Abortion

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our most fundamental moral principles, and much more. For many women, the abortion controversy is personal, involving judgments about their own bodies, their own health and happiness, and their own inner turmoil provoked by life- and- death decisions. Uncritical acceptance of particular moral perspectives on abortion seems to be the norm for people on all sides of the debate. Often, discus- sion of the issue is reduced to shouting; informed reflection, to knee- jerk conclusions; and reasoned argument, to cases built on assumptions never questioned.

In this chapter, we try to do better, relying heavily on critical reasoning and striving for a more objective approach. We begin with a review of the (nonmoral) facts of abortion— biological, medi- cal, psychological, semantic, and legal. Then we consider how the moral theories discussed in pre- vious chapters can be applied to this issue. Finally, we examine a range of common arguments in the debate, from liberal to conservative as well as some intermediate positions.

ISSUE FILE: BACKGROUND

Abortion (also called induced abortion) is the delib- erate termination of a pregnancy by surgical or medical (with drugs) means. The unintentional ter- mination of a pregnancy (due to a medical disorder or injury) is known as a spontaneous abortion, or mis- carriage. An abortion performed to protect the life or health of the mother is referred to as a therapeutic abortion. Therapeutic abortions are usually not thought to be morally problematic. (The Roman

If somehow you had unobstructed access for a single day to all the public and private dramas pro- voked by the issue of abortion, you might see scenes like this: a forty- year- old mother of five agonizing over whether she should terminate her pregnancy (which is both unexpected and unwanted); anti- abortion activists shouting “Thou shall not kill!” at a woman hurrying inside a clinic that performs abortions; a frightened sixteen- year- old rape vic- tim having an abortion against her family’s wishes; a Catholic bishop asserting on the eleven o’clock news that abortion in any form is murder; the head of an abortion rights organization declaring in a CNN interview that anti- abortion activists are violent and dangerous; a politician getting elected solely because he favors a constitutional amend- ment to ban virtually all abortions; two women who have been friends for years disagreeing bit- terly about whether a fetus has a right to life; and state legislators angrily debating a bill requiring any woman seeking an abortion to watch a fifteen- minute video titled “The Tragedy of Abortion.”

Such scenes are emblematic of the abortion issue in that they are intensely emotional and usu- ally accompanied by uncritical or dogmatic think- ing. Passions surge because abortion touches on some of our deepest values and most basic beliefs. When we grapple with the issue of abortion, we must consider whose rights (the mother’s or the unborn’s) carry the most moral weight, what the meaning of human being or person is, when— if ever— the unborn achieves personhood, how having an aborti on affects the health and mind of the mother, how much importance to assign to

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Abortion methods vary depending largely on the stage of a woman’s pregnancy. Within the first seven weeks or so, drugs can be used to induce an abortion. A combination of mifepristone ( RU- 486) and prostaglandins (hormonelike agents that pro- voke uterine contractions) can force the embryo out of the uterus and through the vagina. This approach, sometimes called a medical or medication abortion, has an extremely high success rate.

With a method known as menstrual aspiration (or manual vacuum aspiration), an abortion can be performed in the first three weeks. In this pro- cedure, a physician expands the opening of the uterus (the cervix) and uses a syringe to draw out the embryo from the uterine wall. Up until twelve weeks of pregnancy (the period when most abor- tions are performed, also called the first trimester), a method called suction curettage (or dilation and suc- tion curettage) is often used. A physician widens the cervix, then inserts a thin, flexible tube through it and into the uterus itself. A vacuum device attached to the other end of the tube then provides suction to empty the uterus. A method often used after twelve weeks is dilation and evacuation. After the cervix is opened up, forceps and suction are used to extract the fetus. A nonsurgical technique used in some late abortions involves inducing the con- tractions of labor so the fetus is expelled from the uterus. To force the contractions, physicians often use drugs as well as saline injection, the substitution of saltwater for amniotic fluid in the uterus.

Like any medical procedure, abortion poses some risk of complications. Its risks, however, are relatively low. Fewer than 0.05 percent of women who have a first- trimester abortion suffer from a major complication. The risk of death for women who have an abortion at eight weeks or earlier is 0.3 deaths per hundred thousand abortions. The risk of death for abortions performed at eighteen weeks or later is 6.7 per hundred thousand. The health risks linked to abortion are directly related to the timing of the procedure. The earlier in the pregnancy an abortion is performed, the lower the risk.

Catholic stance, however, is that induced abortion is always wrong, though the unintended death of the fetus during an attempt to save the mother’s life is morally permissible.) But induced abortions are intensely controversial and are the focus of the ongoing moral debate.

Throughout our discussion of abortion in this chapter, we will use the word fetus to refer to the unborn during its entire development from conception to birth. But technically, the term indicates a particular phase of this development. Development begins at conception, or fertil- ization, when a sperm cell enters an ovum and the two merge into a single cell called a zygote. The zygote contains a complete set of forty- six chromosomes, half of them from the mother, half from the father— all the genetic informa- tion needed to make a unique human individual. Over the next few days the zygote inches down the fallopian tube toward the uterus, expanding as cells divide. In three to five days it reaches the uterus, where it grows in a tiny orb of cells called a blastocyst. By day ten the blastocyst fully implants itself in the lining of the uterus, and from implan- tation until the eighth week after fertilization it is known technically as an embryo. In the embry- onic phase, most major organs form (though the brain and spinal cord will keep developing during pregnancy), and the embryo grows to just over an inch long. At about the third week the embryo first acquires a human shape; by the eighth, doc- tors can detect brain activity. From the end of the eighth week until birth (approximately week forty), the embryo is known in medical terminol- ogy as a fetus.

In the abortion debate, certain other aspects of fetal development are thought by some to be of special significance. For example, usually at about sixteen to twenty weeks, the mother can feel the fetus moving, an event known as quickening. At about twenty- three or twenty- four weeks, the fetus may be able to live outside the uterus, a state referred to as viability.

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’ • Nearly half (45 percent) of all pregnancies

among U.S. women in 2011 were unintended, and about four in ten of these were terminated by abortion.

• Nineteen percent of pregnancies (excluding mis- carriages) in 2014 ended in abortion.

• Approximately 926,200 abortions were performed in 2014, down 12 percent from 1.06 million in 2011. In 2014, some 1.5 percent of women aged fifteen to forty- four had an abortion.

• The abortion rate in 2014 was 14.6 abortions per thousand women aged fifteen to forty- four, down 14 percent from 16.9 per thousand in 2011. This is the lowest rate ever observed in the United States; in 1973, the year abortion became legal, the rate was 16.3 per thousand.

• Seventeen percent of abortion patients in 2014 identified as mainline Protestant, 13 percent as evangelical Protestant, and 24 percent as Catho- lic; 38 percent reported no religious affiliation, and the remaining 8 percent reported some other affiliation.

• More than half of all U.S. abortion patients in 2014 were in their twenties: patients aged twenty to twenty- four obtained 34 percent of all abortions, and patients aged twenty- five to twenty- nine obtained 27 percent.

• Twelve percent of abortion patients in 2014 were adolescents: those aged eighteen to nineteen accounted for 8 percent of all abortions, fifteen- to seventeen- year- olds for 3 percent, and those younger than fifteen for 0.2 percent.

• White patients accounted for 39 percent of abor- tion procedures in 2014, blacks for 28 percent, Hispanics for 25 percent, and patients of other races and ethnicities for 9 percent.

• In 2014, 59 percent of abortions were obtained by women who had had at least one birth.

• In 2014, nearly half of the women seeking an abortion were living with a male partner, and 14 percent of them were married.

• The reasons patients gave for having an abor- tion underscored their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. The three most common reasons— each cited by three- fourths of patients— were concern for or responsibility to other individuals; the inability to afford raising a child; and the belief that having a baby would interfere with work, school, or the ability to care for dependents. Half said they did not want to be a single par- ent or were having problems with their hus- band or partner.

• A first- trimester abortion is one of the safest medical procedures and carries minimal risk— less than 0.05 percent— of major complications that might necessitate hospital care.

• Leading experts have concluded that among women who have an unplanned pregnancy, the risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single first- trimester abortion than if they carry the pregnancy to term.

• The risk of death associated with abortion increases with the length of pregnancy, from 0.3 for every hundred thousand abortions at or before eight weeks to 6.7 per hundred thousand at eighteen weeks or later.

• Medication abortions accounted for 31 per- cent of all nonhospital abortions in 2014 and for 45 percent of abortions before nine weeks’ gestation.*

*Derived from “Fact Sheet” and “National Reproduc- tive Health Profile,” data compiled and developed by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, January 2017, January 2018, www.guttmacher.org (March 7, 2018).

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abortions; and held that states may require a girl under eighteen to obtain either the informed con- sent of a parent or a court order before getting an abortion.

MORAL THEORIES

How would a utilitarian judge the moral permissi- bility of abortion? How would a Kantian theorist or a natural law theorist evaluate it? Let us take utili- tarianism first. An act- utilitarian would say that an abortion is morally right if it results in the greatest overall happiness, everyone considered. To argue for abortion, she might point to all the unhappi- ness that could be caused by the mother’s remain- ing pregnant against her wishes: the mother’s impaired mental and physical health (and possible death), her loss of personal freedom and future opportunities, financial strain on the mother as well as on her family, the anguish of being preg- nant as a result of rape or incest, the agony of bring- ing a seriously impaired baby to term only to see it die later, and the stress that all these social and financial problems would have on a child after birth. The philosopher Mary Anne Warren cites a possible consequentialist argument that says when women do not have the option of abortion, unhap- piness can be created on a global scale:

In the long run, access to abortion is essential for the health and survival not just of individual women and families, but also that of the larger social and biologi- cal systems on which all our lives depend. Given the inadequacy of present methods of contraception and the lack of universal access to contraception, the avoidance of rapid population growth gener- ally requires some use of abortion. Unless popula- tion growth rates are reduced in those impoverished societies where they remain high, malnutrition and starvation will become even more widespread than at present.3

An act- utilitarian, of course, could also argue against abortion on exactly the same grounds— the overall happiness (or unhappiness) brought

When we try to evaluate arguments in the abortion debate, we must distinguish between the moral question (Is abortion right?) and the legal one (What should the law allow?). Our main con- cern here is the former, not the latter. But to be fully informed about the issue, we should understand, at least in general terms, what the law does allow. In 1973, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a woman has a constitutional, but not unlimited, right to obtain an abortion in a range of circumstances. According to the court, in the first trimester of pregnancy, the woman’s right is unrestricted. The decision to have an abortion is up to the woman in consultation with her physician. After the first tri- mester, a state may regulate (but not ban) abortion to protect the health of the mother. After viability, however, a state may regulate and even forbid abor- tions in the interests of “the potentiality of human life,” except when abortion is necessary to preserve the health or life of the woman.1

In Roe the court maintained that a woman’s right to an abortion is based on a fundamental right of personal privacy and that this right, derived from several constitutional amendments, applies to numerous situations involving reproduction, families, and children. The court also pointed out that the word person as used in the Constitu- tion “does not include the unborn” and that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.”2

Over the next thirty years the Court handed down other abortion decisions that clarified or supplemented Roe. Among other things, the jus- tices prohibited or constrained the use of Medicaid (a government entitlement program) to subsidize abortions; forbade the use of public employees and facilities to perform abortions (except to save the life of the mother); declared that a woman seek- ing an abortion does not have to notify her hus- band of her intent; affirmed that states may not impose restrictions that present an “undue bur- den,” or excessive impediment, to women seeking

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results from adhering to it. He could argue on vari- ous grounds that generally following a rule such as “Abortion is not morally permissible except to save the mother’s life” would maximize happiness. Or he could claim that generally following this rule instead would maximize happiness: “Abortion is morally permissible for any reason during the first trimester and always in cases of rape, incest, fetal impairment, and serious threats to the mother’s health or life.”

A premise (often unstated) in many arguments about abortion is that the fetus is (or is not) a

about by particular actions. She could contend, for example, that not having an abortion would pro- duce more net happiness than having one because having one would cause the mother tremendous psychological pain, because the happiness brought into the world with the birth of the child would be considerable, and because the social stigma of having an abortion would be extremely painful for both the mother and her family.

A rule- utilitarian could also view abortion as either morally right or wrong depending on the rule being followed and how much net happiness

’ Seven justices concurred with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, including Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote it. Here is an excerpt:

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of per- sonal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. . . . [A]ppellant and some amici argue that the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant’s arguments that Texas either has no valid inter- est at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limita- tion upon the woman’s sole determination, are unpersuasive. The Court’s decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protect- ing potential life. At some point in pregnancy,

these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. . . . We, therefore, conclude that the right of per- sonal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation. . . . [This] decision leaves the State free to place increasing restrictions on abortion as the period of pregnancy lengthens, so long as those restric- tions are tailored to the recognized state interests. The decision vindicates the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment up to the points where important state interests provide compelling justi- fications for intervention. Up to those points, the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibil- ity for it must rest with the physician. If an individ- ual practitioner abuses the privilege of exercising proper medical judgment, the usual remedies, judi- cial and intra- professional, are available.*

*Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153–54, 165–66 (1973).

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intrinsic value and dignity— then he would insist that it has all the rights and is due all the respect that any other person has. This would mean that the unborn should not be regarded as just another quan- tity in a utilitarian calculation of consequences. Like any adult human, the fetus has rights, and these rights cannot be overridden merely for utility’s sake. Only for the most compelling moral reasons can these rights be set aside. A Kantian might say that one such reason is self- defense: killing a person in self- defense is permissible. He might therefore argue

person— an entity with full moral rights. In general, utilitarian arguments about abortion do not depend heavily, if at all, on whether the fetus is regarded as a person. Whether the fetus is a person is not likely to dramatically affect the hedonic calculus. The main issue is not personhood but utility. For the Kantian theorist, however, the moral status of the fetus is likely to matter much more. (Whether Kant himself thought the fetus a person is an open question.) If the Kantian maintains that the fetus is a person— that is, an end in itself, a thing of

’ Do the Jewish or Christian scriptures forbid abor- tion? Many people believe that they do, but the philosopher James Rachels argues that they do not:

It is difficult to derive a prohibition of abortion from either the Jewish or the Christian Scriptures. The Bible does not speak plainly on the mat- ter. There are certain passages, however, that are often quoted by conservatives because they seem to suggest that fetuses have full human sta- tus. One of the most frequently cited passages is from the first chapter of Jeremiah, in which God is quoted as saying: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” These words are presented as though they were God’s endorsement of the con- servative position: They are taken to mean that the unborn, as well as the born, are “consecrated” to God. In context, however, these words obviously mean something quite different. Suppose we read the whole passage in which they occur:

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’ for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and

whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” says the Lord.

Neither abortion, the sanctity of fetal life, nor any- thing else of the kind is being discussed in this pas- sage. Instead, Jeremiah is asserting his authority as a prophet. He is saying, in effect, “God authorized me to speak for him; even though I resisted, he commanded me to speak.” But Jeremiah puts the point more poetically; he has God saying that God had intended him to be a prophet even before Jeremiah was born. . . . The scriptural passage that comes closest to making a specific judgment about the moral sta- tus of fetuses occurs in the 21st chapter of Exo- dus. This chapter is part of a detailed description of the law of the ancient Israelites. Here the pen- alty for murder is said to be death; however, it is also said that if a pregnant woman is caused to have a miscarriage, the penalty is only a fine, to be paid to her husband. Murder was not a category that included fetuses. The Law of Israel appar- ently regarded fetuses as something less than full human beings.*

*James Rachels, from The Elements of Moral Philoso- phy, 4th Ed. pp. 59–60. Copyright © 2003 McGraw Hill Education. Reprinted with permission.

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is abortion morally permissible? Recall that in ethics the proper response to such a question is to provide good reasons for a particular position. The usual fireworks that accompany the abortion debate— strident denunciations of the other side, appeals to emotion and pity, extremist rhetoric, exaggerated claims, political posturing, and the like— are not appropriate, not germane, and not helpful. So here we try to cut through all that and examine a few of the main arguments offered for a range of views.

The conservative position is that abortion is never, or almost never, morally permissible. Typi- cally the “almost never” refers to situations in which abortion may be permissible to save the life of the mother. (Generally, both the liberal and conservative positions hold that abortion may be permissible to save the mother’s life, usually on the grounds that the mother has a right of self- defense. But as mentioned earlier, the Roman Catholic posi- tion is that in any case, the death of the fetus must be unintended.)

that if the mother’s life is being threatened by the fetus she carries (if being pregnant is somehow life- threatening), therapeutic abortion is permissible, just as killing someone who is trying to kill you is permissible. In this view, abortion would seem to be only rarely justified.

On the other hand, if the Kantian does not regard the fetus as a person, he may believe that abortion is often justified to protect the rights and dignity of the mother, who is a person. In other words, the fetus— like any other nonperson— can be used as a means to an end, whereas the mother must be treated as an end in herself.

Traditional natural law theorists would view abortion very differently, for two reasons. First, to them, there is no question about the moral status of the fetus: it is a person with full moral rights. Sec- ond, the theory is very clear about the treatment of innocent persons: it is always morally wrong to directly kill the innocent. So the direct, inten- tional killing of a fetus through abortion is never permissible. According to the doctrine of double effect, killing an innocent person for the purpose of achieving some greater good is immoral. But indirectly, unintentionally killing an innocent per- son while trying to do good may be permissible. Therefore, intentionally killing a fetus through abortion, even to save the mother’s life, is wrong. But trying to, say, cure a pregnant woman’s can- cer by performing a hysterectomy on her or giving her chemotherapy— treatment that has the unin- tended side effect of aborting the fetus— may be morally acceptable. In this view, very few abortions are morally acceptable.

MORAL ARGUMENTS

Arguments for and against abortion are plenti- ful and diverse, their quality ranges from good to bad, and their conclusions vary from conservative (“ pro- life”) to liberal (“ pro- choice”), with several moderate positions in between. We can sum up the central issue of the debate like this: When, if ever,

’ QUICK REVIEW abortion— The deliberate termination of a preg-

nancy by surgical or medical (with drugs) means.

therapeutic abortion— An abortion performed to protect the life or health of the mother.

conception— The merging of a sperm cell and an ovum into a single cell; also called fertilization.

quickening— The point in fetal development when the mother can feel the fetus moving (at about sixteen to twenty weeks).

viability— The stage of fetal development at which the fetus is able to survive outside the uterus.

person— A being thought to have full moral rights.

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Yet there are conservative arguments that do not equivocate. Consider this one:

1. The unborn is an innocent person from conception.

2. It is wrong to kill an innocent person.

3. Abortion is the killing of an innocent person.

4. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

This argument is valid. The only significant difference between it and the previous one is Premise 1, which asserts that the unborn is a being with full moral rights from the very moment of fer- tilization. If Premise 1 is true, then the argument is sound— the premises are true and the conclusion follows from them.

But is the premise true? The conservative insists that it is and can argue for it in this fashion. Birth is generally thought to be the point at which the fetus is most clearly (and legally) a person. The development of the unborn from conception to birth, however, is one continuous process, with no obvious points along the way that might signal a transition into personhood. Moreover, whatever essential prop- erties a born human has that make it a person seem to be present at the moment of conception. Therefore, because no unambiguous point of personhood can be located in this process, the most reasonable option is to identify personhood with conception.

Opponents of this argument contend that it is fallacious. We may not be able to pinpoint a pre- cise moment when day becomes night, they say, but that does not mean that day is night. Likewise, we may not be able to determine the precise point in the continuous process of human development when a zygote becomes a full- fledged person. But that does not mean that a zygote is a person.

The conservative, however, can propose a more nuanced reason for supposing that conception marks the beginning of personhood:

One evidence of the nonarbitrary character of the line drawn [at conception] is the difference of probabili- ties on either side of it. If a spermatozoon is destroyed, one destroys a being which had a chance of far less

Like many arguments about abortion, the con- servative case is built on a proposition about the moral status of the fetus. For most conservatives, the fetus is a person (a human being, as some would say) with full moral rights, the same rights that any adult human has, and these rights emerge at the moment of conception. Of course, the moral right at the heart of it all is the right to life. Taking the life of a fetal person is just as immoral as killing an innocent adult human.

Here is one version of the conservative argument:

1. The unborn is obviously a human life.

2. It is wrong to take a human life.

3. Abortion is the taking of a human life.

4. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

To evaluate this argument (or any argument), we must determine (1) whether the conclusion follows from the premises; and (2) whether the premises are true. A cursory glance at this argument might suggest that the conclusion does follow from the premises and that the premises are true. But we must be careful. This argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. The term human life is assigned two different meanings in the premises, rendering the argument invalid. In Premise 1, “human life” means something like “biologically human”—an entity with human DNA, an entity that is from the human species. But in Premises 2 and 3, the term means “person”—a being entitled to full moral rights. If “human life” is used in different senses in the premises, then the argument is not valid (the conclusion does not follow from the premises)— even if the premises, using their respective mean- ings of the term, are true. As it stands, Premise 1 is unmistakably true: a fetus born of human parents with human DNA is certainly biologically human. And in its present form, Premise 2 is also true: the killing of a person is indeed wrong (except perhaps to save a life). Still, the argument fails and does not provide us with good reasons to accept the conclusion.

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The positive argument for conception as the deci- sion moment of humanization is that at conception the new being receives the genetic code. It is this genetic information which determines his character- istics, which is the biological carrier of the possibility of human wisdom, which makes him a self- evolving being. A being with a human genetic code is man.4

than 1 in 200 million of developing into a reasoning being, possessed of the genetic code, a heart and other organs, and capable of pain. If a fetus is destroyed, one destroys a being already possessed of the genetic code, organs and sensitivity to pain, and one which had an 80 percent chance of developing further into a baby outside the womb who, in time, would reason.

’ The legal status of abortion has been shaped not only by the U.S. Supreme Court but also by many state statutes, some of which have been struck down by the court, and some that have been left standing but are still challenged by many organiza- tions and groups. Here’s a brief summary of current state requirements:

• Physician and hospital requirements: Thirty- eight states require an abortion to be performed by a licensed physician. Nineteen states require an abortion to be performed in a hospital after a specified point in the pregnancy, and nineteen states require the involvement of a second physi- cian after a specified point.

• Gestational limits: Forty- three states prohibit abortions, generally except when necessary to protect the woman’s life or health, after a speci- fied point in pregnancy.

• “ Partial- birth” abortion: Nineteen states have laws in effect that prohibit “ partial- birth” abor- tion. Three of these laws apply only to postviabil- ity abortions.

• Coverage by private insurance: Eleven states restrict coverage of abortion in private insurance plans, most often limiting coverage to cases in which the woman’s life would be endangered if the pregnancy were carried to term. Most states allow the purchase of additional abortion cover- age at an additional cost.

• Refusal: Forty- five states allow individual health care providers to refuse to participate

in an abortion. Forty- two states allow institu- tions to refuse to perform abortions, sixteen of which limit refusal to private or religious institutions.

• State- mandated counseling: Sixteen states man- date that women be given counseling before an abortion that includes information on at least one of the following: the purported link between abortion and breast cancer (five states), the ability of a fetus to feel pain (twelve states), or long- term mental health consequences for the woman (six states).

• Waiting periods: Twenty- seven states require a woman seeking an abortion to wait a speci- fied period of time, usually twenty- four hours, between when she receives counseling and when the procedure is performed. Fourteen of these states have laws that effectively require the woman to make two separate trips to the clinic to obtain the procedure.

• Parental involvement: Thirty- seven states require some type of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion. Twenty- six states require one or both parents to consent to the procedure, while eleven require that one or both parents be notified.*

*Derived from “An Overview of Abortion Laws,” data compiled by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, August 1, 2017, www.guttmacher.org (August 17, 2017).

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disagreement is not over this fundamental moral principle, but over the nature of persons and who does or does not qualify as such an entity. Prem- ise 1, then, is the crux of the liberal’s argument (just as Premise 1 is the heart of the conservative’s argu- ment). How might the liberal defend this premise?

The obvious approach is to plausibly explain what a person is and then show that the fetus does not qualify as one. The most influential argument along these lines is that of Mary Anne Warren. “What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a person?” she asks. What criteria, for example, would we use to decide whether alien beings encountered on an unknown planet deserve to be treated morally or treated as, say, a source of food? How would we tell whether the creatures are persons? Warren says that the characteristics most important to our idea of personhood are (1) consciousness, (2) the ability to reason, (3) self- motivated activity, (4) the capacity to commu- nicate, and (5) the presence of self- concepts and self- awareness. Any being that has all of these traits we would surely regard as a person. Even a being that has only some of these traits would prob- ably qualify as a person. More to the point, Warren says, we must admit that any being that has none of these traits is unquestionably not a person. And since a fetus lacks all these, we have to conclude that it, too, is not a person.

These considerations suggest that being geneti- cally human is not the same thing as being a person in the moral sense, the sense of having full moral rights. As Warren notes,

Now if [these five traits] are indeed the primary crite- ria of personhood, then it is clear that genetic human- ity is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing that an entity is a person. Some human beings are not people [persons], and there may well be people who are not human beings. A man or woman whose consciousness has been permanently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which is no lon- ger a person; defective human beings, with no appre- ciable mental capacity, are not and presumably never

Others who oppose abortion argue that although the fetus may not be a person, it has the potential to become a person and is therefore entitled to the same rights as full- fledged persons. But critics reject this view:

This argument is implausible, since in no other case do we treat the potential to achieve some status entailing certain rights as itself entailing those same rights. For instance, every child born in the United States is a potential voter, but no- one under the age of 18 has the right to vote in that country. If a fetus is a potential person, then so is an unfertilized human ovum, together with enough viable spermatozoa to achieve fertilization; yet few would seriously suggest that these living human entities should have full and equal moral status.5

The liberal position is that abortion is always (or almost always) permissible. Like the conserva- tive’s argument, the liberal’s is based on a particular view of the moral status of the fetus. But in oppo- sition to the conservative view, the liberal asserts that the fetus is not a person, not a being with full moral rights. Abortion therefore is morally permis- sible because the fetus does not possess a right to life (unlike the mother, who has a full complement of rights). Generally, for the liberal, the event that makes the unborn a person is not conception but birth.

Here is a version of a common liberal argument:

1. The unborn is not a person until birth (and thus does not have a right to life).

2. It is wrong to kill an innocent person.

3. Abortion before birth would not be the killing of an innocent person.

4. If abortion before birth is not the killing of an innocent person, it is permissible.

5. Therefore, abortion before birth is permissible.

Notice that this argument and the conserva- tive one have a common premise: it is wrong to kill an innocent person. Thus the liberal and the con- servative agree on the immorality of murder. Their

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other worlds, should such be found, as people in the fullest sense, and to respect their moral rights.6

Against the liberal’s argument, the conservative can lodge the following objections. First, he can point out that if Warren’s view of personhood is

will be people; and a fetus is a human being which is not yet a person, and which therefore cannot coher- ently be said to have full moral rights. Citizens of the next century should be prepared to recognize highly advanced, self- aware robots or computers, should such be developed, and intelligent inhabitants of

’ Because abortion is so controversial, and because conflicts over it are so intense, abortion debates often abound in falsehoods and half- truths. Here are some recent examples, along with the verdicts of the fact- checking website PolitiFact.com:

Claim Verdict “Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little more than False provide abortions.”—Sean Duffy

“Toomey and Trump will ban abortion and punish women who have False them.”—NARAL Pro- Choice America

“Today in America, between 40 and 50 percent of all African- American Mostly False babies, virtually 1- in- 2, are killed before they are born.”—Trent Franks

Ohio budget item later signed into law by Gov. John Kasich requires False women seeking an abortion to undergo a “mandatory vaginal probe.”—Rachel Maddow

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger “believed that people like me False should be eliminated.”—Ben Carson

Attorney general candidate Brad Schimel “is in cahoots with Wisconsin Mostly False Right to Life to make abortion a crime in Wisconsin.”—Chris Taylor

“A salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception . . . is not Mostly False going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.”—Hillary Clinton

“Upwards of 90 percent” of women seeking an abortion decide not to False have an abortion after seeing an ultrasound.—Rachel Campos- Duffy

Mitt Romney “backed a bill that outlaws all abortions, even in cases of False rape and incest.”—Barack Obama

Can you trust advocacy groups such as NARAL and National Right to Life to provide accurate information about abortion? Do you accept every claim they make just because you agree with their stand on the abor- tion issue? How would you fact- check an abortion claim that you’re not sure of?

CRITICAL THOUGHT: Fact- checking Abortion Claims

232 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

that personhood depends on medical expertise. Quickening, the first detection of fetal movement by the mother, signifies nothing that can be plausibly linked to personhood. It does not indicate the start of fetal movement— the fetus begins moving in the very first week of life. Sentience refers to conscious- ness, specifically the capacity to have sense experi- ences. If being sentient (especially the capacity to feel pleasure and pain) is proof of personhood, then per- sonhood must not arise in the fetus until the second trimester, when neurological pathways are devel- oped enough to make sense experience possible. But why should we regard sentience as a marker for per- sonhood in the first place? Kittens, birds, crabs, and spiders are sentient, but few of us would insist that they are persons with full moral rights.

Some moderate positions can be mapped out without reference to the issue of personhood. The most impressive argument for this sort of view is that of Judith Jarvis Thomson. She contends that even if we grant that the fetus is a person with full moral rights, abortion still may be permissible in certain cases— more cases than the conservative would permit and fewer than the liberal would. She argues that the fetus has a right to life, but not a right to sustain that life by using the mother’s body against her will. To underscore her argument, Thomson asks us to consider this strange scenario:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lov- ers 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 now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will

correct, then a fetus is not a person— but neither is a newborn. After all, it is doubtful that a newborn (or perhaps even an older baby) can meet Warren’s cri- teria for personhood. If a newborn is not a person, then killing it— the crime of infanticide— would seem to be permissible. But we tend to think that infanticide is obviously wrong.

To this criticism the liberal may say that though a newborn is not a person, it still has value— either because it is a potential person or because it is valued by others. The liberal might even argue that though a baby is not a person, infanticide should never be permitted because it is a gruesome act that cheapens life or cultivates a callous attitude toward it.

The conservative can offer a related objec- tion to the liberal’s position. The liberal argument implies that the unborn is a person at birth, but not a person a day or even an hour before birth, and therefore that abortion is immoral after birth but permissible an hour before. But because the physi- ological and psychological differences between the newborn and unborn are virtually nil, the liberal’s distinction seems both arbitrary and ghastly.

The moderate rejects the claim that abortions are almost never permissible (as conservatives say) as well as the notion that they almost always are (as liberals maintain). In a variety of ways, moder- ates take intermediate positions between these two ends of the spectrum, asserting that abortion may be justified in more cases than conservatives would allow and fewer than liberals would like.

One moderate approach is to argue that the fetus becomes a person (and acquires full rights) at some time after conception and before birth— at viability, quickening, sentience (sensory experi- ence), or some other notable milestone. Each of these points, however, is problematic in one way or another. The viability of the fetus (the point when it can survive outside the womb) is largely a function of modern medical know- how. Physicians are get- ting better at sustaining fetal life outside the womb, gradually pushing viability further back toward con- ception. But this observation suggests, implausibly,

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á  233

3. The unborn uses the mother’s body against her will when the pregnancy is the result of rape, incest, or defective contraception.

4. Therefore, abortion is permissible in cases of rape, incest, or defective contraception.

Probably the most common criticism of this argument is that the mother may in fact not have the right to disconnect herself from the fetus if she bears some responsibility for being connected. In the case of Thomson’s violinist, the woman was not at all responsible for being connected to him. However, if the woman’s own actions somehow precipitated her being attached to the violinist, then she would be responsible for her predicament and thus would have no right to disconnect herself. Likewise, this objection goes, if a woman consents to sexual intercourse and knows that her actions can lead to pregnancy, she bears some responsibil- ity for getting pregnant and therefore has no right to abort the fetus, even though it is using her body to survive. If this view is right, an abortion would seem to be justified only in cases of rape, when the woman is clearly not responsible for her pregnancy.

CHAPTER REVIEW

SUMMARY

Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy by surgical or medical means. Therapeutic abortions are those performed to protect the life of the mother. An abortion can be performed at any point in the develop- ment of the unborn— from conception to birth.

Abortion methods vary depending on how long the woman has been pregnant. Very early abortions can be done with drugs. Other types of abortions are per- formed by widening the cervix and drawing out the embryo from the uterus with a syringe (manual vac- uum aspiration), by opening the cervix and using a thin

have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”7

Would you agree to such an arrangement? Would you be morally obligated to do so? The vio- linist, like all persons, has a right to life. But does this right, in Thomson’s phrase, “[outweigh] your right to decide what happens in and to your body”? Thomson concludes that the unborn’s right to life does not entail the right to use the mother’s body without her consent; the mother has a right to defend herself against unauthorized exploitation of her body. Abortion then is morally permissible when pregnancy is forced on the mother— that is, in cases of rape, incest, and defective contracep- tion. (Like most people involved in the abortion debate, Thomson also thinks that abortion is mor- ally acceptable to save the life of the mother.)

While laying out her argument, Thomson makes a distinction that further moderates her views. She points out that though women have a right to ter- minate a pregnancy in some cases, they do not have a right to “secure the death of the unborn child”:

It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside the mother’s body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sus- taining the life of that violinist; but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach your- self even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him.8

Here is a greatly simplified version of Thomson’s basic argument:

1. Whether or not the unborn has a right to life, it does not have a right to sustain its life by using the mother’s body against her will.

2. The mother has a right to defend herself against the unborn’s use of her body against her will (a right to have an abortion).

234 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

and in fewer situations than would be accepted by the liberal. A moderate position can be formulated by arguing that the unborn is a person some time after conception and before birth— perhaps at viability, quickening, or sentience.

KEY TERMS abortion (p. 221) therapeutic abortion (p. 221) conception (p. 222) quickening (p. 222) viability (p. 222) person (p. 226)

EXERCISES Review Questions

1. What is a therapeutic abortion? (p. 221) 2. At what point in a woman’s pregnancy is the

fetus thought to be viable? (p. 222) 3. What is a zygote? a blastocyst? (p. 222) 4. What was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in

Roe v. Wade? (p. 224) 5. What is an abortion? (p. 221) 6. In Roe v. Wade, the court held that a woman’s

right to an abortion was based on what fundamental right? (p. 224)

7. In the last few years, has the abortion rate in the United States been going down or up? (p. 223)

8. In 2011, what percentage of unintended pregnancies were terminated by abortion? (p. 223)

9. In 2014, white patients accounted for what percentage of abortion procedures? What percentage of patients were black? (p. 223)

10. Do most medical experts think that abortion in the first trimester is relatively safe? (p. 223)

Discussion Questions

1. Why is personhood such an important concept in abortion debates?

2. How might an act- utilitarian judge the moral permissibility of abortion?

suction tube to empty the uterus (suction curettage), by using forceps and suction to extract the fetus (dilation and evacuation), and by using drugs or saline solution to cause contractions to expel the fetus from the uterus.

In 1973, in the famous case Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a woman has a constitutional, but limited, right to obtain an abor- tion. According to the court, in the first trimester, the woman’s right is unrestricted. The decision to have an abortion is up to the woman in consultation with her physician. After the first trimester, a state may regu- late but not ban abortion to protect the health of the mother. After the fetus reaches viability, a state may regulate and even forbid abortions in the interests of the fetus, except when an abortion is necessary to pre- serve the health or life of the woman.

Major moral theories offer different perspectives on the issue of abortion. An act- utilitarian would argue that an abortion is morally right (or wrong) depending on its consequences. A rule- utilitarian could also judge abortion to be either morally right or wrong depending on the rule being followed and how much net happiness results from adhering to it. A Kantian theorist is likely to judge the issue according to the moral status of the fetus. If the Kantian believes that the fetus is a person, then she would say that the fetus has full moral rights and that these rights cannot be overridden on utilitarian grounds. If she does not think the fetus a person, she may believe that abortion is sometimes justified to protect the rights and dignity of the mother.

Arguments for and against abortion can be roughly grouped into three major categories— conservative, liberal, and moderate. The conservative position is that abortion is never, or almost never, morally per- missible. The conservative case is built on the supposi- tion that the fetus is a person with full moral rights. The liberal position is that abortion is always, or almost always, permissible. The liberal asserts that the fetus is not a person and therefore does not have a right to life. The moderate can take a number of intermediate posi- tions between these two extremes, asserting on vari- ous grounds that abortion may be permissible in more situations than would be allowed by the conservative

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á  235

Sidney Callahan, “A Case for Pro- Life Feminism,” Com- monweal 25 (April 1986): 232–38.

Jane English, “Abortion and the Concept of a Person,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 2 (October 1975): 233–43.

Joel Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1993).

Ronald Munson, “Abortion,” in Intervention and Reflec- tion: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics, ed. Ronald Munson, 7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004).

John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in His- tory,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, ed. John T. Noonan Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

Louis P. Pojman and Francis J. Beckwith, eds., The Abor- tion Controversy: 25 Years After Roe v. Wade: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998).

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 113–67 (1973). Justice Harry Blackmun, Majority Opinion of the Court.

Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clar- endon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

3. What is the conservative argument against abortion?

4. What is the liberal argument for a woman’s right to an abortion?

5. What is Thomson’s argument for a woman’s right to an abortion? Is it sound?

6. What is Warren’s abortion argument? Is it sound? 7. Why does Warren reject the argument that

because a fetus has a potential to become a person, it has the same rights as a full- fledged person?

8. Is being genetically human the same thing as being a person? Why or why not?

9. What argument can the conservative lodge against Warren’s view?

10. What claims about abortion does the moderate reject? Do you agree? Why or why not?

FURTHER READING Daniel Callahan, “Abortion Decisions: Personal Moral-

ity,” in Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

E T H I C A L D I L E M M A S

1. Aborting Daughters

The illegal abortion of female foetuses solely to ensure that families have sons is widely practised within some ethnic communities in Britain and has resulted in significant shortfalls in the proportion of girls, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The practice of sex-selective abortion is now so commonplace that it has affected the natural 50:50 balance of boys to girls within some immigrant groups and has led to the “disappearance” of between 1,400 and 4,700 females from the national census records of England and Wales, we can reveal.

A government investigation last year found no evidence that women living in the UK, but born abroad, were preferentially aborting girls. However, our deeper statistical analysis of data from the 2011 National Census has shown widespread discrepancies in the sex ratio of children in some immigrant families, which can only be easily explained by women choosing to abort female foetuses in the hope of becoming quickly pregnant again with a boy. The findings will reignite the debate over whether pregnant women should be legally allowed to know the sex of their babies following ultrasound scans at 13 weeks.*

236 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

Do you think sex- selection abortions are morally permissible? What reasons can you provide to back up your view? Some Chinese parents could argue that such abortions are acceptable on utilitarian

grounds: aborting female fetuses prevents eco- nomic harm to the family. Is this a good moral argument? Why or why not?

*Steve Connor, “The Lost Girls: Illegal Abortion Widely Used by Some UK Ethnic Groups to Avoid Daughters ‘Has Reduced Female Population by Between 1,500 and 4,700,’” The Independent, January 15, 2014, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-lost-girls-illegal-abortion-widely-used-by-some-uk-ethnic- groups-to-avoid-daughters-has-reduced-9059790.html. Reprinted by permission of ESI Media.

2. Parental Notification

USA Today— Sabrina Holmquist trained as a physician in low- income neighborhoods in the Bronx, N.Y. She says she often saw pregnant teenagers in desperate health and family crises, including some girls who had been abused at home. That, Holmquist says, led her to believe that doctors sometimes should be able to perform abortions on minors without informing a parent.

But in Texas, Linda W. Flower, who practiced obstetrics for two decades, disagrees. She says that in the vast majority of cases in which a teenage girl seeks an abortion, a parent’s guidance is helpful and needed. Flower says she knows of young women who have regretted having abortions.

The doctors’ views reflect the dueling arguments in the first abortion case to come before the Supreme Court in five years: a New Hampshire dispute that tests whether a state may bar physicians from performing an abortion on a girl younger than 18 unless one of her parents has been notified at least 48 hours in advance— even in instances in which the girl faces a health emergency.

