Abortion Is Morally Right

women have a moral right to decide what the right to abortion is vital for gender .
Table of contents

The medical supply may vary greatly. Consequently, it seems inappropriate to claim that viability as such should be regarded as a significant break by being a general moral justification against abortions. The first movement of the fetus is sometimes regarded as a significant break because proponents stress its deeper meaning which usually rests on religious or non-religious considerations. Formerly the Catholic Church maintained that the first movement of the fetus shows that it is the breathing of life into the human body animation which separates the human fetus from animals.

This line of thinking is out-of-date and the Catholic Church no longer uses it. Another point is that the first movement of the fetus that women experience is irrelevant since the real first movement of the fetus is much earlier. Ultrasonic testing shows that the real first movement of the fetus is somewhere between the 6th and 9th week. But even if one considers the real first movement problems may arise.

The physical ability to move is morally irrelevant. What about an adult human being who is quadriplegic and is unable to move? In general, proponents of moderate views believe that consciousness and the ability to feel pain will develop after about six months. However the first brain activities are discernable after the seventh week so that it is possible to conclude that the fetus may feel pain after this date. In this respect, the ability to suffer is decisive for acknowledging a morally significant break.

One may object to this claim, that the proponents of this view redefine the empirical feature of "the ability to suffer" as a normative feature is-ought fallacy. It is logically unsound to conclude from the bare fact that the fetus feels pain that it is morally reprehensible or morally prohibited per se to abort the fetus. Proponents of the extreme conservative view claim that the morally significant break in the biological development of the fetus is given with the unicellular human zygote.

They argue that the unicellular zygote is a human person, and thus, it is prohibited to have an abortion because one kills a human being for example, Schwarz. The extreme conservative proponents argue that biological development from the fetus to a human being is an incremental process which leaves no room for a morally significant break liberals deny this line of thinking. If there is no morally significant break, then the fetus has the same high status of a newborn, or the newborn has the same low status of the fetus.

To many opponents of the "extreme" conservative position, it seems questionable to claim that a unicellular zygote is a person. At best, one may maintain that the zygote will potentially develop into a human being. Except the potentiality argument is flawed since it is impossible to derive current rights from the potential ability of having rights at a later time. Opponents for example, Gert also object to any attempt to base conclusions on religious considerations that they believe cannot stand up to rational criticism. For these reasons, they argue that the conservative view should be rejected.

You awake one morning to find that you have been kidnapped by a society of music lovers in order to help a violinist who is unable to live on his own by virtue of his ill-health. He has been attached to your kidneys because you alone have the only blood type to keep him alive. You are faced with a moral dilemma because the violinist has a right to live by being a member of the human race; there seems to be no possibility to unplug him without violating this right and thus killing him. However, if you leave him attached to you, you are unable to move for months, although you did not give him the right to use your body in such a way Thomson , First, Thomson claims that the right to live does not include the right to be given the means necessary for survival.

Thomson refuses this and claims that "the fact that for continued life that violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be given the continued use of your kidneys" Thomson , She argues that everybody has a right of how his own body is used. Second, Thomson contends that the right to live does not include the right not to be killed. If the violinist has the right not to be killed, then another person is not justified in removing the plug from her kidneys although the violinist has no right to their use.

What is the legal status of the fetus embryo, conceptus, and zygote? Before the question is answered, one should pay some attention to the issue of the genesis of a legal system. Which ontological status do legal rights have? Where do they come from? Usually we accept the idea that legal rights do not "fall from the blue sky" but are made by human beings. Other conceptions which had been provided in the history of human kind are:.

However, let us take the following description for granted: There is a legal community in which the members are legal entities with legal claims and legal addressees with legal obligations. Is the fetus a legal entity or not? It was previously stated that the fetus as such is no person and that it seems unsound to claim that fetuses are persons in the ordinary sense of the notion.

If rights are tied to the notion of personhood, then it seems appropriate to say that fetuses do not have any legal rights. One can object that animals of higher consciousness or even plants, see Korsgaard , have some "rights" or quasi-rights because it is prohibited to kill them without good reason killing great apes and dolphins for fun is prohibited in most countries.

But, it would be wrong to assume that those animals are legal entities with "full" rights, or that they have only "half" rights. Thus, it seems reasonable to say that animals have "quasi-rights. According to this line of argument, it seems sound to claim that fetuses also have quasi-rights. It does not follow that the quasi-rights of the fetuses and the quasi-rights of the animals are identical; people would normally stress that the quasi-rights of fetuses are of more importance than that of animals.

