of medical viability are unconstitutional because doing so violates women's right to medical privacy, in Planned Parenthood of South Eastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). Curiously, PRO acknowledges this, but argues that The Supreme Court of the United States' many rulings to that same end are also unconstitutional. It would appear that PRO is laboring under the impression that the Supreme Court does something 'other' than interpret the meaning of our country's highest source of legal authority. On this point he is mistaken, because of the Supreme Court's being in possession of the power of judicial review. Judicial review is "authority to examine an executive or legislative act and to invalidate that act if it is contrary to constitutional principles." (1) In the case of Marbury v. Madison, John Marshall, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States reasoned that because it is the court's duty to declare the law and because the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land by the second clause of Article VI, the Supreme Court has the authority to determine whether laws passed conflict with the constitution. In his own words, Marshall writes that it is "emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department, to say what the law is." Said in more simple terms, it was in Marbury where the "Supreme Court Case established the right of the courts to determine the constitutionality of the actions of the other two branches of government." (2) This is, clearly, not a power which extents beyond the courts -which it appears PRO seems to be under the impression that it would. Thus, it is within the scope of the Supreme Court's authority to constitutionally protect women's right to seek abortions, and to extend that right to such an extent as would preclude the states from criminalizing it. As such, we can know with legal certainty that no abortion is murder -because it cannot be criminalized as murder. While people can claim abortion is murder, or meat is murder, that does not make it the case. Likewise, while my opponent can claim that laws which permit abortion are unconstitutional, absent any grounding for that claim -for which he has none, nor he could have any- it cannot be the case. He is certainly free to labor under the delusion that abortion is murder, or that meat is murder, but his holding a view does, again, not make it the case. He can misrepresent Marbury, claim that I said a whole bunch of things that I didn't, etc. To his later claims that there are some state laws which make someone liable for two counts of murder if they kill a pregnant woman at any stage of fetal development, that's fine too -it still doesn't mean that abortion is murder. Further clarification for that point is found in the penultimate paragraph of my previous round. Again, to win this debate, my opponent had to show that abortion was murder. I sufficiently prevented him from doing that in my first round of argumentation, and I did that again here. Since I've got some character space left, I want to make some things really clear: In the previous round, I said "abortion is the unlawful killing of one person by another person." I was copying and pasting, and made a mistake. Obviously, murder is the unlawful killing of one person by another person and abortion is not, as defined by the the various sources I've cited above. However, if abortion were to be murder, it would have to (1) be unlawful and (2) entail the killing of another human being. First, abortion before the point of viability is not unlawful. Second, the law does not recognize non-viable fetuses as people. Casey establishes viability is the metric of legal personhood. There may be state laws which permit people who murder pregnant women to be charged with two counts of murder -which is probably reasonable because, absent a murderer's being murderous, that child/fetus most likely would have been born. This also advances the policy interest of preventing people from killing pregnant women -which is something I think we can reasonably agree is a good objective. That said, the law treats the killing of pregnant women differently from abortion. One is murder, the other is not, because non-viable fetuses are not "murderable." ("Murderable" was the word that I was trying to use at the end of the last sentence under the third paragraph of my previous round, but apparently autocorrect had other plans.) While PRO certainly has some interesting ideas about things, abortion alone does not satisfy the elements of murder. Even if some jurisdictions thought that it did, they would be acting unconstitutionally, because constitutional law broadly protects women's right to access abortions. PRO can disagree with Sandra Day O'Conner to any extent he likes, but, at the end of the day, what she said is literally "the law." Sources: (1) http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com... (2) http://www.ourdocuments.gov...