The case, to be heard by the court Wednesday, is the first abortion dispute before the justices since 2000, when they voted 5–4 to strike down Nebraska’s ban on a procedure that critics call “partial birth” abortion because the ban lacked an exception for cases in which the woman’s health was at risk. The new dispute tests whether such a health exception should be required in parental- involvement mandates, which have been passed in various forms by 43 states.†

Which doctor do you think is right about parental notification? Under what circumstances, if any, do you think it morally permissible for an under- eighteen girl to have an abortion without notifying

a parent or guardian? when the girl’s life is at stake? when she is a victim of sexual abuse, including incest? Would it be reasonable to require parental notification in all cases without exception?

†Joan Biskupic, “High Court Case May Signal Shift on Abortion” from USA Today, February 7, 2006. © 2006 Gannett-USA Today. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. www.usatoday.com.

CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á  237

3. Abortion to Avert Health Risks

Medical News Today— The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday began considering the appeal of a Polish woman who says that in 2000 she was denied an abortion despite warnings from physicians that she could become blind if she continued the pregnancy, the Scotsman reports (Neighbour, Scotsman, 2/8). Alicja Tysiac— who has three children— alleges that Poland’s abortion law violated her rights under Article 8 and Article 14 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which guarantee “respect for privacy and family life” and “prohibition of discrimination,” respectively. Polish law allows abortion only if a woman has been raped, if there is danger to the life of the woman or if the fetus will have birth defects, according to the Jurist (Onikepe, Jurist, 2/8). The European Court could rule that Tysiac’s rights were violated but cannot mandate that Poland change its abortion laws (Reuters, 2/7).‡

Should Alicja Tysiac have been permitted an abor- tion even though her life was not at risk? Why or why not? How serious must pregnancy- related health problems be before a risk- lowering abortion

is permissible (if ever)? When such health dan- gers are involved, why should— or should not— a woman be allowed to decide for herself about whether to have an abortion?

‡Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, “European Court of Human Rights Considers Appeal of Polish Woman,” published in Medical News Today, February 10, 2006. Copyright © 2005 The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Reprinted with permission.

R E A D I N G S

A Defense of Abortion Judith Jarvis Thomson

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argu- ment. We are asked to notice that the development of

a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say “before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person” is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good rea- son can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not

Judith Jarvis Thomson, excerpts from “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(1): 47–66. Copyright © 1971 Black- well Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

238 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imag- ine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. 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 direc- tor 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 now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? 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? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. 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.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible- sounding argu- ment I mentioned a moment ago.

In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you didn’t volunteer for the operation that plugged the vio- linist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abor- tion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that

follow. Similar things might be said about the develop- ment of an acorn into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes called “slip- pery slope arguments”—the phrase is perhaps self- explanatory— and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.

I am inclined to agree, however, that the pros- pects for “drawing a line” in the development of the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think also that we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it comes as a surprise when one first learns how early in its life it begins to acquire human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it already has a face, arms and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and brain activity is detectable. On the other hand, I think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of conception. A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not dis- cuss any of this. For it seems to me to be of great inter- est to ask what happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise. How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion com- monly spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and hardly any time explaining the step from there to the impermissibility of abortion. Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious to require much comment. Or perhaps instead they are simply being economical in argument. Many of those who defend abortion rely on the premise that the fetus is not a person, but only a bit of tissue that will become a person at birth; and why pay out more arguments than you have to? Whatever the explana- tion, I suggest that the step they take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide

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to grant— the sum of her rights now outweighing the fetus’ right to life?

The most familiar argument here is the follow- ing. We are told that performing the abortion would be directly killing1 the child, whereas doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only letting her die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be kill- ing an innocent person, for the child has committed no crime, and is not aiming at his mother’s death. And then there are a variety of ways in which this might be continued. (1) But as directly killing an innocent per- son is always and absolutely impermissible, an abor- tion may not be performed. Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent person is murder, and murder is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (3) as one’s duty to refrain from directly killing an innocent person is more stringent than one’s duty to keep a person from dying, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (4) if one’s only options are directly killing an innocent person or letting a person die, one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an abortion may not be performed.

Some people seem to have thought that these are not further premises which must be added if the con- clusion is to be reached, but that they follow from the very fact that an innocent person has a right to life. But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the simplest way to show this is to bring out that while we must certainly grant that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (1) through (4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother’s directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother per- forms an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death. Let us look again at the case of you and the violinist. There you are, in bed with the violinist, and the director of the hospital says to you, “It’s all most distressing, and I deeply sym- pathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain on your kidneys, and you’ll be dead within the month. But you have to stay where you are all the same. Because unplugging you would be directly killing an innocent

persons have a right to life only if they didn’t come into existence because of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those who came into existence because of rape have less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the ques- tion of whether or not you are the product of a rape. And in fact the people who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence do not make an exception in case of rape.

Nor do they make an exception for a case in which the mother has to spend the nine months of her preg- nancy in bed. They would agree that would be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all the same, all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would not make an exception for a case in which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine years, or even the rest of the mother’s life.

Some won’t even make an exception for a case in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother’s life; they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother’s life. Such cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do not accept this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a number of points of interest come out in respect to it.

1. Let us call the view that abortion is impermis- sible even to save the mother’s life “the extreme view.” I want to suggest first that it does not issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without the addition of some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has become pregnant, and now learns that she has a car- diac condition such that she will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be done for her? The fetus, being a person, has a right to life, but as the mother is a person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably they have an equal right to life. How is it supposed to come out that an abortion may not be performed? If mother and child have an equal right to life, shouldn’t we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to the moth- er’s right to life her right to decide what happens in and to her body, which everybody seems to be ready

240 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

violinist, and that’s murder, and that’s impermissible.” If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.

The main focus of attention in writings on abor- tion has been on what a third party may or may not do in answer to a request from a woman for an abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things being as they are, there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do, and what the mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, is deduced, almost as an afterthought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But it seems to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant to the mother that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on for the fetus. For we cannot sim- ply read off what a person may do from what a third party may do. Suppose you find yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child— you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you’ll be crushed to death. The child on the other hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it if a bystander were to say, “There’s nothing we can do for you. We cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the ones to decide who is to live, we cannot inter- vene.” But it cannot be concluded that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to wait passively while it crushes you to death. Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don’t allow the right of self- defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be remembered that she is a person who houses it.

I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming that people have a right to do anything whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self- defense. If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do so. But the case under consideration

here is very different. In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we bystanders cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.

In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against the threat to it posed by the unborn child, even if doing so involves its death. And this shows not merely that the theses in (1) through (4) are false; it shows also that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so we need not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at it from the argument I mentioned at the outset.

2. The extreme view could of course be weak- ened to say that while abortion is permissible to save the mother’s life, it may not be performed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But this cannot be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is that the mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensiveness of deducing that the mother can do nothing from the supposition that third parties can do nothing. But it does more than this: it casts a bright light on the sup- position that third parties can do nothing. Certainly it lets us see that a third party who says “I cannot choose between you” is fooling himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a cer- tain coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says “I cannot choose between you” when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and again “This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, “Of course it’s your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you and Jones who is to have it.”

We should really ask what it is that says “no one may choose” in the face of the fact that the body that houses the child is the mother’s body. It may be simply a failure to appreciate this fact. But it may be something more inter- esting, namely the sense that one has a right to refuse to

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For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But sup- pose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast and carried Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier, 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. He certainly has no right against you that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give him such a right; and nobody has the right against you that you shall give him this right— if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they should give him continued use of your kid- neys. Certainly he had no right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is given something he has a right to be given.

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In their view, it does not include the right to be given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But here a related diffi- culty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a great many different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him— and everybody must refrain

lay hands on people, even where it would be just and fair to do so, even where justice seems to require that somebody do so. Thus justice might call for somebody to get Smith’s coat back from Jones, and yet you have a right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on Jones, a right to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be granted. But then what should be said is not “no one may choose,” but only “I cannot choose,” and indeed not even this, but “I will not act,” leaving it open that somebody else can or should, and in particular that anyone in a position of authority, with the job of secur- ing people’s rights, both can and should. So this is no difficulty. I have not been arguing that any given third party must accede to the mother’s request that he per- form an abortion to save her life, but only that he may.

I suppose that in some views of human life the mother’s body is only on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her any prior claim to it. One who held this view might well think it impartiality to say “I cannot choose.” But I shall simply ignore this possibility. My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn’t be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.

But although they do grant it, I have tried to show that they do not take seriously what is done in grant- ing it. I suggest the same thing will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from cases in which the mother’s life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we now do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman wants an abortion for some less weighty rea- son than preserving her own life.

3. Where the mother’s life is not at stake, the argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a much stronger pull. “Everyone has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life.” And isn’t the child’s right to life weightier than anything other than the mother’s own right to life, which she might put forward as ground for an abortion?

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.

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given him any such right. But we have to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violin- ists, like everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not act unjustly to him in doing it.

The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violin- ist has a right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you do him no injustice.

But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the argument against abortion stares us plainly in the face: it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person, and to remind us that all persons have a right to life— we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust kill- ing. And is it?

I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not given the unborn person a right to the use of her body for food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person such a right? It is not as if there were unborn persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says “I invite you in.”

But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have acquired a right to the use of another person’s body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person inside her? No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn’t her partial respon- sibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use of her body? If so, then her aborting it would be more like the boy’s taking away the chocolates, and less like your unplugging yourself from the violinist— doing so

from unplugging you from him. But does he have a right against everybody that they shall refrain from unplugging you from him? To refrain from doing this is to allow him to continue to use your kidneys. It could be argued that he has a right against us that we should allow him to continue to use your kid- neys. That is, while he had no right against us that we should give him the use of your kidneys, it might be argued that he anyway has a right against us that we shall not now intervene and deprive him of the use of your kidneys. I shall come back to third- party interventions later. But certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not some- thing you owe him.

The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right to life. It reappears in connection with all the other natural rights; and it is something which an adequate account of rights must deal with. For pres- ent purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life— quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we must place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn out in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life. I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body— even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the oppo- nents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would.

4. There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Sup- pose a boy and his small brother are jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the box and refuses to give his brother any of the choco- lates, he is unjust to him, for the brother has been given a right to half of them. But suppose that, hav- ing learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being unjust to him, for you gave him no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have

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or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people- seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your car- pets or upholstery. 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? Surely not— despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furni- ture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do— for by the same token anyone can avoid a preg- nancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or any- way by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

It seems to me that the argument we are looking at can establish at most that there are some cases in which the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother’s body, and therefore some cases in which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much discussion and argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we should sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any rate the argument certainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.

5. There is room for yet another argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may be cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of his life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life is to spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting him use your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health in the slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me plain you ought to allow him to use your kidneys for that hour— it would be indecent to refuse.

Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour, and constituted no threat to life or health. And

would be depriving it of what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing it an injustice.

And then, too, it might be asked whether or not she can kill it even to save her own life: If she volun- tarily called it into existence, how can she now kill it, even in self- defense?

The first thing to be said about this is that it is something new. Opponents of abortion have been so concerned to make out the independence of the fetus, in order to establish that it has a right to life, just as its mother does, that they have tended to overlook the possible support they might gain from making out that the fetus is dependent on the mother, in order to establish that she has a special kind of responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against her which are not possessed by any independent person— such as an ailing violinist who is a stranger to her.

On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother’s body only if her pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some further argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their mothers’ bodies, and thus that aborting them is not depriving them of anything they have a right to and hence is not unjust killing.

And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it pur- ports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I there- fore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house— for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.” It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders

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morally unacceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda again. I said earlier that I had no right to the touch of his cool hand on my fevered brow, even though I needed it to save my life. I said it would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide me with it, but that I had no right against him that he should do so. But suppose he isn’t on the West Coast. Suppose he has only to walk across the room, place a hand briefly on my brow— and lo, my life is saved. Then surely he ought to do it, it would be indecent to refuse. Is it to be said “Ah, well, it follows that in this case she has a right to the touch of his hand on her brow, and so it would be an injustice in him to refuse”? So that I have a right to it when it is easy for him to provide it, though no right when it’s hard? It’s rather a shocking idea that anyone’s rights should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him.

So my own view is that even though you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so— we should say that if you refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give none away, self- centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a case in which a woman pregnant due to rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so; we should conclude that she is self- centered, callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses. The complaints are no less grave; they are just different. However, there is no need to insist on this point. If anyone does wish to deduce “he has a right” from “you ought,” then all the same he must surely grant that there are cases in which it is not morally required of you that you allow that violinist to use your kid- neys, and in which he does not have a right to use them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if you refuse. And so also for mother and unborn child. Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right to demand it— and we were leaving open the possibil- ity that there may be such cases— nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and com- mitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.

suppose that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do anything to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she did nothing at all which would give the unborn per- son a right to the use of her body. All the same it might well be said, as in the newly emended violinist story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour— that it would be indecent in her to refuse.

Now some people are inclined to use the term “right” in such a way that it follows from the fact that you ought to allow a person to use your body for the hour he needs, that he has a right to use your body for the hour he needs, even though he has not been given that right by any person or act. They may say that it follows also that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of the term is perhaps so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to me to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would do better to keep a tight rein on. Suppose that box of chocolates I mentioned earlier had not been given to both boys jointly, but was given only to the older boy. There he sits, stolidly eating his way through the box, his small brother watching enviously. Here we are likely to say “You ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your brother some of those chocolates.” My own view is that it just does not follow from the truth of this that the brother has any right to any of the chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother any, he is greedy, stingy, callous— but not unjust. I suppose that the people I have in mind will say it does follow that the brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and thus that the boy does act unjustly if he refuses to give his brother any. But the effect of saying this is to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the difference between the boy’s refusal in this case and the boy’s refusal in the earlier case, in which the box was given to both boys jointly, and in which the small brother thus had what was from any point of view clear title to half.

A further objection to so using the term “right” that from the fact that A ought to do a thing for B, it follows that B has a right against A that A do it for him, is that it is going to make the question of whether or not a man has a right to a thing turn on how easy it is to provide him with it; and this seems not merely unfortunate, but

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even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police. Min- imally Decent Samaritanism would call for doing at least that, and their not having done it was monstrous.

After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said “Go, and do thou likewise.” Perhaps he meant that we are morally required to act as the Good Samari- tan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do more than is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain that it was not morally required of any of the thirty- eight that he rush out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life, and that it is not morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life— nine years or nine months— to sustaining the life of a per- son who has no special right (we were leaving open the possibility of this) to demand it.

Indeed, with one rather striking class of excep- tions, no one in any country in the world is legally required to do anywhere near as much as this for any- one else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My main concern here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion, but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in this country is any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Decent Samaritan to any person; there is no law under which charges could be brought against the thirty- eight who stood by while Kitty Genovese died. By contrast, in most states in this country women are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This doesn’t by itself settle anything one way or the other, because it may well be argued that there should be laws in this country— as there are in many European countries— compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism. But it does show that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the law. And it shows also that the groups currently working against liberal- ization of abortion laws, in fact working toward hav- ing it declared unconstitutional for a state to permit abortion, had better start working for the adoption of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the charge that they are acting in bad faith.

I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent Samaritan laws would be one thing, Good Samaritan laws quite another, and in fact highly improper. But we are not here concerned with the law. What we

6. We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan. The story of the Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes like this:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his rai- ment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him he had compas- sion on him.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pour- ing in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, “Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.”

(Luke 10:30–35)

The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some cost to himself, to help one in need of it. We are not told what the options were, that is, whether or not the priest and the Levite could have helped by doing less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they could have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows they were not even Minimally Decent Samaritans, not because they were not Samaritans, but because they were not even minimally decent.

These things are a matter of degree, of course, but there is a difference, and it comes out perhaps most clearly in the story of Kitty Genovese, who, as you will remember, was murdered while thirty- eight people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help her. A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to give direct assistance against the murderer. Or per- haps we had better allow that it would have been a Splendid Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it would have involved a risk of death for himself. But the thirty- eight not only did not do this, they did not

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I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming respon- sibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse— or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violin- ist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume responsibility for me.

8. My argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard abor- tion as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a stan- dard we must not fall below. I am inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen- year- old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her sev- enth month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the

should ask is not whether anybody should be com- pelled by law to be a Good Samaritan, but whether we must accede to a situation in which somebody is being compelled— by nature, perhaps— to be a Good Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at third- party interventions. I have been arguing that no person is morally required to make large sacri- fices to sustain the life of another who has no right to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do not include life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another. But what if a man cannot extricate himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us to extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are cases in which we can, cases in which a Good Samari- tan would extricate him. There you are, you were kid- napped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie ahead of you. You have your own life to lead. You are sorry, but you simply cannot see giving up so much of your life to the sustaining of his. You cannot extricate yourself, and ask us to do so. I should have thought that— in light of his having no right to the use of your body— it was obvious that we do not have to accede to your being forced to give up so much. We can do what you ask. There is no injustice to the violinist in our doing so.

7. Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or not the argument we began with, which proceeds only from the fetus’ being a person, really does establish its conclusion. I have argued that it does not.

But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might be argued that all my analo- gies are therefore irrelevant— for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist, Henry Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibil- ity for me. And our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to provide support for their children.

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thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adop- tion and never seen or heard of again. She may there- fore want not merely that the child be detached from her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion are inclined to regard this as beneath contempt— thereby showing insensitivity to what is surely a pow- erful source of despair. All the same, I agree that the desire for the child’s death is not one which anybody may gratify, should it turn out to be possible to detach the child alive.

At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have only been pretending throughout that the fetus is a human being from the moment of con- ception. A very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.

NOTE

1. The term “direct” in the arguments I refer to is a technical one. Roughly, what is meant by “direct killing” is either killing as an end in itself, or killing as a means to some end, for example, the end of saving someone else’s life.

nuisance of postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have been drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion in which the mother’s life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought to have made them suspect at the outset.

Secondly, while I am arguing for the permissibil- ity of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside the mother’s body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sus- taining the life of that violinist; but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach your- self even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. There are some people who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my argument. A woman may be utterly devastated by the

On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion Mary Anne Warren

not a human being, in the morally relevant sense of that term, we ought not to conclude that the difficul- ties involved in determining whether or not a fetus is human make it impossible to produce any satisfactory solution to the problem of the moral status of abor- tion. For it is possible to show that, on the basis of intuitions which we may expect even the opponents of abortion to share, a fetus is not a person, and hence not the sort of entity to which it is proper to ascribe full moral rights.

Of course, while some philosophers would deny the possibility of any such proof, others will deny that there is any need for it, since the moral permissibility of

We will be concerned with both the moral status of abortion, which for our purposes we may define as the act which a woman performs in voluntarily termi- nating, or allowing another person to terminate, her pregnancy, and the legal status which is appropriate for this act. I will argue that, while it is not possible to produce a satisfactory defense of a woman’s right to obtain an abortion without showing that a fetus is

Mary Anne Warren, excerpts from “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” in The Monist Volume 57, pp. 43–61. Copyright © The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, The Hegeler Institute, Peru, IL. Reprinted by permission.

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abortion a form of murder of the existence of any such right unless we are able to produce a clear and convincing refutation of the traditional antiabortion argument, and this has not, to my knowledge, been done. With respect to the two most vital issues which that argument involves, i.e., the humanity of the fetus and its implication for the moral status of abortion, confusion has prevailed on both sides of the dispute.

Thus, both proabortionists and antiabortionists have tended to abstract the question of whether abor- tion is wrong to that of whether it is wrong to destroy a fetus, just as though the rights of another person were not necessarily involved. This mistaken abstrac- tion has led to the almost universal assumption that if a fetus is a human being, with a right to life, then it follows immediately that abortion is wrong (except perhaps when necessary to save the woman’s life), and that it ought to be prohibited. It has also been gener- ally assumed that unless the question about the status of the fetus is answered, the moral status of abortion cannot possibly be determined.

* * *

Judith Thomson is . . . the only writer I am aware of who has seriously questioned this assumption; she has argued that, even if we grant the antiabortion- ist his claim that a fetus is a human being, with the same right to life as any other human being, we can still demonstrate that, in at least some and perhaps most cases, a woman is under no moral obligation to complete an unwanted pregnancy.1 Her argument is worth examining, since if it holds up it may enable us to establish the moral permissibility of abortion with- out becoming involved in problems about what enti- tles an entity to be considered human, and accorded full moral rights. To be able to do this would be a great gain in the power and simplicity of the proabortion position, since, although I will argue that these prob- lems can be solved at least as decisively as can any other moral problem, we should certainly be pleased to be able to avoid having to solve them as part of the justification of abortion.

