Debates

In the last two classes we had 2 debates. In the first class I was part of the debate as it was my team and I against another team. My teams stance in the debate was how abortion should be consider morally wrong, while the other team had the opposite stand being abortion is should not be considered morally wrong. Everyone in my group had different research to do, I specifically had to research from a religious point of view. I looked at the 2 main religions of the world today: islam and Christianity having more than 3 billion followers which almost around 50% of the world. I researched why abortion is considered wrong in these religions and I had to justify these statements with quotes from the holy bible and the Quran which explained how being pregnant was gods gift and creation and only god himself had the right to . During the debate everyone had different roles, our team captain was Afonso while I was the second speaker. Being second speaker meant that I went second in my group. After our first speaker Faustina had gone it was now my turn. I discussed how from a religious point of view abortion was considered morally wrong and when I was told that “not everyone follows religon or bases their morals on religon” I replied by saying that “well almost more than 3 billion people do which is the majority of the world” i then proceeded to justify my points using many quotes I found from the holy bible and Quran. In conclusion I felt like my team did really well we were able to provide very valid points to our argument and backed up each point with sufficient evidence. I specifically was able to justify how abortion is morally wrong from a religious islamic and Christian point of view. We had a lot of people that sided with us due to our argument although they stated that they were against our stand before the debate which I saw as a successful debate. In the second debate where there were 2 teams one side stood for fetus having rights while the other side opposed. At the begging of the debate I saw myself siding with the side that discussed how fetuses deserved rights but as the other team went into detail and discussed that the right of the women carrying the fetus are more important than the right of a human that isn’t even alive yet, this persuaded me to the opposing side which I never would have saw happening. This is why I enjoyed the debates I was able to see all of the points of views on these different controversial topics, as we discussed the woman’s point of view which is highly forgotten when mentioning abortion today and more importantly we talked about the outside factors that are also never mentioned, these included the woman’s situation of obtaining the baby(rape, incest and etc) or her financial status which will affect the baby’s living style. The main point of this whole debate was to be able to relate it to the handmaids tale.

I was able to see a similarity relating to the handmaids tale in comparison to our debates. The first relation I was able to see was how women’s rights were being opressed by men. In the handmaids tale women do not poscess any rights as men decide what they can and cannot do. During the debate we discussed the passing of abortion being illegal in countries and states. These laws were being passed by men. In most of these countries it was based on religon just like Gilead where abortion was considered murder. Men were then again telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodys.