Argue the opposite of your actual views - abortion edition

[Waterfall]

Convincingly arguing for a view you oppose can be a way to demonstrate how well you understand the other side's arguments, and therefore is a good suggestion of how credible your own arguments are. I've never done this before but have always wanted to try, so why not right here right now? Hopefully this thread will inspire other people to start similar threads on different political issues.

One more thing...I cannot guarantee that any of my factual claims below are absolutely true, only that they are true to the best of my current knowledge. Or I might be bluffing.

OK, here I go:

~~~

Aborting a pregnancy should be a legal and socially permissible option. Here's why.

1) We know that many women will seek abortions regardless whether they are legal. Even if we suppose that a fetus is a human life with rights, illegal abortions are much more likely to result in severe health risks to the mother, so if we really value life we should take the practical approach and minimize the amount of death by at least allowing women to have their abortions in a safe and above-board way, carried out by licensed physicians with no fear of legal repercussions. Besides, there are fewer abortions in places where abortion is legal.

2) But let's look more closely at this assumption that a fetus is a human life with rights. At fewer than 5 or 6 months in utero, a fetus cannot viably survive outside its mother's womb. At fewer than one or two months, it is largely indistinguishable from the fetuses of many other animals. At fewer than a few weeks, it is basically a clump of cells, not much different from those around it except that it contains DNA from the father as well. Rights are ascribed on the basis of personhood, not DNA. Any reasonable definition of personhood ought to take into consideration one's level of independence and capability to make choices or at least have demonstrable preferences.

3) In the United States at least, as a person grows up, they gain rights: at 16 you get the right to drive and to earn a paycheck; at 17 to see R-rated movies; at 18 to vote, smoke, and fight in the military; at 21 to drink and rent a car; at higher ages than that to hold certain elected offices. This means there is a legal precedent for restricting rights at young ages, and moreso at negative ages.

4) Unwanted fetuses who are carried to term will often wind up in state custody awaiting adoption or foster care. These programs are already overburdened and are a drag on our economy, not to mention the miserable conditions in which they place young people. Whether they are eventually adopted or kept by their mothers, many unwanted fetuses carried to term have few prospects in life and are generally (though not always) condemned to years of misery and suffering. This is not a preferable outcome to a quick and painless procedure that would have prevented their suffering before it started.

5) Many abortions are sought by women who were raped--sometimes by close family members. The products of those acts are constant reminders to these women, and in the case of incest they also carry a high risk of debilitating birth defects. It is unfair to place this additional burden upon women who were already victimized in an unspeakable way. I must underline this word, "unfair": a society that forces its women to bear this burden is thoroughly unjust, rotten to the core. We would not tolerate this kind of rotten injustice in other societies and we should not tolerate it at home.

6) As established above, it is a stretch to describe a fetus that cannot survive outside the womb as a "person". The fetus is instead part of its mother's body. It is by her that it lives and grows. Forgive the unflattering comparison, but the nature of this relationship would be the same if the mother had a tumor or parasite. It would be beyond absurd to say that a woman should not be able to legally rid herself of either of the latter two--for whatever reason she chose, let alone for fear of the tremendous and indelible impact it would have upon her life if she was not rid of it.

7) In light of #6, abortion really ought to be treated as an issue of basic women's rights. To say that a woman can or cannot choose to do with her body what she pleases is primitive, backward misogyny. It is suspicious that the people crafting and executing the laws that would prohibit her doing so are mostly men, who will never have to face that kind of a choice themselves. We cannot call ourselves a developed nation in 2017 (or even 1917!) yet still tolerate a situation in which men to deprive women of that basic right.

~~~end.

Note: Please only respond with arguments for the opposite side you'd normally be arguing based on your real-life views.

[politics_king]

Personally, I'm against it because I think it's preventable. But, by law, women should have that right to choose. The best way to solve this dilemma is to educate, educate, educate. Teach our young ones about safe-sex, they're going to have it especially in the day of age of the Internet. I just feel if it gets outlawed we're going to have illegal pop-up abortion clinics. Also, I feel like people think that Women who go through with this process have no soul, that is the hardest choice to ever make, but if they feel they can't do it then they have that option.

But I also agree late-term abortions are pretty far out there, you should know with-in 3 months if you want the child or not. It's an ugly thing but people in that specific time were not educated about abortion and maybe felt it was a quick fix. A lot these women become psychologically damaged after going through with it because of guilt. Which is why we educate and promote safe-sex. I feel as the country as a whole as we learn more about what abortion actually is don't like it. We can be better for this, but at least we never adopted a one-child policy like China. It's all semantics if I have to be blunt.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Abortion is an important issue even though less than half of 1% of Americans get one each year. its crucial that neither side works together or compromises. All that matters is how people feel. Evidence is bad. Hypocritically adopting contrary arguments to your normal opinions for this one issue is encouraged. Also use lots of name calling and hyperbole.