However, there are some basic rights of the pregnant woman, for example, the right of self-determination, the right of privacy, the right of physical integrity, and the right to live. On the other hand, there is the existential quasi-right of the fetus, that is, the quasi-right to live. If the presumption is right that legal rights are tied to the notion of personhood and that there is a difference between rights and quasi-rights, then it seems right that the fetus has no legal right but "just" a quasi-right to live.

If this is the case, what about the relation between the existential quasi-right of the fetus and the basic legal rights of the pregnant woman? The answer seems obvious: The fetus has a different legal status that is based on a different moral status see above. On this view there is no legal conflict of rights. Another important point in the debate about the ascription of legal rights to the fetus is the topic of potential rights. Joel Feinberg discusses this point in his famous article "Potentiality, Development, and Rights" , and claims that the thesis that actual rights can be derived from the potential ability of having such rights is logically flawed because one is only able to derive potential rights from a potential ability of having rights.

Feinberg maintains that there may be cases where it is illegal or wrong to have an abortion even when the fetus does not have any rights or is not yet a moral person. Thus, it seems incorrect to derive actual rights from the bare potential ability to have legal rights at a later time. It should be added that Benn - despite his criticism on the argument of potential rights - also claims that there are valid considerations which do not refer to the talk of rights and may provide plausible reasons against infanticide and late abortions even when fetuses and newborns are lawless beings with no personhood.

There is always a chance that women get pregnant when they have sex with their heterosexual partners. However, what does the sphere of decisions look like? A pregnancy is either deliberate or not. If the woman gets deliberately pregnant, then both partners respectively the pregnant woman may decide to have a baby or to have an abortion.

Less good reasons seem to be: If the pregnancy is not deliberate, it is either self-caused in the sense that the partners knew about the consequences of sexual intercourses and the contraception malfunctioned or it is not self-caused in the sense of being forced to have sex rape. In both cases the fetus may be aborted or not. The interesting question concerns the reasons given for the justification of having an abortion. There are at least two different kinds of reasons or justifications: The first group will be called "first order reasons"; the second "second order reasons.

Second order reasons are reasons of justifications which are, in comparison to first order reasons, less suitable in providing a strong justification for abortion, for example, i a journey, ii career prospects, iii by virtue of financial or social grievances. It would be cruel and callous to force the pregnant woman who had been raped to give birth to a child.

Judith Jarvis Thomson maintains in her article "A Defense of Abortion" that the right to live does not include the right to make use of a foreign body even if this means having the fetus aborted Thomson , pp. Both the fetus and the raped woman are "innocent," but this does not change "the fact" that the fetus has any rights. It seems obvious in this case that the raped woman has a right to abort.

Forcing her not to abort is to remind her of the rape day-by-day which would be a serious mental strain and should not be enforced by law or morally condemned. In these terms, once the humanity of the fetus is perceived, abortion is never right except in self-defense.

Legal position

With this exception, now of great rarity, abortion violates the rational humanist tenet of the equality of human lives. Hence, the woman has no right to abort the fetus even if she had been raped and got pregnant against her will. But, it remains unclear what Noonan means by "self-defense. Potential life should not be more valued then actual life.

To force her at the risk of her life means to force her to give up her right of self-defense and her right to live. There seems to be no good reason to suspend her basic right of self-defense. It is hard to say when exactly a fetus is seriously mentally or physically disabled because this hot issue raises the vital question of whether the future life of the disabled fetus is regarded as worth living problem of relativity. Hence, there are simple cases and, of course, borderline cases which lie in the penumbra and are hard to evaluate. Among the simple cases take the following example: Imagine a human torso lacking arms and legs that will never develop mental abilities like self-consciousness, the ability to communicate, or the ability to reason.

It seems quite obvious to some people that such a life is not worth living. But what about the high number of borderline cases? Either parents are not entitled to have a healthy and strong offspring, nor are the offspring entitled to become healthy and strong. Society should not force people to give birth to seriously disabled fetuses or morally worse to force mothers who are willing to give birth to a disabled fetus to have an abortion for example, Nazi Germany. It seems clear that a rather small handicap of the fetus is not a good reason to abort it.

Often radical groups of disabled persons claim that, if other people hold the view that it is all right to abort fetuses with serious genetic handicaps, the same people therewith deny the basic right to live of disabled adults with serious handicaps see Singer debate. This objection is unreasonable since fetuses in contrast to adult human beings have no basic interest in continuing to live their lives. Disabled fetuses may be aborted like other fetuses, disabled adult human persons have to be respected like other people.

