Abortion is murder and should be illegal. The only reason anyone ever supports it is that no adult will ever again have to be an unborn child. It is easier to pretend that abortion is a cancer treatment than it is to take responsibility for our sexuality or to demand responsibility from others.
The usual arguments for abortion are easily dismissed:
(1) People claim that fetuses do not feel pain and have no concept of their future. If that justifies abortion, then painlessly killing people in their sleep is also justified. As long as society does not want a person, this argument would allow anyone to be killed in their sleep as long as it is done painlessly. People don't fear death only because it is painful. They fear it because it takes away their potential future life. Taking it away without their knowledge does not make it any less wrong.
(2) Abortions will keep happening anyway, and they will be more dangerous. The same is true of gang killings. If we gave gangs and crime syndicates the right to legally terminate their enemies using doctors, they'd be less likely to hurt themselves in the process. This argument says we should make more murder legal so that it is less dangerous.
(3) The birth control failed. Seventh grade health class! No birth control is 100%. If you enter a lottery where you know one of the possible outcomes is that you will be responsible for the life of a child, then you are responsible, even if the chances were only one in a million. (This applies to both parents, not just the mother.)
(4) Abortion reduces starvation, abuse, and neglect. So does genocide. People seem to forget that women cannot get pregnant without having sex, and that sex is a choice. It is not lack of murder that contributes to child abuse, child neglect, and starvation. It is sex without commitment that creates more children then we can care for comfortably.
(5) If a woman is raped, then she never chose the pregnancy. That's true, but that only highlights the seriousness of rape. The child is not the one at fault and should not have to die for what the father did. The answer to this problem is to stop letting rapists go free. In fact, any father who refuses to help support all the children he helped conceive should not go free either. They can't conceive anymore neglected children in prison, so that is where they belong.
(6) The mother's life is at stake. An operation that saves the life of the mother and as an unintended side effect causes the child to die should be legal. Patients and doctors have to make life and death decisions all the time, and should not be held liable for decisions made in good faith anymore than a homeowner should be held liable for killing an intruder in a true act of self-defense. This however only describes a small minority of cases. I only say the above in interest of compromise. I know that child birth kills more mothers than abortion, but for most people, having children is worth the risks. I think it is worth the risks, and people who don't want that risk should refrain from having sex until they are no longer able to have children.
(7) Abortion is all about women's rights. Actually, abortion allows neglectful fathers to go free. Almost every abortion is at least 50% the fault of the father, and unless he married her and contributed his share of time and resources, he's just as much a murderer as the woman getting the abortion and the doctor who helped her. If anything, he is the worst of all. At least the woman who killed her child feels what she did. Neglectful fathers don't feel anything. They are the darkest form of evil.
Women have a moral right to choose whether or not to have sex, when, and with whom. They also have the moral right to the father's share of time and resources in raising her children. The idea that murder is a woman's right is pushed by men and women who want to have sex without accepting its responsibilities. The earth is too crowded to let that continue.
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