This house supports legal abortion
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, chairperson. The motion we have before us today is ‘this house supports legal abortion’. My partner and I will be proposing this motion.
So what is abortion? An abortion, also sometimes known as a termination or termination of a pregnancy, is the medical process of ending a pregnancy so it does not result in the birth of the baby. Abortions can only be carried out within the first 24 weeks of a pregnancy and must be agreed on by two medical practitioners.
One of the biggest arguments against abortion is that it is the murder of an unborn child or an innocent baby. But what I would like to suggest is that we usually reserve the terms ‘child’, ‘baby’ or ‘human’ for a thinking, feeling and most importantly conscious being. Abortions are only carried out in the early stages of pregnancies, where the embryo has not reached a stage of development that would render them a conscious being.
Now I ask you the question: what is it that makes a child so inherently precious? Do they become precious from the moment of conception, where they only exist as a fertilised egg? What is it that makes human life special? I think it is our consciousness, self-awareness; feelings, thoughts, hopes and memories. A fertilised egg does not possess the self-awareness which makes it so inherently precious.
The line between consciousness and unconsciousness is arbitrary-there is no clear line. Therefore anti-abortion activists may argue that life begins at conception, and any stage after that is considered arbitrary. As a similar analogy, the line between music and noise is arbitrary; what is considered music to one person may be noise to another. But some things are clearly music and some clearly noise. That doesn’t mean we should call all noise music, or all music noise, to be ‘on the safe side’ as some anti-abortion activists may say.
An abortion is only considered under extreme circumstances. They may be...