On the other hand, even if Thomson’s argument does not hold up, her insight, i.e., that it requires argu- ment to show that if fetuses are human then abortion

abortion appears to them to be too obvious to require proof. But the inadequacy of this attitude should be evident from the fact that both the friends and the foes of abortion consider their position to be morally self- evident. Because proabortionists have never ade- quately come to grips with the conceptual issues sur- rounding abortion, most if not all, of the arguments which they advance in opposition to laws restricting access to abortion fail to refute or even weaken the traditional antiabortion argument, i.e., that a fetus is a human being, and therefore abortion is murder.

These arguments are typically of one of two sorts. Either they point to the terrible side effects of the restrictive laws, e.g., the deaths due to illegal abortions, and the fact that it is poor women who suffer the most as a result of these laws, or else they state that to deny a woman access to abortion is to deprive her of her right to control her own body. Unfortunately, however, the fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the con- sequences of prohibiting it; and the appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death.

Furthermore, it is probably inappropriate to describe a woman’s body as her property, since it seems natural to hold that a person is something distinct from her property, but not from her body. Even those who would object to the identification of a person with his body, or with the conjunction of his body and his mind, must admit that it would be very odd to describe, say, break- ing a leg, as damaging one’s property, and much more appropriate to describe it as injuring oneself. Thus it is probably a mistake to argue that the right to obtain an abortion is in any way derived from the right to own and regulate property.

But however we wish to construe the right to abor- tion, we cannot hope to convince those who consider

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I

We turn now to Professor Thomson’s case for the claim that even if a fetus has full moral rights, abortion is still morally permissible, at least sometimes, and for some reasons other than to save the woman’s life. Her argument is based upon a clever, but I think faulty, analogy. She asks us to picture ourselves waking up one day, in bed with a famous violinist. Imagine that you have been kidnapped, and your bloodstream hooked up to that of the violinist, who happens to have an ailment which will certainly kill him unless he is permitted to share your kidneys for a period of nine months. No one else can save him, since you alone have the right type of blood. He will be uncon- scious all that time, and you will have to stay in bed with him, but after the nine months are over he may be unplugged, completely cured, that is provided that you have cooperated.

Now then, she continues, what are your obliga- tions in this situation? The antiabortionist, if he is consistent, will have to say that you are obligated to stay in bed with the violinist: for all people have a right to life, and violinists are people, and therefore it would be murder for you to disconnect yourself from him and let him die [p. 238]. But this is outrageous, and so there must be something wrong with the same argument when it is applied to abortion. It would cer- tainly be commendable of you to agree to save the violinist, but it is absurd to suggest that your refusal to do so would be murder. His right to life does not obligate you to do whatever is required to keep him alive; nor does it justify anyone else in forcing you to do so. A law which required you to stay in bed with the violinist would clearly be an unjust law, since it is no proper function of the law to force unwilling people to make huge sacrifices for the sake of other people toward whom they have no such prior obligation.

Thomson concludes that, if this analogy is an apt one, then we can grant the antiabortionist his claim that a fetus is a human being, and still hold that it is at least sometimes the case that a pregnant woman has the right to refuse to be a Good Samaritan towards the fetus, i.e., to obtain an abortion. For there is a great gap between the claim that x has a right to life, and the

is properly classified as murder, is an extremely valuable one. The assumption she attacks is particu- larly invidious, for it amounts to the decision that it is appropriate, in deciding the moral status of abor- tion, to leave the rights of the pregnant woman out of consideration entirely, except possibly when her life is threatened. Obviously, this will not do; deter- mining what moral rights, if any, a fetus possesses is only the first step in determining the moral status of abortion. Step two, which is at least equally essen- tial, is finding a just solution to the conflict between whatever rights the fetus may have, and the rights of the woman who is unwillingly pregnant. While the historical error has been to pay far too little attention to the second step, Ms. Thomson’s suggestion is that if we look at the second step first we may find that a woman has a right to obtain an abortion regardless of what rights the fetus has.

Our own inquiry will also have two stages. In Sec- tion I, we will consider whether or not it is possible to establish that abortion is morally permissible even on the assumption that a fetus is an entity with a full- fledged right to life. I will argue that in fact this cannot be established, at least not with the conclu- siveness which is essential to our hopes of convinc- ing those who are skeptical about the morality of abortion, and that we therefore cannot avoid deal- ing with the question of whether or not a fetus really does have the same right to life as a (more fully devel- oped) human being.

In Section II, I will propose an answer to this ques- tion, namely, that a fetus cannot be considered a mem- ber of the moral community, the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, for the simple reason that it is not a person, and that it is personhood, and not genetic humanity, . . . which is the basis for member- ship in this community. I will argue that a fetus, what- ever its stage of development, satisfies none of the basic criteria of personhood, and is not even enough like a person to be accorded even some of the same rights on the basis of this resemblance. Nor, as we will see, is a fetus’s potential personhood a threat to the morality of abortion, since, whatever the rights of potential people may be, they are invariably overridden in any conflict with the moral rights of actual people.

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claim that y is obligated to do whatever is necessary to keep x alive, let alone that he ought to be forced to do so. It is y’s duty to keep x alive only if he has somehow contracted a special obligation to do so; and a woman who is unwillingly pregnant, e.g., who was raped, has done nothing which obligates her to make the enormous sacrifice which is necessary to preserve the conceptus.

This argument is initially quite plausible, and in the extreme case of pregnancy due to rape it is prob- ably conclusive. Difficulties arise, however, when we try to specify more exactly the range of cases in which abortion is clearly justifiable even on the assumption that the fetus is human. Professor Thomson consid- ers it a virtue of her argument that it does not enable us to conclude that abortion is always permissible. It would, she says, be “indecent” for a woman in her sev- enth month to obtain an abortion just to avoid having to postpone a trip to Europe. On the other hand, her argument enables us to see that “a sick and desperately frightened schoolgirl pregnant due to rape may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law” [p. 246]. So far, so good; but what are we to say about the woman who becomes pregnant not through rape but as a result of her own carelessness, or because of contraceptive failure, or who gets pregnant intentionally and then changes her mind about wanting a child? With respect to such cases, the violinist analogy is of much less use to the defender of the woman’s right to obtain an abortion.

Indeed, the choice of a pregnancy due to rape, as an example of a case in which abortion is permis- sible even if a fetus is considered a human being, is extremely significant; for it is only in the case of pregnancy due to rape that the woman’s situation is adequately analogous to the violinist case for our intu- itions about the latter to transfer convincingly. The crucial difference between a pregnancy due to rape and the normal case of an unwanted pregnancy is that in the normal case, we cannot claim that the woman is in no way responsible for her predicament; she could have remained chaste, or taken her pills more faith- fully, or abstained on dangerous days, and so on. If, on the other hand, you are kidnapped by strangers, and hooked up to a strange violinist, then you are free

of any shred of responsibility for the situation, on the basis of which it could be argued that you are obligated to keep the violinist alive. Only when her pregnancy is due to rape is a woman clearly just as nonresponsible.2

Consequently, there is room for the antiabor- tionist to argue that in the normal case of unwanted pregnancy a woman has, by her own actions, assumed responsibility for the fetus. For if x behaves in a way which he could have avoided, and which he knows involves, let us say, a 1 percent chance of bringing into existence a human being, with a right to life, and does so knowing that if this should happen then that human being will perish unless x does certain things to keep him alive, then it is by no means clear that when it does happen x is free of any obligation to what he knew in advance would be required to keep that human being alive.

The plausibility of such an argument is enough to show that the Thomson analogy can provide a clear and persuasive defense of a woman’s right to obtain an abortion only with respect to those cases in which the woman is in no way responsible for her pregnancy, e.g., where it is due to rape. In all other cases, we would almost certainly conclude that it was necessary to look carefully at the particular circumstances in order to determine the extent of the woman’s responsibil- ity, and hence the extent of her obligation. This is an extremely unsatisfactory outcome, from the view- point of the opponents of restrictive abortion laws, most of whom are convinced that a woman has a right to obtain an abortion regardless of how and why she got pregnant.

Of course a supporter of the violinist analogy might point out that it is absurd to suggest that forget- ting her pill one day might be sufficient to obligate a woman to complete an unwanted pregnancy. And indeed it is absurd to suggest this. As we will see, the moral right to obtain an abortion is not in the least dependent upon the extent to which the woman is responsible for her pregnancy. But unfortunately, once we allow the assumption that a fetus has full moral rights, we cannot avoid taking this absurd suggestion seriously. Perhaps we can make this point more clear by altering the violinist story just enough to make it more analogous to a normal unwanted pregnancy

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and less to a pregnancy due to rape, and then seeing whether it is still obvious that you are not obligated to stay in bed with the fellow.

Suppose, then, that violinists are peculiarly prone to the sort of illness the only cure for which is the use of someone else’s bloodstream for nine months, and that because of this there has been formed a society of music lovers who agree that whenever a violinist is stricken they will draw lots and the loser will, by some means, be made the one and only person capable of saving him. Now then, would you be obligated to cooperate in curing the violinist if you had volun- tarily joined this society, knowing the possible conse- quences, and then your name had been drawn and you had been kidnapped? Admittedly, you did not promise ahead of time that you would, but you did deliberately place yourself in a position in which it might happen that a human life would be lost if you did not. Surely this is at least a prima facie reason for supposing that you have an obligation to stay in bed with the violin- ist. Suppose that you had gotten your name drawn deliberately; surely that would be quite a strong reason for thinking that you had such an obligation.

It might be suggested that there is one important disanalogy between the modified violinist case and the case of an unwanted pregnancy, which makes the woman’s responsibility significantly less, namely, the fact that the fetus comes into existence as the result of the woman’s actions. This fact might give her a right to refuse to keep it alive, whereas she would not have had this right had it existed previously, independently, and then as a result of her actions become dependent upon her for its survival.

My own intuition, however, is that x has no more right to bring into existence, either deliberately or as a foreseeable result of actions he could have avoided, a being with full moral rights (y), and then refuse to do what he knew beforehand would be required to keep that being alive, then he has to enter into an agree- ment with an existing person, whereby he may be called upon to save that person’s life, and then refuse to do so when so called upon. Thus, x’s responsibility for y’s existence does not seem to lessen his obligation to keep y alive, if he is also responsible for y’s being in a situation in which only he can save him.

Whether or not this intuition is entirely correct, it brings us back once again to the conclusion that once we allow the assumption that a fetus has full moral rights it becomes an extremely complex and difficult question whether and when abortion is justifiable. Thus the Thomson analogy cannot help us produce a clear and persuasive proof of the moral permissibility of abortion. Nor will the opponents of the restrictive laws thank us for anything less; for their conviction (for the most part) is that abortion is obviously not a morally serious and extremely unfortunate, even though some- times justified act, comparable to killing in self- defense or to letting the violinist die, but rather is closer to being a morally neutral act, like cutting one’s hair.

The basis of this conviction, I believe, is the real- ization that a fetus is not a person, and thus does not have a full- fledged right to life. Perhaps the reason why this claim has been so inadequately defended is that it seems self- evident to those who accept it. And so it is, insofar as it follows from what I take to be perfectly obvious claims about the nature of personhood, and about the proper grounds for ascribing moral rights, claims which ought, indeed, to be obvious to both the friends and foes of abortion. Nevertheless, it is worth examining these claims, and showing how they dem- onstrate the moral innocuousness of abortion, since this apparently has not been adequately done before.

II

The question which we must answer in order to pro- duce a satisfactory solution to the problem of the moral status of abortion is this: How are we to define the moral community, the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a human fetus is a member of this community or not? What sort of entity, exactly, has the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? . . . What reason is there for identifying the moral community with the set of all human beings, in whatever way we have chosen to define that term?

1. On the Definition of ‘Human’

One reason why this vital . . . question is so frequently overlooked in the debate over the moral status of

252 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

way of defining the moral community, which I will argue for only to the extent of explaining why it is, or should be, self- evident. The suggestion is simply that the moral community consists of all and only people, rather than all and only human beings;5 and probably the best way of demonstrating its self- evidence is by considering the concept of personhood, to see what sorts of entity are and are not persons, and what the decision that a being is or is not a person implies about its moral rights.

What characteristics entitle an entity to be con- sidered a person? This is obviously not the place to attempt a complete analysis of the concept of person- hood, but we do not need such a fully adequate analy- sis just to determine whether and why a fetus is or isn’t a person. All we need is a rough and approximate list of the most basic criteria of personhood, and some idea of which, or how many, of these an entity must satisfy in order to properly be considered a person.

In searching for such criteria, it is useful to look beyond the set of people with whom we are acquainted, and ask how we would decide whether a totally alien being was a person or not. (For we have no right to assume that genetic humanity is necessary for personhood.) Imagine a space traveler who lands on an unknown planet and encounters a race of beings utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example, a source of food.

How should he go about making this decision? If he has some anthropological background, he might look for such things as religion, art, and the manufac- turing of tools, weapons, or shelters, since these fac- tors have been used to distinguish our human from our prehuman ancestors, in what seems to be closer to the moral than the genetic sense of ‘human’. And no doubt he would be right to consider the presence of such factors as good evidence that the alien beings were people, and morally human. It would, however, be overly anthropocentric of him to take the absence of these things as adequate evidence that they were not, since we can imagine people who have progressed

abortion is that the term ‘human’ has two distinct, but not often distinguished, senses. This fact results in a slide of meaning, which serves to conceal the falla- ciousness of the traditional argument that since (1) it is wrong to kill innocent human beings, and (2) fetuses are innocent human beings, then (3) it is wrong to kill fetuses. For if ‘human’ is used in the same sense in both (1) and (2) then, whichever of the two senses is meant, one of these premises is question- begging. And if it is used in two different senses then of course the conclusion doesn’t follow.

Thus, (1) is a self- evident moral truth,3 and avoids begging the question about abortion, only if ‘human being’ is used to mean something like “a full- fledged member of the moral community.” (It may or may not also be meant to refer exclusively to members of the species Homo sapiens.) We may call this the moral sense of ‘human’. It is not to be confused with what we will call the genetic sense, i.e., the sense in which any mem- ber of the species is a human being, and no member of any other species could be. If (1) is acceptable only if the moral sense is intended, (2) is non- question- begging only if what is intended is the genetic sense.

In “Deciding Who is Human,” [John] Noonan argues for the classification of fetuses with human beings by pointing to the presence of the full genetic code, and the potential capacity for rational thought.4 It is clear that what he needs to show, for his version of the traditional argument to be valid, is that fetuses are human in the moral sense, the sense in which it is analytically true that all human beings have full moral rights. But, in the absence of any argument showing that whatever is genetically human is also morally human, and he gives none, nothing more than genetic humanity can be demonstrated by the presence of the human genetic code. And, as we will see, the potential capacity for rational thought can at most show that an entity has the potential for becom- ing human in the moral sense.

2. Defining the Moral Community

Can it be established that genetic humanity is suffi- cient for moral humanity? I think that there are very good reasons for not defining the moral community in this way. I would like to suggest an alternative

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that he had no notion at all of what a person is— perhaps because he had confused the concept of a per- son with that of genetic humanity. If the opponents of abortion were to deny the appropriateness of these five criteria, I do not know what further arguments would convince them. We would probably have to admit that our conceptual schemes were indeed irrec- oncilably different, and that our dispute could not be settled objectively.

I do not expect this to happen, however, since I think that the concept of a person is one which is very nearly universal (to people), and that it is common to both proabortionists and antiabortionists, even though neither group has fully realized the relevance of this concept to the resolution of their dispute. Fur- thermore, I think that on reflection even the antiabor- tionists ought to agree not only that (1)–(5) are central to the concept of personhood, but also that it is a part of this concept that all and only people have full moral rights. The concept of a person is in part a moral con- cept; once we have admitted that x is a person we have recognized, even if we have not agreed to respect, x’s right to be treated as a member of the moral commu- nity. It is true that the claim that x is a human being is more commonly voiced as part of an appeal to treat x decently than is the claim that x is a person, but this is either because ‘human being’ is here used in the sense which implies personhood, or because the genetic and moral senses of ‘human’ have been confused.

Now if (1)–(5) are indeed the primary criteria of personhood, then it is clear that genetic humanity is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing that an entity is a person. Some human beings are not people, and there may well be people who are not human beings. A man or woman whose consciousness has been permanently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which is no longer a person; defective human beings, with no appreciable mental capacity, are not and presumably never will be people; and a fetus is a human being which is not yet a person, and which therefore cannot coherently be said to have full moral rights. Citizens of the next century should be prepared to recognize highly advanced, self- aware robots or computers, should such be developed, and intelligent inhabitants of other worlds, should such

beyond, or evolved without ever developing, these cultural characteristics.

I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood, or humanity in the moral sense, are, very roughly, the following:

1. consciousness (of objects and events external and/ or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;

2. reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);

3. self- motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control);

4. the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics;

5. the presence of self- concepts, and self- awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

Admittedly, there are apt to be a great many prob- lems involved in formulating precise definitions of these criteria, let alone in developing universally valid behavioral criteria for deciding when they apply. But I will assume that both we and our explorer know approximately what (1)–(5) mean, and that he is also able to determine whether or not they apply. How, then should he use his findings to decide whether or not the alien beings are people? We needn’t suppose that an entity must have all of these attributes to be properly considered a person; (1) and (2) alone may well be sufficient for personhood, and quite probably (1)–(3) are sufficient. Neither do we need to insist that any one of these criteria is necessary for personhood, although once again (1) and (2) look like fairly good candidates for necessary conditions, as does (3), if ‘activity’ is construed so as to include the activity of reasoning.

All we need to claim, to demonstrate that a fetus is not a person, is that any being which satisfies none of (1)–(5) is certainly not a person. I consider this claim to be so obvious that I think anyone who denied it, and claimed that a being which satisfied none of (1)–(5) was a person all the same, would thereby demonstrate

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in us almost the same powerful protective instinct as is commonly aroused by a small infant, nevertheless it is not significantly more personlike than is a very small embryo. It is somewhat more personlike; it can apparently feel and respond to pain, and it may even have a rudimentary form of consciousness, insofar as its brain is quite active. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that it is not fully conscious, in the way that an infant of a few months is, and that it cannot reason, or communicate messages of indefinitely many sorts, does not engage in self- motivated activity, and has no self- awareness. Thus, in the relevant respects, a fetus, even a fully developed one, is considerably less per- sonlike than is the average mature mammal, indeed the average fish. And I think that a rational person must conclude that if the right to life of a fetus is to be based upon its resemblance to a person, then it cannot be said to have any more right to life than, let us say, a newborn guppy (which also seems to be capable of feeling pain), and that a right of that magnitude could never override a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, at any stage of her pregnancy.

There may, of course, be other arguments in favor of placing legal limits upon the stage of pregnancy in which an abortion may be performed. Given the rela- tive safety of the new techniques of artificially induc- ing labor during the third trimester, the danger to the woman’s life or health is no longer such an argument. Neither is the fact that people tend to respond to the thought of abortion in the later stages of pregnancy with emotional repulsion, since mere emotional responses cannot take the place of moral reasoning in determining what ought to be permitted. Nor, finally, is the frequently heard argument that legalizing abor- tion, especially late in the pregnancy, may erode the level of respect for human life, leading, perhaps, to an increase in unjustified euthanasia and other crimes. For this threat, if it is a threat, can be better met by edu- cating people to the kinds of moral distinctions which we are making here than by limiting access to abortion (which limitation may, in its disregard for the rights of women, be just as damaging to the level of respect for human rights).

Thus, since the fact that even a fully developed fetus is not personlike enough to have any significant

be found, as people in the fullest sense, and to respect their moral rights. But to ascribe full moral rights to an entity which is not a person is as absurd as to ascribe moral obligations and responsibilities to such an entity.

3. Fetal Development and the Right to Life

Two problems arise in the application of these sugges- tions for the definition of the moral community to the determination of the precise moral status of a human fetus. Given that the paradigm example of a person is a normal adult human being, then (1) How like this par- adigm, in particular how far advanced since concep- tion, does a human being need to be before it begins to have a right to life by virtue, not of being fully a person as of yet, but of being like a person? and (2) To what extent, if any, does the fact that a fetus has the potential for becoming a person endow it with some of the same rights? Each of these questions requires some comment.

