Purpose: To write a 750-word research prospectus based on Abortion
Audience: You are writing to a target audience based upon the topic selection, including your professor and peers.    
Format: MLA documentation style.    

Topic: Abortion

Claim: Abortion should not be legal.

Supporting points:

1. The fetus or embryo is a person and has the right to liberty and life. These supporters often use the human name being to mean what philosophers call a person.
2. Abortion is wrong because it kills an actual person, thus depriving them of their future. However, the fetus has a life prospect that is similar in morally pertinent respects to a future lost by a capable adult homicide victim.

Thesis: Abortion should not be legal because an unborn child has the right to life and not be harmed, and abortion unlawfully takes that right away.

 Counterclaim/Objection: Abortion should be legal because:

1. The fetus is part of a mother’s body, and it is her choice or decision. If the fetus were situated outside the mother’s body using a bizarre technology, no one would claim it was part of the mother’s body.
2. The zygote is like an unfertilized egg and not an adult; thus, it cannot have similar moral status to an adult.

Rebuttal: My response to the two points of the objection/counterclaim 

1. Killing oneself is wrong. Even if one intentionally uses one’s body to hurt another.
2. The embryo or fetus and adult have the same moral rights. They are similar because of metaphysical or physical similarities, so they should have the same moral status.

Works Cited

Marquis, Don. “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 4, 1989, p. 183, https://doi.org/10.2307/2026961.

Moller, D. “Abortion and Moral Risk.” Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 3, 2011, pp. 425–43, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0031819111000222.

Morris, J. “Substance Ontology Cannot Determine the Moral Status of Embryos.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, vol. 37, no. 4, 2012, pp. 331–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhs026.

Svenaeus, Fredrik. “Phenomenology of Pregnancy and the Ethics of Abortion.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-017-9786-x.

(Teacher Corrections)

Revise with ONLY the following:

1. The two points of the thesis are the same (rights). You need another solid point.

2. Use the following rule to cite an article:
Last name, first name. “Title of Article.” Title of Journal italicized, vol. #, no. #, Year, pp. first page-ending page.