Arguments in favour of abortion

With regard to the reasons of justification according to the second group, there is a specific view which is based on the argument that it is the decision of the woman to have an abortion or not. There is a related view that rests on the assumption of the pregnant woman who claims that the fetus is a part of her body like a limb so that she has the right to do what ever she wants to do with the fetus.

The argument is wrong. The fetus is certainly not a simple part of the pregnant woman but, rather, a dependent organism that relies on the woman. The following example, the journey to Europe from North America, is based on the feminist argument but it is somewhat different in stressing another point in the line of argumentation: A young woman is pregnant in the seventh month and decides to make a journey to Europe for a sight-seeing tour. Her pregnancy is an obstacle to this and she decides to have an abortion. She justifies her decision by claiming that it will be possible for her to get pregnant whenever she wants but she is only able to make the journey now by virtue of her present career prospects.

What can be said of her decision? Most authors may feel a deep discomfort not to morally condemn the action of the woman or not to reproach her for her decision for different reasons.


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But, there seems only two possible answers which may count as a valid basis for morally blaming the woman for her decision: First, if the young woman lives in a moral community where all members hold the view that it is immoral to have an abortion with regard to the reason given, then her action may be morally reprehensible. Furthermore, if the moral agreement is enforced by law, the woman also violated the particular law for which she has to take charge of. Second, one could also blame her for not showing compassion for her potential child. People may think that she is a callous person since she prefers to make the journey to Europe instead of giving birth to her almost born child seventh month.

If the appeal to her mercy fails, one will certainly be touched by her "strange" and "inappropriate" action. However, the community would likely put some informal pressure on the pregnant woman to influence her decision not to have an abortion. A woman got pregnant not deliberately and wants to have an abortion by virtue of her bad financial and social background because she fears that she will be unable to offer the child an appropriate life perspective.

The category that is morally central to this analysis is the category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood. A standard fetus has a valuable future like ours: Is there a problem in determining which things can be said to have a future? Suppose there is a drug that can be injected into kittens to cause them to grow into cat people.

It is morally okay not to inject the kittens.

BBC - Ethics: Abortion

There is no morally relevant distinction between actions and omissions The Moral Symmetry Principle, a. Therefore, it is okay to neutralize the development of a PCP once you have injected the kitten e. CPs have the same rights as HSPs. Therefore, it is okay to neutralize the development of a PHSP—abortion is morally permissible. Notice that PCPs are not merely potential persons, they are also things with futures of value.

Thomson assumes, just for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person from conception. She then tries to show that, even given that the fetus has a right to life, it does not follow that abortion is morally impermissible. For the sake of argument, Thomson assumes that 1 and 2 are true. She then argues that 4 does not follow from 3. This much is easy to see, since most of us agree that it is not wrong to kill in self-defense. But Thomson argues that the gap between 3 and 4 is much wider than this. Along these lines, one suggestion is that a mother has a right to decide what happens in and to her body, and that this might outweigh the fetuses right to life.

Instead, she argues that the right to life has been misunderstood.

Philosophical aspects of the abortion debate

Once it is understood correctly, it will be seen that 4 does not follow from 3. Thomson proposes a thought experiment: A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.

The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years?

What if the director of the hospital says. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him. Thomson concludes that i it is not true that the violinist has a right to your body, and so, by analogy ii it is not true that a fetus that is a product of rape has a right to your body, but iii there is no easy way for the anti-abortion argument to be amended to account for this.

This means that the argument is invalid; the conclusion 4 does not follow from the premises.

So what does the right to life consist in? Sometimes the bare minimum is something you have no right to. Sometimes you can be killed by being deprived of something you have no right to. Also, there is self-defense. Sex using birth control? You don't want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house?


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The philosophical arguments in the abortion debate are deontological or rights-based. The view that all or almost all abortion should be illegal generally rests on the claims: The view that abortion should in most or all circumstances be legal generally rests on the claims: Although both sides are likely to see the rights-based considerations as paramount, some popular arguments appeal to consequentialist or utilitarian considerations. For example, anti-abortion advocacy groups see the list below sometimes claim the existence of post-abortion syndrome or a link between abortion and breast cancer , alleged medical and psychological risks of abortion.

On the other side, pro-choice groups see the list below say that criminalizing abortion will lead to the deaths of many women through " back-alley abortions "; that unwanted children have a negative social impact or conversely that abortion lowers the crime rate ; and that reproductive rights are necessary to achieve the full and equal participation of women in society and the workforce. Consequentialist arguments on both sides tend to be vigorously disputed, though are not widely discussed in the philosophical literature.