In answering the first question, we need not attempt a detailed consideration of the moral rights of organisms which are not developed enough, aware enough, intelligent enough, etc., to be considered people, but which resemble people in some respects. It does seem reasonable to suggest that the more like a person, in the relevant respects, a being is, the stronger is the case for regarding it as having a right to life, and indeed the stronger its right to life is. Thus we ought to take seriously the suggestion that, insofar as “the human individual develops biologically in a continu- ous fashion . . . the rights of a human person might develop in the same way.”6 But we must keep in mind that the attributes which are relevant in determining whether or not an entity is enough like a person to be regarded as having some of the same moral rights are no different from those which are relevant to determining whether or not it is fully a person— i.e., are no different from (1)–(5)—and that being geneti- cally human, or having recognizably human facial and other physical features, or detectable brain activ- ity, or the capacity to survive outside the uterus, are simply not among these relevant attributes.

Thus it is clear that even though a seven- or eight- month fetus has features which make it apt to arouse

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a few hundred thousand or more human beings, by breaking his body into its component cells, and using these to create fully developed human beings, with, of course, his genetic code. We may imagine that each of these newly created men will have all of the original man’s abilities, skills, knowledge, and so on, and also have an individual self- concept, in short that each of them will be a bona fide (though hardly unique) per- son. Imagine that the whole project will take only seconds, and that its chances of success are extremely high, and that our explorer knows all of this, and also knows that these people will be treated fairly. I main- tain that in such a situation he would have every right to escape if he could, and thus to deprive all of these potential people of their potential lives; for his right to life outweighs all of theirs together, in spite of the fact that they are all genetically human, all innocent, and all have a very high probability of becoming people very soon, if only he refrains from acting.

Indeed, I think he would have a right to escape even if it were not his life which the alien scientists planned to take, but only a year of his freedom, or, indeed, only a day. Nor would he be obligated to stay if he had gotten captured (thus bringing all these people- potentials into existence) because of his own carelessness, or even if he had done so deliberately, knowing the consequences. Regardless of how he got captured, he is not morally obligated to remain in captivity for any period of time for the sake of per- mitting any number of potential people to come into actuality, so great is the margin by which one actual person’s right to liberty outweighs whatever right to life even a hundred thousand potential people have. And it seems reasonable to conclude that the rights of a woman will outweigh by a similar margin whatever right to life a fetus may have by virtue of its potential personhood.

Thus, neither a fetus’s resemblance to a person, nor its potential for becoming a person provides any basis whatever for the claim that it has any significant right to life. Consequently, a woman’s right to protect her health, happiness, freedom, and even her life,7 by terminating an unwanted pregnancy, will always override whatever right to life it may be appropriate to ascribe to a fetus, even a fully developed one. And

right to life on the basis of its personlikeness shows that no legal restrictions upon the stage of pregnancy in which an abortion may be performed can be justi- fied on the grounds that we should protect the rights of the older fetus; and since there is no other apparent justification for such restrictions, we may conclude that they are entirely unjustified. Whether or not it would be indecent (whatever that means) for a woman in her seventh month to obtain an abortion just to avoid hav- ing to postpone a trip to Europe, it would not, in itself, be immoral, and therefore it ought to be permitted.

4. Potential Personhood and the Right to Life

We have seen that a fetus does not resemble a per- son in any way which can support the claim that it has even some of the same rights. But what about its potential, the fact that if nurtured and allowed to develop naturally it will very probably become a per- son? Doesn’t that alone give it at least some right to life? It is hard to deny that the fact that an entity is a potential person is a strong prima facie reason for not destroying it; but we need not conclude from this that a potential person has a right to life, by virtue of that potential. It may be that our feeling that it is better, other things being equal, not to destroy a potential person is better explained by the fact that potential people are still (felt to be) an invaluable resource, not to be lightly squandered. Surely, if every speck of dust were a potential person, we would be much less apt to conclude that every potential person has a right to become actual.

Still, we do not need to insist that a potential per- son has no right to life whatever. There may well be something immoral, and not just imprudent, about wantonly destroying potential people, when doing so isn’t necessary to protect anyone’s rights. But even if a potential person does have some prima facie right to life, such a right could not possibly outweigh the right of a woman to obtain an abortion, since the rights of any actual person invariably outweigh those of any potential person, whenever the two conflict. Since this may not be immediately obvious in the case of a human fetus, let us look at another case.

Suppose that our space explorer falls into the hands of an alien culture, whose scientists decide to create

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3. Of course, the principle that it is (always) wrong to kill inno- cent human beings is in need of many other modifications, e.g., that it may be permissible to do so to save a greater num- ber of other innocent human beings, but we may safely ignore these complications here.

4. John Noonan, “Deciding Who Is Human,” Natural Law Forum 13 (1968): 135.

5. From here on, we will use ‘human’ to mean genetically human, since the moral sense seems closely connected to, and perhaps derived from, the assumption that genetic humanity is sufficient for membership in the moral community.

6. Thomas L. Hayes, “A Biological View,” Commonweal 85 (March 17, 1967): 677–78; quoted by Daniel Callahan, in Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

7. That is, insofar as the death rate, for the woman, is higher for childbirth than for early abortion.

thus, in the absence of any overwhelming social need for every possible child, the laws which restrict the right to obtain an abortion, or limit the period of preg- nancy during which an abortion may be performed, are a wholly unjustified violation of a woman’s most basic moral and constitutional rights.

NOTES

1. Judith Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47–66.

2. We may safely ignore the fact that she might have avoided getting raped, e.g., by carrying a gun, since by similar means you might likewise have avoided getting kidnapped, and in neither case does the victim’s failure to take all possible pre- cautions against a highly unlikely event (as opposed to rea- sonable precautions against a rather likely event) mean that he is morally responsible for what happens.

Why Abortion Is Immoral Don Marquis

The argument is based on a major assumption. Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the ethics of abortion . . . believe that whether or not abor- tion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seri- ously wrong to end. The argument of this essay will assume, but not argue, that they are correct.

Also, this essay will neglect issues of great impor- tance to a complete ethics of abortion. Some anti- abortionists will allow that certain abortions, such as abortion before implantation or abortion when the life of a woman is threatened by a pregnancy or abor- tion after rape, may be morally permissible. This essay will not explore the casuistry of these hard cases. The purpose of this essay is to develop a general argument for the claim that the overwhelming majority of delib- erate abortions are seriously immoral.

The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seri- ously immoral has received little support in the recent philosophical literature. No doubt most philosophers affiliated with secular institutions of higher educa- tion believe that the anti- abortion position is either a symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclu- sion generated by seriously confused philosophical argument. The purpose of this essay is to undermine this general belief. This essay sets out an argument that purports to show, as well as any argument in eth- ics can show, that abortion is, except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral, that it is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being.

Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” The Journal of Philoso- phy LXXXVI, 4 (April 1989): 183–202. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author.

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always prima facie seriously wrong to take a human life” or “It is always prima facie seriously wrong to end the life of a baby.” Since these are generally accepted moral principles, her position is certainly not obviously wrong. The pro- choicer will claim that her position is supported by such plausible moral principles as “Being a person is what gives an individual intrinsic moral worth” or “It is only seriously prima facie wrong to take the life of a member of the human community.” Since these are generally accepted moral principles, the pro- choice position is certainly not obviously wrong. Unfortunately, we have again arrived at a standoff.

Now, how might one deal with this standoff? The standard approach is to try to show how the moral principles of one’s opponent lose their plausibility under analysis. It is easy to see how this is possible. On the one hand, the anti- abortionist will defend a moral principle concerning the wrongness of killing which tends to be broad in scope in order that even fetuses at an early stage of pregnancy will fall under it. The prob- lem with broad principles is that they often embrace too much. In this particular instance, the principle “It is always prima facie wrong to take a human life” seems to entail that it is wrong to end the existence of a living human cancer- cell culture, on the grounds that the culture is both living and human. Therefore, it seems that the anti- abortionist’s favored principle is too broad.

On the other hand, the pro- choicer wants to find a moral principle concerning the wrongness of kill- ing which tends to be narrow in scope in order that fetuses will not fall under it. The problem with narrow principles is that they often do not embrace enough. Hence, the needed principles such as “It is prima facie seriously wrong to kill only persons” or “It is prima facie wrong to kill only rational agents” do not explain why it is wrong to kill infants or young children or the severely retarded or even perhaps the severely men- tally ill. Therefore, we seem again to have a standoff. The anti- abortionist charges, not unreasonably, that pro- choice principles concerning killing are too nar- row to be acceptable; the pro- choicer charges, not unreasonably, that anti- abortionist principles con- cerning killing are too broad to be acceptable.

I.

A sketch of standard anti- abortion and pro- choice arguments exhibits how these arguments possess cer- tain symmetries that explain why partisans of those positions are so convinced of the correctness of their own positions, why they are not successful in con- vincing their opponents, and why, to others, this issue seems to be unresolvable. An analysis of the nature of this standoff suggests a strategy for surmounting it.

Consider the way a typical anti- abortionist argues. She will argue or assert that life is present from the moment of conception or that fetuses look like babies or that fetuses possess a characteristic such as a genetic code that is both necessary and sufficient for being human. Anti- abortionists seem to believe that (1) the truth of all of these claims is quite obvious, and (2) establishing any of these claims is sufficient to show that abortion is morally akin to murder.

A standard pro- choice strategy exhibits similari- ties. The pro- choicer will argue or assert that fetuses are not persons or that fetuses are not rational agents or that fetuses are not social beings. Pro- choicers seem to believe that (1) the truth of any of these claims is quite obvious, and (2) establishing any of these claims is suffi- cient to show that an abortion is not a wrongful killing.

In fact, both the pro- choice and the anti- abortion claims do seem to be true, although the “it looks like a baby” claim is more difficult to establish the earlier the pregnancy. We seem to have a standoff. How can it be resolved?

As everyone who has taken a bit of logic knows, if any of these arguments concerning abortion is a good argument, it requires not only some claim characteriz- ing fetuses, but also some general moral principle that ties a characteristic of fetuses to having or not having the right to life or to some other moral characteristic that will generate the obligation or the lack of obli- gation not to end the life of a fetus. Accordingly, the arguments of the anti- abortionist and the pro- choicer need a bit of filling in to be regarded as adequate.

Note what each partisan will say. The anti- abortionist will claim that her position is supported by such generally accepted moral principles as “It is

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chromosomes in one’s cells than on the color of one’s skin? If ‘human being’, on the other hand, is taken to be a moral category, then the claim that a fetus is a human being cannot be taken to be a premise in the anti- abortion argument, for it is precisely what needs to be established. Hence, either the anti- abortionist’s main category is a morally irrelevant, merely biologi- cal category, or it is of no use to the anti- abortionist in establishing (noncircularly, of course) that abortion is wrong.

Although this problem with the anti- abortionist position is often noticed, it is less often noticed that the pro- choice position suffers from an analogous problem. The principle “Only persons have the right to life” also suffers from an ambiguity. The term ‘per- son’ is typically defined in terms of psychological characteristics, although there will certainly be dis- agreement concerning which characteristics are most important. Supposing that this matter can be settled, the pro- choicer is left with the problem of explaining why psychological characteristics should make a moral difference. If the pro- choicer should attempt to deal with this problem by claiming that an explanation is not necessary, that in fact we do treat such a cluster of psychological properties as having moral significance, the sharp- witted anti- abortionist should have a ready response. We do treat being both living and human as having moral significance. If it is legitimate for the pro- choicer to demand that the anti- abortionist pro- vide an explanation of the connection between the biological character of being a human being and the wrongness of being killed (even though people accept this connection), then it is legitimate for the anti- abortionist to demand that the pro- choicer provide an explanation of the connection between psychological criteria for being a person and the wrongness of being killed (even though that connection is accepted).

[Joel] Feinberg has attempted to meet this objec- tion (he calls psychological personhood “common- sense personhood”):

The characteristics that confer commonsense person- hood are not arbitrary bases for rights and duties, such as race, sex or species membership; rather they are traits that make sense out of rights and duties and without which those moral attributes would have no point or

Attempts by both sides to patch up the difficulties in their positions run into further difficulties. The anti- abortionist will try to remove the problem in her posi- tion by reformulating her principle concerning killing in terms of human beings. Now we end up with: “It is always prima facie seriously wrong to end the life of a human being.” This principle has the advantage of avoiding the problem of the human cancer- cell cul- ture counterexample. But this advantage is purchased at a high price. For although it is clear that a fetus is both human and alive, it is not at all clear that a fetus is a human being. There is at least something to be said for the view that something becomes a human being only after a process of development, and that therefore first trimester fetuses and perhaps all fetuses are not yet human beings. Hence, the anti- abortionist, by this move, has merely exchanged one problem for another.

The pro- choicer fares no better. She may attempt to find reasons why killing infants, young children, and the severely retarded is wrong which are indepen- dent of her major principle that is supposed to explain the wrongness of taking human life, but which will not also make abortion immoral. This is no easy task. Appeals to social utility will seem satisfactory only to those who resolve not to think of the enormous dif- ficulties with a utilitarian account of the wrongness of killing and the significant social costs of preserving the lives of the unproductive. A pro- choice strategy that extends the definition of ‘person’ to infants or even to young children seems just as arbitrary as an anti- abortion strategy that extends the definition of ‘human being’ to fetuses. Again, we find symmetries in the two positions and we arrive at a standoff.

There are even further problems that reflect sym- metries in the two positions. In addition to counterex- ample problems, or the arbitrary application problems that can be exchanged for them, the standard anti- abortionist principle “It is prima facie seriously wrong to kill a human being,” or one of its variants, can be objected to on the grounds of ambiguity. If ‘human being’ is taken to be a biological category, then the anti- abortionist is left with the problem of explain- ing why a merely biological category should make a moral difference. Why, it is asked, is it any more rea- sonable to base a moral conclusion on the number of

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Furthermore, the pro- choicer cannot any more escape her problem by making person a purely moral category than the anti- abortionist could escape by the analogous move. For if person is a moral category, then the pro- choicer is left without the recourses for establishing (noncircularly, of course) the claim that a fetus is not a person, which is an essential premise in her argument. Again, we have both a symmetry and a standoff between pro- choice and antiabortion views.

Passions in the abortion debate run high. There are both plausibilities and difficulties with the stan- dard positions. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that partisans of either side embrace with fervor the moral generalizations that support the conclusions they preanalytically favor, and reject with disdain the moral generalizations of their opponents as being sub- ject to inescapable difficulties. It is easy to believe that the counterexamples to one’s own moral principles are merely temporary difficulties that will dissolve in the wake of further philosophical research, and that the counterexamples to the principles of one’s opponents are as straightforward as the contradiction between A and O propositions in traditional logic. This might suggest to an impartial observer (if there are any) that the abortion issue is unresolvable.

There is a way out of this apparent dialectical quandary. The moral generalizations of both sides are not quite correct. The generalizations hold for the most part, for the usual cases. This suggests that they are all accidental generalizations, that the moral claims made by those on both sides of the dispute do not touch on the essence of the matter.

This use of the distinction between essence and accident is not meant to invoke obscure metaphysical categories. Rather, it is intended to reflect the rather atheoretical nature of the abortion discussion. If the generalization a partisan in the abortion dispute adopts were derived from the reason why ending the life of a human being is wrong, then there could not be exceptions to that generalization unless some special case obtains in which there are even more powerful countervailing reasons. Such generalizations would not be merely accidental generalizations; they would point to, or be based upon, the essence of the wrong- ness of killing, what it is that makes killing wrong. All

function. It is because people are conscious; have a sense of their personal identities; have plans, goals, and proj- ects; experience emotions; are liable to pains, anxieties, and frustrations; can reason and bargain, and so on— it is because of these attributes that people have values and interests, desires and expectations of their own, including a stake in their own futures, and a personal well- being of a sort we cannot ascribe to unconscious or nonrational beings. Because of their developed capaci- ties they can assume duties and responsibilities and can have and make claims on one another. Only because of their sense of self, their life plans, their value hierar- chies, and their stakes in their own futures can they be ascribed fundamental rights. There is nothing arbitrary about these linkages.1

The plausible aspects of this attempt should not be taken to obscure its implausible features. There is a great deal to be said for the view that being a psy- chological person under some description is a neces- sary condition for having duties. One cannot have a duty unless one is capable of behaving morally, and a being’s capability of behaving morally will require having a certain psychology. It is far from obvious, however, that having rights entails consciousness or rationality, as Feinberg suggests. We speak of the rights of the severely retarded or the severely mentally ill, yet some of these persons are not rational. We speak of the rights of the temporarily unconscious. The New Jersey Supreme Court based their decision in the Quinlan case on Karen Ann Quinlan’s right to privacy, and she was known to be permanently unconscious at that time. Hence, Feinberg’s claim that having rights entails being conscious is, on its face, obviously false.

Of course, it might not make sense to attribute rights to a being that would never in its natural history have certain psychological traits. This modest connec- tion between psychological personhood and moral personhood will create a place for Karen Ann Quinlan and the temporarily unconscious. But then it makes a place for fetuses also. Hence, it does not serve Feinberg’s pro- choice purposes. Accordingly, it seems that the pro- choicer will have as much difficulty bridging the gap between psychological personhood and personhood in the moral sense as the anti- abortionist has bridging the gap between being a biological human being and being a human being in the moral sense.

260 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

valued by me as I grow older and as my values and capacities change. When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ulti- mately what makes killing me wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his or her future.

How should this rudimentary theory of the wrongness of killing be evaluated? It cannot be faulted for deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, for it does not. The analysis assumes that killing me (or you, reader) is prima facie seriously wrong. The point of the analy- sis is to establish which natural property ultimately explains the wrongness of the killing, given that it is wrong. A natural property will ultimately explain the wrongness of killing, only if (1) the explanation fits with our intuitions about the matter and (2) there is no other natural property that provides the basis for a better explanation of the wrongness of killing. This analysis rests on the intuition that what makes kill- ing a particular human or animal wrong is what it does to that particular human or animal. What makes killing wrong is some natural effect or other of the killing. Some would deny this. For instance, a divine- command theorist in ethics would deny it. Surely this denial is, however, one of those features of divine- command theory which renders it so implausible.

The claim that what makes killing wrong is the loss of the victim’s future is directly supported by two considerations. In the first place, this theory explains why we regard killing as one of the worst of crimes. Killing is especially wrong, because it deprives the vic- tim of more than perhaps any other crime. In the sec- ond place, people with AIDS or cancer who know they are dying believe, of course, that dying is a very bad thing for them. They believe that the loss of a future to them that they would otherwise have experienced is what makes their premature death a very bad thing for them. A better theory of the wrongness of killing would require a different natural property associated with killing which better fits with the attitudes of the dying. What could it be?

this suggests that a necessary condition of resolving the abortion controversy is a more theoretical account of the wrongness of killing. After all, if we merely believe, but do not understand, why killing adult human beings such as ourselves is wrong, how could we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral or permissible?

II.

In order to develop such an account, we can start from the following unproblematic assumption concerning our own case: it is wrong to kill us. Why is it wrong? Some answers can be easily eliminated. It might be said that what makes killing us wrong is that a killing brutalizes the one who kills. But the brutalization con- sists of being inured to the performance of an act that is hideously immoral; hence, the brutalization does not explain the immorality. It might be said that what makes killing us wrong is the great loss others would experience due to our absence. Although such hubris is understandable, such an explanation does not account for the wrongness of killing hermits, or those whose lives are relatively independent and whose friends find it easy to make new friends.

A more obvious answer is better. What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the mur- derer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and rela- tives, but its effect on the victim. The loss of one’s life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss of one’s life deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future. Therefore, killing someone is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of) the greatest possible losses on the victim. To describe this as the loss of life can be misleading, however. The change in my biological state does not by itself make killing me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biologi- cal life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life. These activi- ties, projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either valuable for their own sakes or are means to something else that is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my future are not valued by me now, but will come to be

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prohibition of active euthanasia, but that is another matter. Sanctity- of- human- life theories seem to hold that active euthanasia is seriously wrong even in an individual case where there seems to be good reason for it independently of public policy considerations. This consequence is most implausible, and it is a plus for the claim that the loss of a future of value is what makes killing wrong that it does not share this consequence.

