Persuasive speech

Teenage girls are being forced to become mothers at

their young age while they're practically distilled Children themselves.

Scared women are looking towards um illegal abortions because

the government's not providing them with anything else.

These illegal abortions are deadly, not just for the fetus,

but for the mothers themselves.

And abortion bans seem to be a growing trend in today's society.

Um And I think this needs to come to an end. My name is

Tehan

and I believe that society needs to see abortions as being morally permissible.

So that way we can reflect this in legislation.

I,

I think that a abortion is morally permissible when it is done out of a

mother's love for herself and not towards out of um hatred towards her fetus.

And that is pretty much never the case.

I've never heard of an abortion case where a mother

it's an abortion for any other reason. So

I would say that I'm pro choice in pretty much any case.

And philosopher Judith Thompson would agree with me,

her work on defending abortion against the anti abortion ideas.

Uh She's known to be very controversial. She takes very interesting points, but

overall, her work supports what I believe and I will be using it today.

And the plan for today is for me to go over the anti abortion ideas.

I will then counter them.

And then I would like to address the middle ground that I see between these two ideas.

But again, starting off with the anti abortion ideas,

they are foundation built off of the fact that

they believe a fetus is a person at conception.

This then leads them to say

we need to treat a fetus like we would treat any other person.

And therefore, if we were to kill any other person, it would be seen as murder.

So they say abortion is murder. That's how they get their argument.

They say that the pregnancy is a mother's responsibility

and that it's a direct consequence of sex.

So it's a consequence of their actions.

They see the fetus as being innocent and defenseless.

And philosopher brainstorm uses the work of

philosopher Noonan and created the golden rule.

This rule says that a fetus is innocent and capable of personhood.

So it is morally wrong to terminate it unless that were to prevent a greater evil.

That's a philosopher's standpoint and

how he supports the anti abortion ideas.

Um Another argument I've heard is that a fetus is a gift,

it belongs in a womb because if it were to be anywhere else, it would die.

They say a womb is the only place it can survive. So a fetus belongs in there.

I've also heard many,

um, religious arguments. That's a big thing for the anti abortion group.

But I'm not gonna address any of those today because I don't see any of them

as having any solid ground. Religion varies from person to person.

Our country allows free religion.

So

I think it's unfair to inflict another

person's beliefs on someone else when it's not

a overall accepted thing.

But overall, the anti abortion group sees the fetus as being a person.

They see it as being innocent.

They say it deserves a right to life and they say

it is a mother's responsibility to carry it to term,

to counter the anti abortion ideas.

I'd like to start off with their first point where they

say that a fetus is considered a person at conception.

I personally do not agree.

I don't think a at

conception, right when it happens, a fetus is considered a person.

But for the sake of this argument,

I will agree and I will consider a fetus um a person at

conception for the rest of my arguments.

Uh This was inspired by philosopher Judith Thompson.

She did the same thing in her work.

This point between whether a fetus is a person or not is

a huge stand still for so many abortion arguments that are happening.

And so philosopher Judith Thompson made the move of just accepting it and moving on

because her arguments were just as strong later on while she took the stance.

And I believe that my arguments can be just as strong if

I take the stance that a fetus is considered person at conception.

Moving on. Um

the anti abortion group then takes that the fetus

is a person and says that abortion is murder.

And I'd like to address that with a argument

analogy that philosopher Judith Thompson came up with,

it's her violinist argument analogy.

She says to imagine that you wake up in a street corner and there is a random

violinist attached to your body physically and

he is surviving off of your bodily functions. And if you were to unhook him

within the next nine months, he would die. He's

literally living off of your bodily functions.

And you never asked for this, never consented to this.

It just happened. You never wanted this to happen.

Um Well, uh philosopher Judith Thompson, then

what you would do in this scenario,

many of us would unplug this violinist because he's not our responsibility.

We never asked for this to happen and we're not killing him.

We're simply unhooking him and taking back the rights to our own body.

And this is a point that philosopher Judith Thompson pushes abortion is not murder.

Abortion is simply detaching

a fetus or a person from your body

to simply regain control to your own body, regain the rights

back to your body. And um

that's not murder. It's done with the intention of

claiming something that is yours back and not with the intention of killing the

person that attached itself to you.

Moving on to the next point. Um, the anti abortion group says that,

uh, pregnancy as a mother's responsibility and a direct consequence of sex.

Uh,

I'd also like to counter this with

one of philosopher Judith Thompson's argument analogies.

She uses a burglar argument analogy.

She says to imagine that it's a hot day.

You go into your living room, open your window and a burglar crawls in

says that he has to live there for the next nine months.

And if you were to kick him out on the street, he would die.

Pretty much. All of us would still kick this burglar out.

He's not our responsibility just because we opened our window

does not mean we invited him into the house.

Um,

we'd never asked for this. And philosopher Judith Thompson compares this to

saying that consenting to sex is not consenting to pregnancy just because you open

your window doesn't mean you're inviting someone to come live in your house.

Um, and also if

pregnancies were a direct consequence of sex,

men would also be getting pregnant. It is unfair to say that,

um,

these pregnancies are consequences from sex when it

is just the mother that's having to struggle.