[RINO Tom]

There are negative consequences of ALL kinds of morally right actions, and the politicalization of the question of human life - which I believe a fetus LIVING inside of a woman's womb is - should not allow us to only focus on those negative consequences and overshadow the simple fact that we are, yes, murdering a completely defenseless (future) child for any reason whatsoever.  Maybe we can make an exception for a woman's life (as I'm completely willing to accept the logic that a living woman's life is worth saving at the expense of a yet-to-be-born baby's), and I am open to sparing a woman the trauma of giving birth to the child of the man who raped her ... but just allowing any old female to cut the chord on the life of the child living inside her for any old reason?  That's senseless murder all in the name of "women's 'rights,'" and that's disgusting.  Nobody needs a voice more than a defenseless fetus that is depressingly resigned to its fate, and I am intent on giving those unborn children the most basic right anyone on this Earth enjoys: the right to life.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     The pro-life argument is basically that the unborn constitute human life and merit protection under the law as such. Just as killing a person who is born is murder, so would killing an unborn human. If you believe that human beings are endowed with immortal souls, this becomes a very salient point.

     Speaking from my pro-choice perspective, I hate what has become the prevailing feminist characterization of the issue, where it's solely about the rights of women and being pro-life is being anti-woman. If you believe that abortion constitutes the murder of an ensouled human being, then women's rights aren't even part of the equation. It refuses to acknowledge an opposing argument that is going to resonate with a substantial segment of the population.

     Now you may be comfortable with ignoring these people because they are not going to be persuaded to support abortion rights, and you may be right. It makes me cringe though because it only serves to indicate ignorance (real or feigned) towards what the opposition thinks. That's just my pet peeve, though, and a bit of a digression from the point of the thread here. It's much harder to sustain a pro-life argument from an atheist perspective, so the premise of the thread led me to consider the issue from a religious point of view.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Abortion may be a dirty business and not a situation that anybody (other than absolute weirdos like Lena Dunham) wants to find herself in, but it's crucial it remain an option at least as long as pregnancy carries medical risks and is disadvantageous in our society. It's a means of control over one's own embodied destiny in a sense that's uncontroversial in most other situations; not only that, its availability is an important cultural and symbolic victory for the feminist movement. Since moral views on it vary so drastically and so insuperably, it's best to view it as a social ill to be minimized through non-penal means. Getting serious about considering the unborn persons would also lead to a lot of unforeseen, unpredictable social changes that might be more trouble than they're worth even from a moderately pro-life perspective.

[Mr. Smith]

Sometimes, abortion is the only way to stop a person from having a terrible life because the would-be mother wasn't prepared to raise a child.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Pro-choicers have very strong opinions on what does not constitute a person, but they are almost always at a loss to explain what does. I have yet to hear a coherent "definition" of personhood that does not raise a whole slew of disturbing moral implications. Is it all about cognitive capabilities? They begin to develop long before birth, and continue long after it. Depending on your standards, you can easily find yourself defending infanticide, which I'm hoping most sensible pro-choicers wouldn't want to. Is there something magical about birth that turns a non-person into a person, even though a 9-months fetus is virtually identical in every regard to a newborn baby? The only argument I can think of is about the idea that the organism can survive without being biologically connected to another organism. But what's so special about dependency to another organism that's so different from, say dependency to a drip-feed or a dialysis? Or even dependency to a mother and father who feed you? Equating personhood with self-sufficiency is even creepier than equating it with abstract thinking.

Most pro-choicers, I hope, accept that personhood can't be equated to birth, and that it begins at some point earlier than birth. But none of the milestones they talk about (sensitivity to pain, brain activity, heartbeat, implantation, gastrulation, etc.) is really all that "hard". For example, the various components that make sensitivity to pain possible don't develop overnight, but over multiple weeks. The same is true with brain activity and with basically any "faculty" that the embryo or fetus can be said to have. So you end up arguing that "personhood" is not a binary attribute, but a sort of continuum where someone becomes slightly more of a person every second. That's basically the ship of Theseus revisited. But legally (and, more importantly, morally) this cannot be so. What would it possibly mean to say that someone is a "partial" person? Personhood is a statement about someone's fundamental worth, dignity, and rights - it either exists or it doesn't. When pro-choicers want to use one of these arbitrarily milestones, they are thus equating such fundamental ontological change to a microscopical biological change. It would be as saying that Theseus' ship stopped being Theseus' ship after the 7th, the 19th or the 43rd plank was replaced. It obviously can't be right.

Now, seeing the impossibility of locating a true "beginning" to personhood, the question we must ask ourselves is: on which side would I rather err? Would I rather confer rights and dignity to a being that shouldn't have them, or deny them to a being that should? If, like me, you believe that killing a person is an absolute evil, something that nothing can ever justify (I won't go into trolley problems, since they are irrelevant to the issue at hand), you can't possibly choose the latter. If you have an absolutely unimpeachable, ironclad philosophical argument stating that personhood begins at time X, fair enough, go ahead and allow abortions before X. But if there is but a 0.0000001% chance that you are wrong, that maybe there something is already there before time X (and time X could be any time after conception), then you have gambled with a person's right to life. A society that accepts this gamble is a society that doesn't see people as ends onto themselves, but rather as disposable quantities whose value can sometimes be balanced out with other considerations. That's not a society I would be comfortable living in.