In the fourth place, the account of the wrongness of killing defended in this essay does straightforwardly entail that it is prima facie seriously wrong to kill chil- dren and infants, for we do presume that they have futures of value. Since we do believe that it is wrong to kill defenseless little babies, it is important that a the- ory of the wrongness of killing easily account for this. Personhood theories of the wrongness of killing, on the other hand, cannot straightforwardly account for the wrongness of killing infants and young children. Hence, such theories must add special ad hoc accounts of the wrongness of killing the young. The plausibil- ity of such ad hoc theories seems to be a function of how desperately one wants such theories to work. The claim that the primary wrong- making feature of a kill- ing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future accounts for the wrongness of killing young children and infants directly; it makes the wrongness of such acts as obvious as we actually think it is. This is a fur- ther merit of this theory. Accordingly, it seems that this value of a future- like- ours theory of the wrong- ness of killing shares strengths of both sanctity- of- life and personhood accounts while avoiding weaknesses of both. In addition, it meshes with a central intuition concerning what makes killing wrong.

The claim that the primary wrong- making fea- ture of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children. Since the reason that is sufficient to explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of birth is a reason that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong.

The view that what makes killing wrong is the loss to the victim of the value of the victim’s future gains additional support when some of its implications are examined. In the first place, it is incompatible with the view that it is wrong to kill only beings who are biolog- ically human. It is possible that there exists a different species from another planet whose members have a future like ours. Since having a future like that is what makes killing someone wrong, this theory entails that it would be wrong to kill members of such a species. Hence, this theory is opposed to the claim that only life that is biologically human has great moral worth, a claim which many anti- abortionists have seemed to adopt. This opposition, which this theory has in com- mon with personhood theories, seems to be a merit of the theory.

In the second place, the claim that the loss of one’s future is the wrong- making feature of one’s being killed entails the possibility that the futures of some actual nonhuman mammals on our own planet are sufficiently like ours that it is seriously wrong to kill them also. Whether some animals do have the same right to life as human beings depends on adding to the account of the wrongness of killing some addi- tional account of just what it is about my future or the futures of other adult human beings which makes it wrong to kill us. No such additional account will be offered in this essay. Undoubtedly, the provision of such an account would be a very difficult matter. Undoubtedly, any such account would be quite con- troversial. Hence, it surely should not reflect badly on this sketch of an elementary theory of the wrongness of killing that it is indeterminate with respect to some very difficult issues regarding animal rights.

In the third place, the claim that the loss of one’s future is the wrong- making feature of one’s being killed does not entail, as sanctity of human life theo- ries do, that active euthanasia is wrong. Persons who are severely and incurably ill, who face a future of pain and despair, and who wish to die will not have suffered a loss if they are killed. It is, strictly speak- ing, the value of a human’s future which makes kill- ing wrong in this theory. This being so, killing does not necessarily wrong some persons who are sick and dying. Of course, there may be other reasons for a

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actions is a property of actions sometimes directed at individuals other than postnatal human beings. If the structure of the argument for the wrongness of the wanton infliction of pain on animals is sound, then the structure of the argument for the prima facie seri- ous wrongness of abortion is also sound, for the struc- ture of the two arguments is the same. The structure common to both is the key to the explanation of how the wrongness of abortion can be demonstrated with- out recourse to the category of person. In neither argu- ment is that category crucial.

This defense of an argument for the wrongness of abortion in terms of a structurally similar argument for the wrongness of the wanton infliction of pain on animals succeeds only if the account regarding ani- mals is the correct account. Is it? In the first place, it seems plausible. In the second place, its major compe- tition is Kant’s account. Kant believed that we do not have direct duties to animals at all, because they are not persons. Hence, Kant had to explain and justify the wrongness of inflicting pain on animals on the grounds that “he who is hard in his dealings with ani- mals becomes hard also in his dealing with men.”2 The problem with Kant’s account is that there seems to be no reason for accepting this latter claim unless Kant’s account is rejected. If the alternative to Kant’s account is accepted, then it is easy to understand why some- one who is indifferent to inflicting pain on animals is also indifferent to inflicting pain on humans, for one is indifferent to what makes inflicting pain wrong in both cases. But, if Kant’s account is accepted, there is no intelligible reason why one who is hard in his deal- ings with animals (or crabgrass or stones) should also be hard in his dealings with men. After all, men are persons: animals are no more persons than crabgrass or stones. Persons are Kant’s crucial moral category. Why, in short, should a Kantian accept the basic claim in Kant’s argument?

Hence, Kant’s argument for the wrongness of inflicting pain on animals rests on a claim that, in a world of Kantian moral agents, is demonstrably false. Therefore, the alternative analysis, being more plausible anyway, should be accepted. Since this alternative analy- sis has the same structure as the anti-abortion argument being defended here, we have further support for the

This argument does not rely on the invalid infer- ence that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong to kill potential persons also. The category that is mor- ally central to this analysis is the category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of per- sonhood. The argument to the conclusion that abor- tion is prima facie seriously morally wrong proceeded independently of the notion of person or potential person or any equivalent. Someone may wish to start with this analysis in terms of the value of a human future, conclude that abortion is, except perhaps in rare circumstances, seriously morally wrong, infer that fetuses have the right to life, and then call fetuses “persons” as a result of their having the right to life. Clearly, in this case, the category of person is being used to state the conclusion of the analysis rather than to generate the argument of the analysis.

The structure of this anti- abortion argument can be both illuminated and defended by comparing it to what appears to be the best argument for the wrong- ness of the wanton infliction of pain on animals. This latter argument is based on the assumption that it is prima facie wrong to inflict pain on me (or you, reader). What is the natural property associated with the inflic- tion of pain which makes such infliction wrong? The obvious answer seems to be that the infliction of pain causes suffering and that suffering is a misfortune. The suffering caused by the infliction of pain is what makes the wanton infliction of pain on me wrong. The wanton infliction of pain on other adult humans causes suffering. The wanton infliction of pain on ani- mals causes suffering. Since causing suffering is what makes the wanton infliction of pain wrong and since the wanton infliction of pain on animals causes suf- fering, it follows that the wanton infliction of pain on animals is wrong.

This argument for the wrongness of the wan- ton infliction of pain on animals shares a number of structural features with the argument for the serious prima facie wrongness of abortion. Both arguments start with an obvious assumption concerning what it is wrong to do to me (or you, reader). Both then look for the characteristic or the consequence of the wrong action which makes the action wrong. Both recog- nize that the wrong- making feature of these immoral

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valuable experience to continue. Therefore, it might be said, what makes killing wrong is the discontinua- tion of that experience for the victim. Let us call this the discontinuation account. Another rival account is based upon the obvious fact that people strongly desire to continue to live. This suggests that what makes kill- ing us so wrong is that it interferes with the fulfillment of a strong and fundamental desire, the fulfillment of which is necessary for the fulfillment of any other desires we might have. Let us call this the desire account.

Consider first the desire account as a rival account of the ethics of killing which would provide the basis for rejecting the anti- abortion position. Such an account will have to be stronger than the value of a future- like- ours account of the wrongness of abor- tion if it is to do the job expected of it. To entail the wrongness of abortion, the value of a future- like- ours account has only to provide a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for the wrongness of killing. The desire account, on the other hand, must provide us also with a necessary condition for the wrongness of killing in order to generate a pro- choice conclusion on abortion. The reason for this is that presumably the argument from the desire account moves from the claim that what makes killing wrong is interference with a very strong desire to the claim that abortion is not wrong because the fetus lacks a strong desire to live. Obviously, this inference fails if someone’s hav- ing the desire to live is not a necessary condition of its being wrong to kill that individual.

One problem with the desire account is that we do regard it as seriously wrong to kill persons who have little desire to live or who have no desires to live or, indeed, have a desire not to live. We believe it is seri- ously wrong to kill the unconscious, the sleeping, those who are tired of life, and those who are suicidal. The value- of- a- human- future account renders stan- dard morality intelligible in these cases; these cases appear to be incompatible with the desire account.

The desire account is subject to a deeper difficulty. We desire life, because we value the goods of this life. The goodness of life is not secondary to our desire for it. If this were not so, the pain of one’s own premature death could be done away with merely by an appro- priate alteration in the configuration of one’s desires.

argument for the immorality of abortion being defended in this essay.

Of course, this value of a future- like- ours argu- ment, if sound, shows only that abortion is prima facie wrong, not that it is wrong in any and all circum- stances. Since the loss of the future to a standard fetus, if killed, is, however, at least as great a loss as the loss of the future to a standard adult human being who is killed, abortion, like ordinary killing, could be jus- tified only by the most compelling reasons. The loss of one’s life is almost the greatest misfortune that can happen to one. Presumably abortion could be justified in some circumstances, only if the loss consequent on failing to abort would be at least as great. Accordingly, morally permissible abortions will be rare indeed unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy that a fetus is not yet definitely an individual. Hence, this argument should be taken as showing that abortion is presumptively very seriously wrong, where the pre- sumption is very strong— as strong as the presumption that killing another adult human being is wrong.

III.

How complete an account of the wrongness of killing does the value of a future- like- ours account have to be in order that the wrongness of abortion is a conse- quence? This account does not have to be an account of the necessary conditions for the wrongness of kill- ing. Some persons in nursing homes may lack valuable human futures, yet it may be wrong to kill them for other reasons. Furthermore, this account does not obviously have to be the sole reason killing is wrong where the victim did have a valuable future. This anal- ysis claims only that, for any killing where the victim did have a valuable future like ours, having that future by itself is sufficient to create the strong presumption that the killing is seriously wrong.

One way to overturn the value of a future- like- ours argument would be to find some account of the wrong- ness of killing which is at least as intelligible and which has different implications for the ethics of abortion. Two rival accounts possess at least some degree of plau- sibility. One account is based on the obvious fact that people value the experience of living and wish for that

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Is the discontinuation account just as good an account as the value of a future- like- ours account? The discontinuation account will not be adequate at all, if it does not refer to the value of the experi- ence that may be discontinued. One does not want the discontinuation account to make it wrong to kill a patient who begs for death and who is in severe pain that cannot be relieved short of killing. (I leave open the question of whether it is wrong for other reasons.) Accordingly, the discontinuation account must be more than a bare discontinuation account. It must make some reference to the positive value of the patient’s experiences. But, by the same token, the value of a future- like- ours account cannot be a bare future account either. Just having a future surely does not itself rule out killing the above patient. This account must make some reference to the value of the patient’s future experiences and projects also. Hence, both accounts involve the value of experiences, proj- ects, and activities. So far we still have symmetry between the accounts.

The symmetry fades, however, when we focus on the time period of the value of the experiences, etc., which has moral consequences. Although both accounts leave open the possibility that the patient in our example may be killed, this possibility is left open only in virtue of the utterly bleak future for the patient. It makes no difference whether the patient’s immediate past contains intolerable pain, or consists in being in a coma (which we can imagine is a situa- tion of indifference), or consists in a life of value. If the patient’s future is a future of value, we want our account to make it wrong to kill the patient. If the patient’s future is intolerable, whatever his or her immediate past, we want our account to allow kill- ing the patient. Obviously, then, it is the value of that patient’s future which is doing the work in rendering the morality of killing the patient intelligible.

This being the case, it seems clear that whether one has immediate past experiences or not does not work in the explanation of what makes killing wrong. The addition the discontinuation account makes to the value of a human future account is otiose. Its addi- tion to the value- of- a- future account plays no role at all in rendering intelligible the wrongness of killing.

This is absurd. Hence, it would seem that it is the loss of the goods of one’s future, not the interference with the fulfillment of a strong desire to live, which accounts ultimately for the wrongness of killing.

It is worth noting that, if the desire account is modified so that it does not provide a necessary, but only a sufficient, condition for the wrongness of kill- ing, the desire account is compatible with the value of a future- like- ours account. The combined accounts will yield an anti- abortion ethic. This suggests that one can retain what is intuitively plausible about the desire account without a challenge to the basic argu- ment of this paper.

It is also worth noting that, if future desires have moral force in a modified desire account of the wrongness of killing, one can find support for an anti- abortion ethic even in the absence of a value of a future- like- ours account. If one decides that a mor- ally relevant property, the possession of which is suf- ficient to make it wrong to kill some individual, is the desire at some future time to live— one might decide to justify one’s refusal to kill suicidal teenagers on these grounds, for example— then, since typical fetuses will have the desire in the future to live, it is wrong to kill typical fetuses. Accordingly, it does not seem that a desire account of the wrongness of killing can provide a justification of a pro- choice ethic of abortion which is nearly as adequate as the value of a human- future justification of an anti- abortion ethic.

The discontinuation account looks more promis- ing as an account of the wrongness of killing. It seems just as intelligible as the value of a future- like- ours account, but it does not justify an anti- abortion posi- tion. Obviously, if it is the continuation of one’s activi- ties, experiences, and projects, the loss of which makes killing wrong, then it is not wrong to kill fetuses for that reason, for fetuses do not have experiences, activities, and projects to be continued or discontinued. Accord- ingly, the discontinuation account does not have the anti- abortion consequences that the value of a future- like- ours account has. Yet, it seems as intelligible as the value of a future- like- ours account, for when we think of what would be wrong with our being killed, it does seem as if it is the discontinuation of what makes our lives worthwhile which makes killing us wrong.

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Accordingly, Tooley concludes that abortion cannot be seriously prima facie wrong.3

What could be the evidence for Tooley’s basic claim? Tooley once argued that individuals have a prima facie right to what they desire and that the lack of the capacity to desire something undercuts the basis of one’s right to it.4 This argument plainly will not succeed in the context of the analysis of this essay, however, since the point here is to establish the fetus’s right to life on other grounds. Tooley’s argument assumes that the right to life cannot be established in general on some basis other than the desire for life. This position was considered and rejected in the pre- ceding section of this paper.

One might attempt to defend Tooley’s basic claim on the grounds that, because a fetus cannot apprehend continued life as a benefit, its continued life cannot be a benefit or cannot be something it has a right to or cannot be something that is in its interest. This might be defended in terms of the general proposition that, if an individual is literally incapable of caring about or taking an interest in some X, then one does not have a right to X or X is not a benefit or X is not something that is in one’s interest.

Each member of this family of claims seems to be open to objections. As John C. Stevens5 has pointed out, one may have a right to be treated with a certain medical procedure (because of a health insurance policy one has purchased), even though one can- not conceive of the nature of the procedure. And, as Tooley himself has pointed out, persons who have been indoctrinated, or drugged, or rendered tempo- rarily unconscious may be literally incapable of car- ing about or taking an interest in something that is in their interest or is something to which they have a right, or is something that benefits them. Hence, the Tooley claim that would restrict the scope of the value of a future- like- ours argument is undermined by counterexamples.

Finally, Paul Bassen6 has argued that, even though the prospects of an embryo might seem to be a basis for the wrongness of abortion, an embryo cannot be a victim and therefore cannot be wronged. An embryo cannot be a victim, he says, because it lacks sentience. His central argument for this seems to be that, even

Therefore, it can be discarded with the discontinua- tion account of which it is a part.

IV.

The analysis of the previous section suggests that alternative general accounts of the wrongness of kill- ing are either inadequate or unsuccessful in getting around the anti- abortion consequences of the value of a future- like- ours argument. A different strategy for avoiding these anti- abortion consequences involves limiting the scope of the value of a future argument. More precisely, the strategy involves arguing that fetuses lack a property that is essential for the value- of- a- future argument (or for any anti- abortion argument) to apply to them.

One move of this sort is based upon the claim that a necessary condition of one’s future being valuable is that one values it. Value implies a valuer. Given this one might argue that, since fetuses cannot value their futures, their futures are not valuable to them. Hence, it does not seriously wrong them deliberately to end their lives.

This move fails, however, because of some ambi- guities. Let us assume that something cannot be of value unless it is valued by someone. This does not entail that my life is of no value unless it is valued by me. I may think, in a period of despair, that my future is of no worth whatsoever, but I may be wrong because others rightly see value— even great value— in it. Fur- thermore, my future can be valuable to me even if I do not value it. This is the case when a young per- son attempts suicide, but is rescued and goes on to sig- nificant human achievements. Such young people’s futures are ultimately valuable to them, even though such futures do not seem to be valuable to them at the moment of attempted suicide. A fetus’s future can be valuable to it in the same way. Accordingly, this attempt to limit the anti- abortion argument fails.

Another similar attempt to reject the anti- abortion position is based on [Michael] Tooley’s claim that an entity cannot possess the right to life unless it has the capacity to desire its continued existence. It fol- lows that, since fetuses lack the conceptual capacity to desire to continue to live, they lack the right to life.

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Bassen wishes to impose upon the possibility of being victimized here seem far too strong. Perhaps this author, due to his unrealistic standards of excellence and his low self- esteem, regarded his work as unwor- thy of survival, even though it possessed genuine lit- erary merit. Destruction of such work would surely victimize its author. In such a case, empathy with the victim concerning the loss is clearly impossible.

Of course, Bassen does not make the possibility of empathy a necessary condition of victimizability; he requires only mentation. Hence, on Bassen’s actual view, this author, as I have described him, can be a vic- tim. The problem is that the basic intuition that ren- ders Bassen’s view plausible is missing in the author’s case. In order to attempt to avoid counterexamples, Bassen has made his thesis too weak to be supported by the intuitions that suggested it.

Even so, the mentation requirement on victimiz- ability is still subject to counterexamples. Suppose a severe accident renders me totally unconscious for a month, after which I recover. Surely killing me while I am unconscious victimizes me, even though I am incapable of mentation during that time. It fol- lows that Bassen’s thesis fails. Apparently, attempts to restrict the value of a future- like- ours argument so that fetuses do not fall within its scope do not succeed.

V.

In this essay, it has been argued that the correct ethic of the wrongness of killing can be extended to fetal life and used to show that there is a strong presumption that any abortion is morally impermissible. If the ethic of killing adopted here entails, however, that contra- ception is also seriously immoral, then there would appear to be a difficulty with the analysis of this essay.

But this analysis does not entail that contracep- tion is wrong. Of course, contraception prevents the actualization of a possible future of value. Hence, it follows from the claim that futures of value should be maximized that contraception is prima facie immoral. This obligation to maximize does not exist, however; furthermore, nothing in the ethics of killing in this paper entails that it does. The ethics of killing in this

though plants and the permanently unconscious are alive, they clearly cannot be victims. What is the explanation of this? Bassen claims that the explana- tion is that their lives consist of mere metabolism and mere metabolism is not enough to ground victimiz- ability. Mentation is required.

The problem with this attempt to establish the absence of victimizability is that both plants and the permanently unconscious clearly lack what Bassen calls “prospects” or what I have called “a future life like ours.” Hence, it is surely open to one to argue that the real reason we believe plants and the permanently unconscious cannot be victims is that killing them cannot deprive them of a future life like ours; the real reason is not their absence of present mentation.

Bassen recognizes that his view is subject to this difficulty, and he recognizes that the case of children seems to support this difficulty, for “much of what we do for children is based on prospects.” He argues, how- ever, that, in the case of children and in other such cases, “potentially comes into play only where victim- izability has been secured on other grounds. . . .”

Bassen’s defense of his view is patently question- begging, since what is adequate to secure victimiz- ability is exactly what is at issue. His examples do not support his own view against the thesis of this essay. Of course, embryos can be victims: when their lives are deliberately terminated, they are deprived of their futures of value, their prospects. This makes them vic- tims, for it directly wrongs them.

The seeming plausibility of Bassen’s view stems from the fact that paradigmatic cases of imagining someone as a victim involve empathy, and empathy requires mentation of the victim. The victims of flood, famine, rape, or child abuse are all persons with whom we can empathize. That empathy seems to be part of seeing them as victims.

In spite of the strength of these examples, the attractive intuition that a situation in which there is victimization requires the possibility of empathy is subject to counterexamples. Consider a case that Bassen himself offers: “Posthumous obliteration of an author’s work constitutes a misfortune for him only if he had wished his work to endure”. . . The conditions

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to make killing an adult human being wrong, abor- tion is wrong. This way of dealing with the problem of abortion seems superior to other approaches to the ethics of abortion, because it rests on an ethics of kill- ing which is close to self- evident, because the crucial morally relevant property clearly applies to fetuses, and because the argument avoids the usual equivo- cations of ‘human life’, ‘human being’, or ‘person’. The argument rests neither on religious claims nor on Papal dogma. It is not subject to the objection of “speciesism.” Its soundness is compatible with the moral permissibility of euthanasia and contracep- tion. It deals with our intuitions concerning young children.

