Introduction
Abortion is a weighty and historically contentious ethical subject. Many profound questions and concepts at the very heart of maternal-fetal ethics are implicated in the topic of abortion, like the nature of personhood, bodily autonomy, and the grounds for moral status.
Is there a morally relevant turning point during fetal development past which abortion is unethical, or is the ethically relevant point conception itself? If a fetus is accorded partial or full moral status, does that obligate the mother to carry the pregnancy to term, or does a mother’s right to bodily autonomy and integrity trump a fetus’s right to life? Are there mitigating circumstances which can tip the scales of our competing moral imperatives (I.e., imminent threat to the mother’s life, pregnancy resulting from rape, etc.)? All these questions are in play in the discourse on abortion.
Part of the enduring complexity of answering these questions is caused by differing, sometimes irreconcilable intuitions on what matters, morally speaking. Proponents on both sides have compiled a litany of traits or properties a fetus or fertilized embryo may possess or grow to possess over the course of fetal maturation that are alleged to confer or jeopardize moral status. These properties range from the ability to feel pain, the presence of phenomenal consciousness, periviability, fetal heartbeat, and others. Ultimately, it remains unresolved which of these properties ought to matter and why precisely because they hinge upon and are derived from prior philosophical axioms and metaethical propositions which are themselves unresolved.
Assigned Readings
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47–66.
Thesis: Thomson puts forward a pro-choice argument that concedes (at least for the purposes of argument) the right to life of a fetus, yet still upholds a woman’s right to choose. Thomson provides two pivotal thought experiments to illustrate her argument. The first thought experiment imagines you wake up to discover yourself ‘plugged in’ as life support for an unconscious violinist and posits that you are permitted to ‘unplug’ even when doing so will terminate the violinist, as the violinist is not entitled to prolonged use of your body. The second thought experiment considers whether pregnancy resulting from consensual intercourse makes one morally accountable for the fetus as a consequence of the tacit consent or voluntariness of the risk taken, with Thomson concluding it does not.
Marquis, Don. “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 4 (1989): 183–202.
Thesis: Marquis argues that, barring potential exceptions like rape or life-threatening pregnancies, “the overwhelming majority of deliberate abortions are seriously immoral.” Marquis first formulates and defends the position that what makes killing someone wrong consists in its effect on the victim, and where the effect is depriving them of anticipated future value. Next, he argues that abortions similarly rob the fetus of the value of a “future-like-ours,” and consequently, abortion is morally impermissible.
Discussion Questions
- Do Thomson’s thought experiments seem like appropriate analogies to pregnancy and abortion? Are there any relevant distinctions between the person supporting the violinist and a pregnant person sharing their body with a fetus, or between the homeowner aiming to keep out ‘people-seeds’ and those who have consensual intercourse?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of arguing for the permissiveness of abortion while also recognizing a fetus’s right to life?
- Does the loss of a “future-like-ours” capture the wrong-making feature of killing? Are there other explanations for why killing is wrong that do not entail the impermissibility of abortion?
- What does Marquis’s view about moral status belonging to the earliest possible “identifiable subject” (which he locates at the moment of conception) imply for abortifacient contraception (e.g., IUDs or Plan B)? What about implantation failure more generally?
Additional Assorted Readings
Feinberg, Joel, ed. The Problem of Abortion. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub. Co, 1984.
John Finnis, “Abortion and Health Care Ethics,” pp. 547–57 from Raanan Gillon (ed.), Principles of Health Care Ethics, Chichester: John Wiley, 1994.
Sumner, L. W. Abortion and Moral Theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Pres, 2016.
Tooley, Michael. “In Defense of Abortion and Infanticide.” In What Is a Person?, edited by Michael F. Goodman, 83–114. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3950-5_4.