Contemporary philosophical literature contains two kinds of arguments concerning the morality of abortion.

On this page

One family of arguments see the following three sections relates to the moral status of the embryo—the question of whether the embryo has a right to life, is the sort of being it would be seriously wrong to kill, or in other words is a "person" in the moral sense. An affirmative answer would support claim 1 in the central anti-abortion argument, while a negative answer would support claim 2 in the central pro-choice argument.

Another family of arguments see the section on Thomson, below relates to bodily rights—the question of whether the woman's bodily rights justify abortion even if the embryo has a right to life. A negative answer would support claim 2 in the central pro-life argument, while an affirmative answer would support claim 2 in the central pro-choice argument. Since the zygote is genetically identical to the embryo, the fully formed fetus, and the baby, questioning the beginning of personhood could lead to an instance of the Sorites paradox , also known as the paradox of the heap.

Mary Anne Warren , in her article arguing for the permissibility of abortion, [2] holds that moral opposition to abortion is based on the following argument:. Warren, however, thinks that "human being" is used in different senses in 1 and 2. In 1 , "human being" is used in a moral sense to mean a "person", a "full-fledged member of the moral community".

In 2 , "human being" means "biological human ". That the embryo is a biologically human organism or animal is uncontroversial, Warren holds. But it does not follow that the embryo is a person, and it is persons that have rights, such as the right to life. To help make a distinction between "person" and "biological human", Warren notes that we should respect the lives of highly intelligent aliens , even if they are not biological humans.

She thinks there is a cluster of properties that characterize persons: A person does not have to have each of these, but if something has all five then it definitely is a person whether it is biologically human or not, while if it has none or perhaps only one then it is not a person, again whether it is biologically human or not.

The fetus has at most one, consciousness and this only after it becomes susceptible to pain —the timing of which is disputed , and hence is not a person. Other writers apply similar criteria, concluding that the embryo lacks a right to life because it lacks self-consciousness, [6] or rationality and self-consciousness, [7] [8] or "certain higher psychological capacities" including "autonomy". Others conclude that personhood should be based on "brain birth" concept, which is in essence the reversal of the brain death used as a modern definition of medical death.

Under this proposal, presence of brain waves would be enough to grant personhood, even with other features lacking. Based on whether brain activity in the brain stem , or just in the cerebral cortex , is relevant for personhood, two concepts of "brain birth" emerge: These writers disagree on precisely which features confer a right to life, [12] but agree those features must be certain developed psychological or physiological features which the embryo lacks.

Warren's arguments face two main objections. The comatose patient objection claims that as patients in a reversible coma do not satisfy Warren's or some other criteria—they are not conscious, do not communicate, and so on—therefore they would lack a right to life on her view.


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The comatose also still possess brain activity brain waves , so this objection does not apply to "brain birth" theories. Finally, there are some post-natal humans who are unable to feel pain due to genetic disorders and thus do not satisfy all of Warren's criteria. The infanticide objection points out that infants indeed up to about one year of age, since it is only around then that they begin to outstrip the abilities of non-human animals have only one of Warren's characteristics—consciousness—and hence would have to be accounted non-persons on her view; thus her view would permit not only abortion but infanticide.

Warren agrees that infants are non-persons and so killing them is not strictly murder , but denies that infanticide is generally permissible. Killing such a human being would be wrong, not because it is a person, but because it would go against the desires of people willing to adopt the infant and to pay to keep the infant alive. Although, this clarification has problems of its own: Thus, according to Warren, it must be wrong to kill animals, and perhaps even plants.

Nonetheless, Warren grants that her argument entails that infanticide would be morally acceptable under some circumstances, such as those of a desert island. Philosopher Peter Singer similarly concludes that infanticide, particularly of severely disabled infants, is justifiable under certain conditions. Since brain waves appear in the lower brain brain stem in 6—8 weeks of gestation, and in the higher brain cerebral cortex in weeks of gestation, both "whole brain" and "higher brain" brain birth personhood concepts based on the presence of brain waves do not permit infanticide.

Some opponents of Warren's view believe that what matters morally is not that one be actually exhibiting complex mental qualities of the sort she identifies, but rather that one have in oneself a self-directed genetic propensity or natural capacity to develop such qualities. In other words, what is crucial is that one be the kind of entity or substance that, under the right conditions, actively develops itself to the point of exhibiting Warren's qualities at some point in its life, even if it does not actually exhibit them because of not having developed them yet embryo, infant or having lost them severe Alzheimer's.