Finally, this analysis can be viewed as resolving a standard problem— indeed, the standard problem— concerning the ethics of abortion. Clearly, it is wrong to kill adult human beings. Clearly, it is not wrong to end the life of some arbitrarily chosen single human cell. Fetuses seem to be like arbitrarily chosen human cells in some respects and like adult humans in other respects. The problem of the ethics of abortion is the problem of determining the fetal property that settles this moral controversy. The thesis of this essay is that the problem of the ethics of abortion, so understood, is solvable.

NOTES

1. Joel Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 270.

2. “Duties to Animals and Spirits,” in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Loius Infeld (New York: Harper, 1963), p. 239.

3. Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford, 1984), pp. 46–47.

4. Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, pp. 44–45.

5. “Must the Bearer of a Right Have the Concept of That to Which He Has a Right?” Ethics 95, no. 1 (1984): 68–74.

6. “Present Sakes and Future Prospects: The Status of Early Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (1982): 314–37.

essay would entail that contraception is wrong only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception. Nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception, however.

Candidates for a subject of harm by contracep- tion fall into four categories: (1) some sperm or other, (2) some ovum or other, (3) a sperm and an ovum separately, and (4) a sperm and an ovum together. Assigning the harm to some sperm is utterly arbi- trary, for no reason can be given for making a sperm the subject of harm rather than an ovum. Assigning the harm to some ovum is utterly arbitrary, for no reason can be given for making an ovum the subject of harm rather than a sperm. One might attempt to avoid these problems by insisting that contraception deprives both the sperm and the ovum separately of a valuable future like ours. On this alternative, too many futures are lost. Contraception was supposed to be wrong, because it deprived us of one future of value, not two. One might attempt to avoid this problem by holding that contraception deprives the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable future like ours. But here the definite article mis- leads. At the time of contraception, there are hun- dreds of millions of sperm, one (released) ovum and millions of possible combinations of all of these. There is no actual combination at all. Is the subject of the loss to be a merely possible combination? Which one? This alternative does not yield an actual subject of harm either. Accordingly, the immoral- ity of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a future- like- ours argument simply because there is no nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.

VI.

The purpose of this essay has been to set out an argu- ment for the serious presumptive wrongness of abortion subject to the assumption that the moral per- missibility of abortion stands or falls on the moral sta- tus of the fetus. Since a fetus possesses a property, the possession of which in adult human beings is sufficient

268 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

From Virtue Theory and Abortion Rosalind Hursthouse

have a moral right to do as they choose with their own bodies, or, more particularly, to terminate their preg- nancies, then it may well follow that a law forbidding abortion would be unjust. Indeed, even if they have no such right, such a law might be, as things stand at the moment, unjust, or impractical, or inhumane: on this issue I have nothing to say in this article. But, putting all questions about the justice or injustice of laws to one side, and supposing only that women have such a moral right, nothing follows from this supposi- tion about the morality of abortion, according to vir- tue theory, once it is noted (quite generally, not with particular reference to abortion) that in exercising a moral right I can do something cruel, or callous, or selfish, light- minded, self- righteous, stupid, inconsid- erate, disloyal, dishonest— that is, act viciously.2 Love and friendship do not survive their parties’ constantly insisting on their rights, nor do people live well when they think that getting what they have a right to is of preeminent importance; they harm others, and they harm themselves. So whether women have a moral right to terminate their pregnancies is irrelevant within virtue theory, for it is irrelevant to the question “In having an abortion in these circumstances, would the agent be acting virtuously or viciously or neither?”

What about the consideration of the status of the fetus— what can virtue theory say about that? One might say that this issue is not in the province of any moral theory; it is a metaphysical question, and an extremely difficult one at that. Must virtue theory then wait upon metaphysics to come up with the answer?

At first sight it might seem so. For virtue is said to involve knowledge, and part of this knowledge con- sists in having the right attitude to things. “Right” here does not just mean “morally right” or “proper” or “nice” in the modern sense; it means “accurate, true.” One cannot have the right or correct attitude to something if the attitude is based on or involves false beliefs. And this suggests that if the status of the fetus

* * *

As everyone knows, the morality of abortion is com- monly discussed in relation to just two consider- ations: first, and predominantly, the status of the fetus and whether or not it is the sort of thing that may or may not be innocuously or justifiably killed; and sec- ond, and less predominantly (when, that is, the dis- cussion concerns the morality of abortion rather than the question of permissible legislation in a just soci- ety), women’s rights. If one thinks within this familiar framework, one may well be puzzled about what virtue theory, as such, could contribute. Some people assume the discussion will be conducted solely in terms of what the virtuous agent would or would not do . . . Others assume that only justice, or at most justice and charity, will be applied to the issue, generating a dis- cussion very similar to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s.1

Now if this is the way the virtue theorist’s discus- sion of abortion is imagined to be, no wonder people think little of it. It seems obvious in advance that in any such discussion there must be either a great deal of extremely tendentious application of the virtue terms just, charitable, and so on or a lot of rhetorical appeal to “this is what only the virtuous agent knows.” But these are caricatures; they fail to appreciate the way in which virtue theory quite transforms the discussion of abortion by dismissing the two familiar dominating considerations as, in a way, fundamentally irrelevant. In what way or ways, I hope to make both clear and plausible.

Let us first consider women’s rights. Let me emphasize again that we are discussing the morality of abortion, not the rights and wrongs of laws prohib- iting or permitting it. If we suppose that women do

Rosalind Hursthouse, excerpts from “Virtue Theory and Abor- tion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20(3): 233–44. Copyright © 1991 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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other, nearly everything written on the status of the fetus and its bearing on the abortion issue would be consistent with the human reproductive facts (to say nothing of family life) being totally different from what they are. Imagine that you are an alien extra- terrestrial anthropologist who does not know that the human race is roughly 50 percent female and 50 percent male, or that our only (natural) form of repro- duction involves heterosexual intercourse, viviparous birth, and the female’s (and only the female’s) being pregnant for nine months, or that females are capable of childbearing from late childhood to late middle age, or that childbearing is painful, dangerous, and emotionally charged— do you think you would pick up these facts from the hundreds of articles written on the status of the fetus? I am quite sure you would not. And that, I think, shows that the current philosophi- cal literature on abortion has got badly out of touch with reality.

Now if we are using virtue theory, our first ques- tion is not “What do the familiar biological facts show— what can be derived from them about the sta- tus of the fetus?” but “How do these facts figure in the practical reasoning, actions and passions, thoughts and reactions, of the virtuous and the nonvirtuous? What is the mark of having the right attitude to these facts and what manifests having the wrong attitude to them?” This immediately makes essentially rele- vant not only all the facts about human reproduction I mentioned above, but a whole range of facts about our emotions in relation to them as well. I mean such facts as that human parents, both male and female, tend to care passionately about their offspring, and that family relationships are among the deepest and strongest in our lives— and, significantly, among the longest- lasting.

These facts make it obvious that pregnancy is not just one among many other physical conditions; and hence that anyone who genuinely believes that an abortion is comparable to a haircut or an appendec- tomy is mistaken.4 The fact that the premature termi- nation of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts about human life and death, parenthood, and family

is relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion, its status must be known, as a truth, to the fully wise and virtuous person.

But the sort of wisdom that the fully virtuous per- son has is not supposed to be recondite; it does not call for fancy philosophical sophistication, and it does not depend upon, let alone wait upon, the discover- ies of academic philosophers.3 And this entails the following, rather startling, conclusion: that the status of the fetus— that issue over which so much ink has been spilt— is, according to virtue theory, simply not relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion (within, that is, a secular morality).

Or rather, since that is clearly too radical a conclu- sion, it is in a sense relevant, but only in the sense that the familiar biological facts are relevant. By “the famil- iar biological facts” I mean the facts that most human societies are and have been familiar with— that, stan- dardly (but not invariably), pregnancy occurs as the result of sexual intercourse, that it lasts about nine months, during which time the fetus grows and devel- ops, that standardly it terminates in the birth of a liv- ing baby, and that this is how we all come to be.

It might be thought that this distinction— between the familiar biological facts and the status of the fetus— is a distinction without a difference. But this is not so. To attach relevance to the status of the fetus, in the sense in which virtue theory claims it is not relevant, is to be gripped by the conviction that we must go beyond the familiar biological facts, deriv- ing some sort of conclusion from them, such as that the fetus has rights, or is not a person, or something similar. It is also to believe that this exhausts the rel- evance of the familiar biological facts, that all they are relevant to is the status of the fetus and whether or not it is the sort of thing that may or may not be killed.

These convictions, I suspect, are rooted in the desire to solve the problem of abortion by getting it to fall under some general rule such as “You ought not to kill anything with the right to life but may kill anything else.” But they have resulted in what should surely strike any nonphilosopher as a most bizarre aspect of nearly all the current philosophical litera- ture on abortion, namely, that, far from treating abor- tion as a unique moral problem, markedly unlike any

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same reasons in the early stages in a way that matches the fact that deep grief over miscarriage in the later stages is more appropriate than it is over miscarriage in the earlier stages (when, that is, the grief is solely about the loss of this child, not about, as might be the case, the loss of one’s only hope of having a child or of having one’s husband’s child). Imagine (or recall) a woman who already has children; she had not intended to have more, but finds herself unexpect- edly pregnant. Though contrary to her plans, the pregnancy, once established as a fact, is welcomed— and then she loses the embryo almost immediately. If this were bemoaned as a tragedy, it would, I think, be a misapplication of the concept of what is tragic. But it may still properly be mourned as a loss. The grief is expressed in such terms as “I shall always wonder how she or he would have turned out” or “When I look at the others, I shall think, ‘How different their lives would have been if this other one had been part of them.’” It would, I take it, be callous and light- minded to say, or think, “Well, she has already got four chil- dren; what’s the problem?”; it would be neither, nor arrogantly intrusive in the case of a close friend, to try to correct prolonged mourning by saying, “I know it’s sad, but it’s not a tragedy; rejoice in the ones you have.” The application of tragic becomes more appro- priate as the fetus grows, for the mere fact that one has lived with it for longer, conscious of its existence, makes a difference. To shrug off an early abortion is understandable just because it is very hard to be fully conscious of the fetus’s existence in the early stages and hence hard to appreciate that an early abortion is the destruction of life. It is particularly hard for the young and inexperienced to appreciate this, because appreciation of it usually comes only with experience.

I do not mean “with the experience of having an abortion” (though that may be part of it) but, quite generally, “with the experience of life.” Many women who have borne children contrast their later pregnan- cies with their first successful one, saying that in the later ones they were conscious of a new life growing in them from very early on. And, more generally, as one reaches the age at which the next generation is coming up close behind one, the counterfactuals “If

relationships, must make it a serious matter. To dis- regard this fact about it, to think of abortion as noth- ing but the killing of something that does not matter, or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable state of affairs, is to do something callous and light- minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous and wise person would do. It is to have the wrong attitude not only to fetuses, but more generally to human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships.

Although I say that the facts make this obvious, I know that this is one of my tendentious points. In partial support of it I note that even the most dedi- cated proponents of the view that deliberate abortion is just like an appendectomy or haircut rarely hold the same view of spontaneous abortion, that is, miscar- riage. It is not so tendentious of me to claim that to react to people’s grief over miscarriage by saying, or even thinking, “What a fuss about nothing!” would be callous and light- minded, whereas to try to laugh someone out of grief over an appendectomy scar or a botched haircut would not be. It is hard to give this point due prominence within act- centered theories, for the inconsistency is an inconsistency in attitude about the seriousness of loss of life, not in beliefs about which acts are right or wrong. Moreover, an act- centered theorist may say, “Well, there is nothing wrong with thinking ‘What a fuss about nothing!’ as long as you do not say it and hurt the person who is grieving. And besides, we cannot be held responsible for our thoughts, only for the intentional actions they give rise to.” But the character traits that virtue theory emphasizes are not simply dispositions to intentional actions, but a seamless disposition to certain actions and passions, thoughts and reactions.

To say that the cutting off of a human life is always a matter of some seriousness, at any stage, is not to deny the relevance of gradual fetal develop- ment. Notwithstanding the well- worn point that clear boundary lines cannot be drawn, our emotions and attitudes regarding the fetus do change as it develops, and again when it is born, and indeed further as the baby grows. Abortion for shallow reasons in the later stages is much more shocking than abortion for the

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their connection with having the right attitude to par- enthood and family relationships. But it may well be thought that failing to bring in women’s rights still leaves some important aspects of the problem of abor- tion untouched.

Speaking in terms of women’s rights, people some- times say things like, “Well, it’s her life you’re talking about too, you know; she’s got a right to her own life, her own happiness.” And the discussion stops there. But in the context of virtue theory, given that we are particularly concerned with what constitutes a good human life, with what true happiness or eudaimonia is, this is no place to stop. We go on to ask, “And is this life of hers a good one? Is she living well?”

If we are to go on to talk about good human lives, in the context of abortion, we have to bring in our thoughts about the value of love and family life, and our proper emotional development through a natu- ral life cycle. The familiar facts support the view that parenthood in general, and motherhood and child- bearing in particular, are intrinsically worthwhile, are among the things that can be correctly thought to be partially constitutive of a flourishing human life. If this is right, then a woman who opts for not being a mother (at all, or again, or now) by opting for abortion may thereby be manifesting a flawed grasp of what her life should be, and be about— a grasp that is childish, or grossly materialistic, or shortsighted, or shallow.

I said “may thereby”: this need not be so. Consider, for instance, a woman who has already had several children and fears that to have another will seriously affect her capacity to be a good mother to the ones she has— she does not show a lack of appreciation of the intrinsic value of being a parent by opting for abor- tion. Nor does a woman who has been a good mother and is approaching the age at which she may be look- ing forward to bring a good grandmother. Nor does a woman who discovers that her pregnancy may well kill her, and opts for abortion and adoption. Nor, nec- essarily, does a woman who has decided to lead a life centered around some other worthwhile activity or activities with which motherhood would compete.

People who are childless by choice are sometimes described as “irresponsible,” or “selfish,” or “refusing

I, or she, had had an abortion, Alice, or Bob, would not have been born” acquire a significant application, which casts a new light on the conditionals “If I or Alice have an abortion then some Caroline or Bill will not be born.”

The fact that pregnancy is not just one among many physical conditions does not mean that one can never regard it in that light without manifest- ing a vice. When women are in very poor physical health, or worn out from childbearing, or forced to do very physically demanding jobs, then they cannot be described as self- indulgent, callous, irresponsible, or light- minded if they seek abortions mainly with a view to avoiding pregnancy as the physical condition that it is. To go through with a pregnancy when one is utterly exhausted, or when one’s job consists of crawl- ing along tunnels hauling coal, as many women in the nineteenth century were obliged to do, is perhaps heroic, but people who do not achieve heroism are not necessarily vicious. That they can view the pregnancy only as eight months of misery, followed by hours if not days of agony and exhaustion, and abortion only as the blessed escape from this prospect, is entirely understandable and does not manifest any lack of serious respect for human life or a shallow attitude to motherhood. What it does show is that something is terribly amiss in the conditions of their lives, which make it so hard to recognize pregnancy and childbear- ing as the good that they can be.

* * *

The foregoing discussion, insofar as it emphasizes the right attitude to human life and death, parallels to a certain extent those standard discussions of abortion that concentrate on it solely as an issue of killing. But it does not, as those discussions do, gloss over the fact, emphasized by those who discuss the morality of abor- tion in terms of women’s rights, that abortion, wildly unlike any other form of killing, is the termination of a pregnancy, which is a condition of a woman’s body and results in her having a child if it is not aborted. This fact is given due recognition not by appeal to women’s rights but by emphasizing the relevance of the familiar biological and psychological facts and

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or guilt inappropriate. For, by virtue of the fact that a human life has been cut short, some evil has prob- ably been brought about,5 and that circumstances make the decision to bring about some evil the right decision will be a ground for guilt if getting into those circumstances in the first place itself manifested a flaw in character.

What “gets one into those circumstances” in the case of abortion is, except in the case of rape, one’s sexual activity and one’s choices, or the lack of them, about one’s sexual partner and about con- traception. The virtuous woman (which here of course does not mean simply “chaste woman” but “woman with the virtues”) has such character traits as strength, independence, resoluteness, decisiveness, self- confidence, responsibility, serious- mindedness, and self- determination— and no one, I think, could deny that many women become pregnant in circum- stances in which they cannot welcome or cannot face the thought of having this child precisely because they lack one or some of these character traits. So even in the cases where the decision to have an abortion is the right one, it can still be the reflection of a moral failing— not because the decision itself is weak or cow- ardly or irresolute or irresponsible or light- minded, but because lack of the requisite opposite of these fail- ings landed one in the circumstances in the first place. Hence the common universalized claim that guilt and remorse are never appropriate emotions about an abortion is denied. They may be appropriate, and appropriately inculcated, even when the decision was the right one.

Another motivation for bringing women’s rights into the discussion may be to attempt to cor- rect the implication, carried by the killing- centered approach, that insofar as abortion is wrong, it is a wrong that only women do, or at least (given the pre- ponderance of male doctors) that only women insti- gate. I do not myself believe that we can thus escape the fact that nature bears harder on women than it does on men, but virtue theory can certainly correct many of the injustices that the emphasis on women’s rights is rightly concerned about. With very little

to grow up,” or “not knowing what life is about.” But one can hold that having children is intrinsi- cally worthwhile without endorsing this, for we are, after all, in the happy position of there being more worthwhile things to do than can be fitted into one lifetime. Parenthood, and motherhood in particu- lar, even if granted to be intrinsically worthwhile, undoubtedly take up a lot of one’s adult life, leaving no room for some other worthwhile pursuits. But some women who choose abortion rather than have their first child, and some men who encourage their partners to choose abortion, are not avoiding par- enthood for the sake of other worthwhile pursuits, but for the worthless one of “having a good time,” or for the pursuit of some false vision of the ideals of freedom or self- realization. And some others who say “I am not ready for parenthood yet” are making some sort of mistake about the extent to which one can manipulate the circumstances of one’s life so as to make it fulfill some dream that one has. Perhaps one’s dream is to have two perfect children, a girl and a boy, within a perfect marriage, in financially secure circumstances, with an interesting job of one’s own. But to care too much about that dream, to demand of life that it give it to one and act accordingly, may be both greedy and foolish, and is to run the risk of missing out on happiness entirely. Not only may fate make the dream impossible, or destroy it, but one’s own attachment to it may make it impossible. Good marriages, and the most promising children, can be destroyed by just one adult’s excessive demand for perfection.

Once again, this is not to deny that girls may quite properly say “I am not ready for motherhood yet,” especially in our society, and, far from mani- festing irresponsibility or light- mindedness, show an appropriate modesty or humility, or a fearfulness that does not amount to cowardice. However, even when the decision to have an abortion is the right decision— one that does not itself fall under a vice- related term and thereby one that the perfectly virtu- ous could recommend— it does not follow that there is no sense in which having the abortion is wrong,

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3. This is an assumption of virtue theory, and I do not attempt to defend it here. An adequate discussion of it would require a separate article, since, although most moral philosophers would be chary of claiming that intellectual sophistication is a necessary condition of moral wisdom or virtue, most of us, from Plato onward, tend to write as if this were so. Sorting out which claims about moral knowl- edge are committed to this kind of elitism and which can, albeit with difficulty, be reconciled with the idea that moral knowledge can be acquired by anyone who really wants it would be a major task.

4. Mary Anne Warren, in “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Monist 57 (1973), sec. 1, says of the opponents of restrictive laws governing abortion that “their conviction (for the most part) is that abortion is not a morally serious and extremely unfortunate, even though sometimes justi- fied, act, comparable to killing in self- defense or to letting the violinist die, but rather is closer to being a morally neu- tral act, like cutting one’s hair” (italics mine). I would like to think that no one genuinely believes this. But certainly in discussion, particularly when arguing against restrictive laws or the suggestion that remorse over abortion might be appro- priate, I have found that some people say they believe it (and often cite Warren’s article, albeit inaccurately, despite its age). Those who allow that it is morally serious, and far from morally neutral, have to argue against restrictive laws, or the appropriateness of remorse, on a very different ground from that laid down by the premise “The fetus is just part of the woman’s body (and she has a right to determine what hap- pens to her body and should not feel guilty about anything she does to it).”

