Debate: is life better today than it was in the early 1900's
Side: yes

Modern day people use medication as a "get out of jail free" card meaning that they can smoke, drink and eat whatever and whenever they like.Responding to a question with another question is not an answer - it is a dodge. I am not going to indulge you until you directly respond to my inquiries. This is a dishonest debating tactic and you should avoid it in the future. You can't understand that todays world gives the appearance of being better when it isn'tYou can't understand that saying this does not make it true. because it is a subject on which I am authority, let's examine my life as a case study. If I were to live 100 years ago, my father would be dead and my sister would have miscarried her twins. I would probably never have had the opportunity to attend school at all, as my family is not well off, and college would have been even more out of reach. I would likely already be married, a mother (quite possibly to a dead child), and working a menial job to support my family. I would not be allowed to vote and I would be considered an inferior being to my husband. As it is, my father is alive, my nieces are alive, I am able to attend college full time, I have all the rights that my boyfriend has and I have much more freedom and flexibility with my career and my future plans because I do not have any children thanks to birth control. I am going to take advantage of my opportunity to get an excellent education, travel overseas, and study primatology and evolutionary psychology. I owe all these opportunities to modern developments in transportation, civil rights, science and technology in general. My life is by no means unique. Every woman and every minority (in developed countries like US and Britain) is better off than they would have been 100 years ago purely by virtue of experiencing less institutionalized discrimination. Poor people have more government support and rich people have exponentially more money and luxuries on which to spend their vast wealth. Children die less, people live longer, and we have more choices, comforts, and opportunities. What people do with their freedoms may not always be ideal, but they are there.If you want to live in the 1900s, thanks to modern technology, you someday can. Use the internet to research a place that is 100 years behind the rest of the world, use an airplane to get there, and there you are. Now babies don't only die in childbirth we kill them as well Babies do die in childbirth, but it is extremely rare in developed countries, and they are also much safer from disease in infancy and early childhood. Do not ignore this. Abortion and losing a child to a curable disease are different. Are you one of those posh rich kids who ignore everything they don't want to see?While it's not good to be poor and I don't think anyone deserves it, the US currently takes better care of its poor than they did 100 years ago. Hitting me with an irrelevant insult does nothing to change this.So do youEvidence:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortionhttp://www.poverty.com/I am not using an emotionally appealing editorial as the basis for my argument, good try though. There have been dozens of sources offered by me and others in this debate, so go look at a couple of those.All your sources prove is that those things exist. Great. Biological warfare - covered this. Don't support it, but medicine has done an enormous amount of good for the human race as well.I support a citizens' right to bodily autonomy so the abortion debate is not going to work here either. As for poverty - what shape do you think humanitarianism was in 100 years ago? How many people, percentage-wise, do you think were starving in Africa and other countries 100 years ago, when the quality of life was hugely lower even in developed countries like the US and Britain? Think about the aid that is offered to countries today - inadequate, clearly, but substantial - both in the form of raw goods like food, and sustainable efforts like permanent sources of clean water and education about farming techniques and family planning. Imagine how impossible such efforts would have been a century ago.