Debate: Abortion is a selfish action to alleviate an undesirable consequence
Side: True

''A child is sentient, has feelings, and generally would want to live.''----------You have to be very precise about what you mean by sentience, feelings and the general desire to live. These characteristic are very vague and can apply to pretty much any animal for that matter. An adult pig is sentient, has feelings in the form of anger, fear, sadness, happiness, excitement. A pig also displays a general desire to live and escape suffering. A pig qualifies for the criteria you’ve put forth yet we don’t raise a pig to the importance of a human child. This means two things - we are hypocrites or we haven’t considered some third characteristic.---------''Something that has not developed the essential parts to have these relatively complex thoughts does not feel these things. Therefore, you are not taking anything from "them" (more accurately it but okay) because there is nothing too take.''---------I am taking their lives, their future and a life-time amount of choices. I want you to specify what do you mean by complex thoughts? As I said before, your proposed characteristics are very vague and actually can be used to defend animals, so what is it? Will a baby for example get insulted if I call him stupid? No, he doesn’t and do you know why? Because a newborn child is not capable of abstract thought, is not capable of understanding the concept of rights, the concept of death or any abstract concept for that matter. It’s purely an organism of instinct, it’ll take weeks, maybe even months for the child to start recognizing its parent. Therefore, as you said - since the child is incapable of comprehending and feeling these things, you do them no harm because no harm can be done to someone who doesn’t understand and is ignorant of the concept of harm and rights.Secondly, you did not address my sleep analogy. When I am asleep, I am no longer sentient, I don’t feel any emotions nor can I express my wills and desires. During sleep, my personality is effectively gone - I’m not excercising my capacity for sentience - therefore because I’m not sentient and thus, incapable of feeling or making decisions, I am no longer human? If someone kills me while I’m sleeping, nothing is taken from me because at the time, my sentience is not functioning.-------''You'll lose that argument though because either nature or god "aborts" thousands of little potential babies even in the instances when one of the eggs do happen to be fertilized. If god or nature makes this happen on such a ridiculously high level, literally hundreds of thousands of little potential lives that are never born during each ejaculation, who are you to tell someone else they have to go through with this or that one particular pregnancy?''-------So basically, because the fetal fatality rate in nature is so high - it follows that it’s acceptable to terminate fetal life artificially as well? This is an absurd argument. About 5 people die each second of hunger - does it follow that it’s right therefore to artificially starve people to death?You see, in the case where there are malformations and natural deaths - it’s a tragedy, but the deaths were not the result of actual intent of terminating the life of someone. When a someone gets hit by lightning, we don’t say that the lightning is evil. However, when some guy shoots another for no reason - then we have good grounds to call that man evil and immoral. Abortion entails clear malicious intent to terminate a developing human being, nature doesn’t.