I mean, it's taking

men are 50% as involved with these unwanted pregnancies as women.

And it takes a lot of the blame or responsibility off of the men.

If we say it's just a consequence of their actions because no,

the men are also making these

actions, actions and choices. Yet they're not having the same consequences.

Moving on to the next argument

that the

anti abortion group makes.

Um they say that a fetus belongs in the womb

because it's the only place that the fetus can survive

in this scenario. I would like to compare the fetus to cancer

when a cancer patient comes in and says, please remove this cancer from my body.

Nobody has a problem with that.

And that's because cancer kills cancer affects portions of

these patients lives and affects the patient's family.

But an unwanted pregnancy can do the exact same thing.

And if you're trying to defend the fetus in these cases, saying, oh,

but the womb is the only place that can survive.

Well, the human body is the only place human cancer can survive.

Um

Yet nobody

has a problem

with helping cancer patients. And then

the antiabortionist group also says, oh, well, the fetus is a gift.

I

don't think it's fair to let the public choose what people need to see as

gifts and what other people shouldn't see as

gifts just because one person likes something,

doesn't mean that everyone else should

want something just because I want something

in my life doesn't mean I need to inflict that on everybody else.

For example, let's say I was a huge snake, pet enthusiast.

I love my pet snake and I say everybody around me needs to have a pet snake. It's a gift.

Everybody needs to value snakes.

That would be insane. Some people don't like snakes.

Some people it wouldn't fit into their lifestyle just like an

unwanted fetus doesn't fit into these mothers searching for abortions lifestyles

and stemming off of that.

They say, oh, but the fetus is defenseless and it deserves a right to life.

Well, a mother is also defenseless without an abortion.

She has

no way to protect herself just like they're claiming these fetuses still

and

the mothers also deserve a right to life. If a mother claims that having

a

pregnancy would make her put her life on hold for the next nine months,

that's taking away her right to life by making

her have this child and carry it to term.

And I know all these points can seem very confusing and um

very heavily sided.

So I would like to talk about a middle ground

between the two arguments of the anti abortion and the pro-choice

arguments.

And I feel like this middle ground is

seen with um rape and maternal death pregnancies

in the cases of rape.

This is not just an unconsented pregnancy, but it's also unconsented sex.

There was no action that the mothers did to

land themselves in the positions that they were in.

They did a there was no provocation.

It's not a consequence you cannot even begin to argue that this

is a consequence of the mother's actions because she quite literally did nothing

to deserve this. If anything, it's just traumatizing her for no reason.

Um

And it's cruel to say that a woman should have

to carry out a child for the next nine months because

of nothing. Um

Pregnancy is not just

in these cases, it's not just a physical bodily burden,

it's also a financial burden to have these unwanted pregnancies.

But in these rape cases, it's very mentally traumatizing for these patients to

um go through with these pregnancies. And so I think this should

make the anti abortion group open their eyes a little more and see what,

you know,

special cases really need to be considered when

they want to rule out abortions in general.

Another

um middle ground or like step forward that I'd say

uh would be helpful to showing the anti abortion group

why the pro choice is the movement to be behind is because

of the maternal death pregnancies. These are cases where a mother would die

if she were to give birth to the fetus.

In these cases, it's very much valuing one life over another.

Um

And

the mother is completely defenseless.

In these cases, they wanna,

the antiabortionist group wants to say fetuses

are always defenseless without an abortion.

A mother is defenseless. In these cases, she

would be using an abortion as self defense.

The fetus is the murderer here, the fetus being in the mother's body is killing her

physically. And if she were to have it again, it would kill her.

This is not, um,

even close to the same as having an abortion.

And if it were, it would be, the fetus is removing itself from the mother's body.

And this is

um, killing the mother. That's not what's happening.

The fetus is inside of the mother's body, actively deteriorating her health.

I think that's murder and I can't see how the

anti abortion group would be behind that and valuing this

murdering fetus's life over the

mother's life who's just trying to protect herself

and take back control to her own body.

And I will say some antiabortionists are beginning to see this middle ground.

Um And it's a step forward for them in the right direction to seeing the

bigger picture.

And in conclusion, I just want to go ahead and say that the bigger picture,

bigger picture is that seeing that being pro choice is actually being pro-life.

I haven't once referred to the anti abortion

group as being pro-life because they aren't.

There's nothing about them that makes them pro-life.

Being pro choice is being pro-life because it's

protecting and supporting the lives of all women,

mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, any woman, you know, it is protecting

their life that's being pro-life.

It's speaking up for women who have recently lost so many rights. And um

that's really important,

especially with legislation looking the way it does in today's society.

And also I'd say a lot of people do look down on abortion and I think that's something,

um,

that needs to be fixed, it

needs to be seen as morally permissible. We shouldn't be shaming people for this.

Today, we went over the anti abortion groups ideas.

Uh I then countered them and talked about a middle ground between the two

and as a young woman with legislation looking the way it does today, I'm

scared for what the future holds.

Uh We need to be getting upset about this and talking about this. Now,

it's a very clear violation of human rights and

we need to protect this generation and future ones.

Thank you.

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