5. I say “some evil has probably been brought about” on the ground that (human) life is (usually) a good and hence (human) death usually an evil. The exceptions would be (a) where death is actually a good or a benefit, because the baby that would come to be if the life were not cut short would be better off dead than alive, and (b) where death, though not a good, is not an evil either, because the life that would be led (e.g., in a state of permanent coma) would not be a good.

amendment, everything that has been said above applies to boys and men too. Although the abortion decision is, in a natural sense, the woman’s decision, proper to her, boys and men are often party to it, for well or ill, and even when they are not, they are bound to have been party to the circumstances that brought it up. No less than girls and women, boys and men can, in their actions, manifest self- centeredness, callousness, and light- mindedness about life and parenthood in relation to abortion. They can be self- centered or courageous about the possibility of disability in their offspring; they need to reflect on their sexual activity and their choices, or the lack of them, about their sexual partner and contraception; they need to grow up and take responsibility for their own actions and life in relation to fatherhood. If it is true, as I maintain, that insofar as motherhood is intrinsically worthwhile, being a mother is an impor- tant purpose in women’s lives, being a father (rather than a mere generator) is an important purpose in men’s lives as well, and it is adolescent of men to turn a blind eye to this and pretend that they have many more important things to do.

* * *

NOTES

1. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47–66. One could indeed regard this article as proto- virtue theory (no doubt to the surprise of the author) if the concepts of cal- lousness and kindness were allowed more weight.

2. One possible qualification: if one ties the concept of jus- tice very closely to rights, then if women do have a moral right to terminate their pregnancies it may follow that in doing so they do not act unjustly. (Cf. Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion.”) But it is debatable whether even that much follows.

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Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens Susan Sherwin

Although feminists welcome the support of non- feminists in pursuing policies that will grant women control over abortion decisions, they generally envi- sion very different sorts of policies for this purpose than those considered by non- feminist sympathizers. For example, Kathleen McDonnell (1984) urges femi- nists to develop an explicitly “‘feminist morality’ of abortion. . . . At its root it would be characterized by the deep appreciations of the complexities of life, the refusal to polarize and adopt simplistic formulas” (p. 52). Here, I propose one conception of the shape such an analysis should take.

WOMEN AND ABORTION

The most obvious difference between feminist and non- feminist approaches to abortion can be seen in the relative attention each gives to the interests and experiences of women in its analysis. Feminists con- sider it self- evident that the pregnant woman is a subject of principal concern in abortion decisions. In most non- feminist accounts, however, not only is she not perceived as central, she is rendered virtu- ally invisible. Non- feminist theorists, whether they support or oppose women’s right to choose abortion, focus almost all their attention on the moral status of the developing embryo or the fetus.

In pursuing a distinctively feminist ethics, it is appropriate to begin with a look at the role of abortion in women’s lives. Clearly, the need for abortion can be very intense: women have pursued abortions under appalling and dangerous conditions, across widely diverse cultures and historical periods. No one denies that if abortion is not made legal, safe, and accessible, women will seek out illegal and life- threatening abor- tions to terminate pregnancies they cannot accept. Anti- abortion activists seem willing to accept this price, but feminists judge the inevitable loss of women’s lives associated with restrictive abortion policies to be a matter of fundamental concern.

Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume a familiarity with the feminist position and equate it with liberal defences of women’s right to choose abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists car agree with some of the conclusions that arise from certain non- feminist arguments on abortion, but they often disagree about the way the issues are formulated and the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the main- stream literature.

Among the many differences found between feminist and non- feminist arguments about abor- tion, is the fact that most non- feminist discussions of abortion consider the questions of the moral or legal permissibility of abortion in isolation from other ques- tions, ignoring (and thereby obscuring) relevant con- nections to other social practices that oppress women. They are generally grounded in masculinist concep- tions of freedom (e.g., privacy, individual choice, individuals’ property rights in their own bodies) that do not meet the needs, interests, and intuitions of many of the women concerned. In contrast, feminists seek to couch their arguments in moral concepts that support their general campaign of overcoming injus- tice in all its dimensions, including those inherent in moral theory itself.1 There is even disagreement about how best to understand the moral question at issue: non- feminist arguments focus exclusively on the morality and/or legality of performing abortions, whereas feminists insist that other questions, includ- ing ones about accessibility and delivery of abortion services must also be addressed.

Susan Sherwin, “Abortion Through a Feminist Ethics Lens,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 30, no. 1–2 (1991), © Canadian Philosophical Association 1991, published by Cam- bridge University Press, reproduced with permission.

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she will have—between one and three more than her working childless counterpart” (Petchesky 1984, p. 150). In many circumstances, having a child will exac- erbate the social and economic forces already stacked against her by virtue of her sex (and her race, class, age, sexual orientation, or the effects of some disability, etc.). Access to abortion is a necessary option for many women if they are to escape the oppressive conditions of poverty.

Whatever the reason, most feminists believe that a pregnant woman is in the best position to judge whether abortion is the appropriate response to her circumstances. Since she is usually the only one able to weigh all the relevant factors, most feminists reject attempts to offer any general abstract rules for deter- mining when abortion is morally justified. Women’s personal deliberations about abortion include con- textually defined considerations reflecting her com- mitment to the needs and interests of everyone concerned—including herself, the fetus she carries, other members of her household, etc. Because there is no single formula available for balancing these com- plex factors through all possible cases, it is vital that feminists insist on protecting each woman’s right to come to her own conclusions. Abortion decisions are, by their very nature, dependent on specific features of each woman’s experience; theoretically dispassionate philosophers and other moralists should not expect to set the agenda for these considerations in any univer- sal way. Women must be acknowledged as full moral agents with the responsibility for making moral deci- sions about their own pregnancies.2 Although I think that it is possible for a woman to make a mistake in her moral judgment on this matter (i.e., it is possible that a woman may come to believe that she was wrong about her decision to continue or terminate a pregnancy), the intimate nature of this sort of decision makes it unlikely that anyone else is in a position to arrive at a more reliable conclusion; it is, therefore, improper to grant others the authority to interfere in women’s decisions to seek abortions.

Feminist analysis regards the effects of unwanted pregnancies on the lives of women individually and collectively as a central element in the moral evalua- tion of abortion. Even without patriarchy, bearing a

Although anti- abortion campaigners imagine that women often make frivolous and irresponsible deci- sions about abortion, feminists recognize that women have abortions for a wide variety of reasons. Some women, for instance, find themselves seriously ill and incapacitated throughout pregnancy: they cannot continue in their jobs and may face enormous difficul- ties in fulfilling their responsibilities at home. Many employers and schools will not tolerate pregnancy in their employees or students, and not every woman is able to put her job, career, or studies on hold. Women of limited means may be unable to take adequate care of children they have already borne and they may know that another mouth to feed will reduce their abil- ity to provide for their existing children. Women who suffer from chronic disease, or who feel too young, or too old, or who are unable to maintain lasting rela- tionships may recognize that they will not be able to care properly for a child at this time. Some who are homeless, or addicted to drugs, or who are diagnosed as carrying the AIDS virus may be unwilling to allow a child to enter the world under such circumstances. If the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, the psycho- logical pain of carrying it to term may be unbearable, and the woman may recognize that her attitude to the child after birth will always be tinged with bitterness. Some women have learned that the fetuses they carry have serious chromosomal anomalies and consider it best to prevent them from being born with a condition bound to cause suffering. Others, knowing the fathers to be brutal and violent, may be unwilling to subject a child to the beatings or incestuous attacks they antici- pate: some may have no other realistic way to remove the child (or themselves) from the relationship.

Or a woman may simply believe that bearing a child is incompatible with her life plans at this time, since continuing a pregnancy is likely to have pro- found repercussions throughout a woman’s entire life. If the woman is young, a pregnancy will very likely reduce her chances of education and hence limit her career and life opportunities: “The earlier a woman has a baby, it seems, the more likely she is to drop out of school; the less education she gets, the more likely she is to remain poorly paid, peripheral to the labour market, or unemployed, and the more children

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the participants, but is the price of continued “good will”—popularity, economic survival, peace, or simple acceptance. Few women have not found themselves in circumstances where they do not feel free to refuse a man’s demands for intercourse, either because he is holding a gun to her head or because he threatens to be emotionally hurt if she refuses (or both). Women are socialized to be compliant and accommodating, sensitive to the feelings of others, and frightened of physical power; men are socialized to take advantage of every opportunity to engage in sexual intercourse and to use sex to express dominance and power. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to argue that women could simply “choose” to avoid heterosexual activity if they wish to avoid pregnancy. Catherine MacKinnon neatly sums it up: “the logic by which women are supposed to consent to sex [is]: preclude the alternatives, then call the remaining option ‘her choice’ ” (MacKinnon 1989, p. 192).

Nor can women rely on birth control alone to avoid pregnancy. There simply is no form of reversible contraception available that is fully safe and reliable. The pill and the IUD are the most effective means offered, but both involve significant health hazards to women and are quite dangerous for some. No woman should spend the 30 to 40 years of her reproductive life on either form of birth control. Further, both have been associated with subsequent problems of involun- tary infertility, so they are far from optimal for women who seek to control the timing of their pregnancies.

The safest form of birth control involves the use of barrier methods (condoms or diaphragms) in com- bination with spermicidal foams or jelly. But these methods also pose difficulties for women. They may be socially awkward to use: young women are discour- aged from preparing for sexual activity that might never happen and are offered instead romantic models of spontaneous passion. (Few films or novels interrupt scenes of seduction for the fetching of contraceptives.) Many women find their male partners unwilling to use barrier methods of contraception and they do not have the power to insist. Further, cost is a limiting fac- tor for many women. Condoms and spermicides are expensive and are not covered under most health care plans. There is only one contraceptive option which

child would be a very important event in a woman’s life. It involves significant physical, emotional, social, and (usually) economic changes for her. The ability to exert control over the incidence, timing, and fre- quency of childbearing is often tied to her ability to control most other things she values. Since we live in a patriarchal society, it is especially important to ensure that women have the authority to control their own reproduction.3 Despite the diversity of opinion among feminists on most other matters, virtually all feminists seem to agree that women must gain full control over their own reproductive lives if they are to free them- selves from male dominance.4 Many perceive the commitment of the political right wing to opposing abortion as part of a general strategy to reassert patri- archal control over women in the face of significant feminist influence (Petchesky 1980, p.112).

Women’s freedom to choose abortion is also linked with their ability to control their own sexuality. Women’s subordinate status often prevents them from refusing men sexual access to their bodies. If women cannot end the unwanted pregnancies that result from male sexual dominance, their sexual vulner- ability to particular men can increase, because caring for an(other) infant involves greater financial needs and reduced economic opportunities for women.5 As a result, pregnancy often forces women to become dependent on men. Since a woman’s dependence on a man is assumed to entail that she will remain sexually loyal to him, restriction of abortion serves to channel women’s sexuality and further perpetuates the cycle of oppression.

In contrast to most non- feminist accounts, femi- nist analyses of abortion direct attention to the ques- tion of how women get pregnant. Those who reject abortion seem to believe that women can avoid unwanted pregnancies by avoiding sexual inter- course. Such views show little appreciation for the power of sexual politics in a culture that oppresses women. Existing patterns of sexual dominance mean that women often have little control over their sexual lives. They may be subject to rape by strangers, or by their husbands, boyfriends, colleagues, employers, customers, fathers, brothers, uncles, and dates. Often, the sexual coercion is not even recognized as such by

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The woman on whom the fetus depends for sur- vival is considered as secondary (if she is considered at all) in these debates. The actual experiences and responsibilities of real women are not perceived as morally relevant (unless they, too, can be proved innocent by establishing that their pregnancies are a result of rape or incest). It is a common assumption of both defenders and opponents of women’s right to choose abortion that many women will be irre- sponsible in their choices. The important question, though, is whether fetuses have the sort of status that justifies interfering in women’s choices at all. In some contexts, women’s role in gestation is literally reduced to that of “fetal containers”; the individual women disappear or are perceived simply as mechanical life- support systems.9

The current rhetoric against abortion stresses the fact that the genetic make- up of the fetus is determined at conception and the genetic code is incontestably human. Lest there be any doubt about the humanity of the fetus, we are assailed with photographs of fetuses at various stages of development demonstrating the early appearance of recognizably human characteris- tics, e.g., eyes, fingers, and toes. The fact that the fetus in its early stages is microscopic, virtually indistin- guishable from other primate fetuses to the untrained eye, and lacking in the capacities that make human life meaningful and valuable is not deemed relevant by the self- appointed defenders of fetuses. The anti- abortion campaign is directed at evoking sympathetic attitudes towards this tiny, helpless being whose life is threatened by its own mother; it urges us to see the fetus as entangled in an adversarial relationship with the (presumably irresponsible) woman who carries it. We are encouraged to identify with the “unborn child” and not with the (selfish) woman whose life is also at issue.

Within the non- feminist literature, both defend- ers and opponents of women’s right to choose abor- tion agree that the difference between a late- term fetus and a newborn infant is “merely geographical” and cannot be considered morally significant. But a fetus inhabits a woman’s body and is wholly depen- dent on her unique contribution to its maintenance while a newborn is physically separate though still in

offers women safe and fully effective birth control: barrier methods with the back- up option of abortion.6

From a feminist perspective, a central moral fea- ture of pregnancy is that it takes place in women’s bodies and has profound effects on women’s lives Gender- neutral accounts of pregnancy are not avail- able; pregnancy is explicitly a condition associated with the female body.7 Because the need for abortion is experienced only by women, policies about abor- tion affect women uniquely. Thus, it is important to consider how proposed policies on abortion fit into general patterns of oppression for women. Unlike non- feminist accounts, feminist ethics demands that the effects on the oppression of women be a principal consideration when evaluating abortion policies.

THE FETUS

In contrast, most non- feminist analysts believe that the moral acceptability of abortion turns on the ques- tion of the moral status of the fetus. Even those who support women’s right to choose abortion tend to accept the central premise of the anti- abortion propo- nents that abortion can only be tolerated if it can be proved that the fetus is lacking some criterion of full personhood.8 Opponents of abortion have structured the debate so that it is necessary to define the status of the fetus as either valued the same as other humans (and hence entitled not to be killed) or as lacking in all value. Rather than challenging the logic of this formulation, many defenders of abortion have con- centrated on showing that the fetus is indeed with- out significant value (Tooley 1972, Warren 1973); others, such as Wayne Sumner (1981), offer a more subtle account that reflects the gradual development of fetuses whereby there is some specific criterion that determines the degree of protection to be afforded them which is lacking in the early stages of pregnancy but present in the later stages. Thus, the debate often rages between abortion opponents who describe the fetus as an “innocent,” vulnerable, morally impor- tant, separate being whose life is threatened and who must be protected at all costs, and abortion supporters who try to establish some sort of deficiency inherent to fetuses which removes them from the scope of the moral community.

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women are being coerced into undergoing unwanted Caesarean deliveries and technologically monitored hospital births. Some states have begun to imprison women for endangering their fetuses through drug abuse and other socially unacceptable behaviours. An Australian state recently introduced a bill that makes women liable to criminal prosecution “if they are found to have smoked during pregnancy, eaten unhealthful foods, or taken any other action which can be shown to have adversely affected the development of the fetus” (Warren 1989, p. 60).

In other words, physicians have joined with anti- abortionist activists in fostering a cultural acceptance of the view that fetuses are distinct individuals, who are physically, ontologically, and socially separate from the women whose bodies they inhabit, and who have their own distinct interests. In this picture, pregnant women are either ignored altogether or are viewed as deficient in some crucial respect and hence subject to coercion for the sake of their fetuses. In the former case, the interests of the women concerned are assumed to be identical with those of the fetus: in the latter, the women’s interests are irrelevant because they are perceived as immoral, unimportant, or unnatural. Focus on the fetus as an independent entity has led to presumptions which deny pregnant women their roles as active, independent, moral agents with a primary interest in what becomes of the fetuses they carry. Emphasis on the fetus’s status has led to an assumed licence to interfere with women’s reproductive freedom.

A FEMINIST VIEW OF THE FETUS

Because the public debate has been set up as a competi- tion between the rights of women and those of fetuses, feminists have often felt pushed to reject claims of fetal value in order to protect women’s claims. Yet, as Addelson (1987) has argued, viewing abortion in this way “tears [it] out of the context of women’s lives” (p.107). There are other accounts of fetal value that are more plausible and less oppressive to women.

On a feminist account, fetal development is exam- ined in the context in which it occurs, within women’s bodies rather than in the imagined isolation implicit

need of a lot of care. One can only view the distinction between being in or out of a woman’s womb as mor- ally irrelevant if one discounts the perspective of the pregnant woman: feminists seem to be alone in recog- nizing her perspective as morally important.10

Within anti- abortion arguments, fetuses are iden- tified as individuals: in our culture which views the (abstract) individual as sacred, fetuses qua individu- als should be honoured and preserved. Extraordinary claims are made to try to establish the individuality and moral agency of fetuses. At the same time, the women who carry these fetal individuals are viewed as passive hosts whose only significant role is to refrain from aborting or harming their fetuses. Since it is widely believed that the woman does not actually have to do anything to protect the life of the fetus, pregnancy is often considered (abstractly) to be a tolerable burden to protect the life of an individual so like us.11

Medicine has played its part in supporting these sorts of attitudes. Fetal medicine is a rapidly expanding specialty, and it is commonplace in professional medi- cal journals to find references to pregnant women as “fetal environments.” Fetal surgeons now have at their disposal a repertory of sophisticated technology that can save the lives of dangerously ill fetuses; in light of such heroic successes, it is perhaps understandable that women have disappeared from their view. These specialists see fetuses as their patients, not the women who nurture them. Doctors perceive themselves as the active agents in saving fetal lives and, hence, believe that they are the ones in direct relationship with the fetuses they treat.

Perhaps even more distressing than the tendency to ignore the woman’s agency altogether and view her as a purely passive participant in the medically controlled events of pregnancy and childbirth is the growing prac- tice of viewing women as genuine threats to the well- being of the fetus. Increasingly, women are viewed as irresponsible or hostile towards their fetuses, and the relationship between them is characterized as adver- sarial (Overall 1987, p. 60). Concern for the well- being of the fetus is taken as licence for doctors to intervene to ensure that women comply with medical “advice.” Courts are called upon to enforce the doctors’ orders when moral pressure alone proves inadequate, and

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the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are second persons, who grow up with other persons. . . . The fact that a person has a life history, and that a people collectively have a history depends upon the hum- bler fact that each person has a childhood in which a cultural heritage is transmitted, ready for adolescent rejection and adult discriminating selection and con- tribution. Persons come after and before other per- sons. (P. 84–85; her emphasis.)

Persons, in other words, are members of a social com- munity which shapes and values them, and person- hood is a relational concept that must be defined in terms of interactions and relationships with others.

A fetus is a unique sort of being in that it cannot form relationships freely with others, nor can others readily form relationships with it. A fetus has a pri- mary and particularly intimate relationship with the woman in whose womb it develops; any other rela- tionship it may have is indirect, and must be mediated through the pregnant woman. The relationship that exists between a woman and her fetus is clearly asym- metrical, since she is the only party to the relationship who is capable of making a decision about whether the interaction should continue and since the fetus is wholly dependent on the woman who sustains it while she is quite capable of surviving without it.

However much some might prefer it to be other- wise, no one else can do anything to support or harm a fetus without doing something to the woman who nurtures it. Because of this inexorable biological real- ity, she bears a unique responsibility and privilege in determining her fetus’s place in the social scheme of things. Clearly, many pregnancies occur to women who place very high value on the lives of the partic- ular fetuses they carry, and choose to see their preg- nancies through to term despite the possible risks and costs involved; hence, it would be wrong of anyone to force such a woman to terminate her pregnancy under these circumstances. Other women, or some of these same women at other times, value other things more highly (e.g., their freedom, their health, or previous responsibilities which conflict with those generated by the pregnancies), and choose not to continue their pregnancies. The value that women ascribe to indi- vidual fetuses varies dramatically from case to case,

in many theoretical accounts. Fetuses develop in spe- cific pregnancies which occur in the lives of particular women. They are not individuals housed in generic female wombs, nor are they full persons at risk only because they are small and subject to the whims of women. Their very existence is relational, developing as they do within particular women’s bodies, and their principal relationship is to the women who carry them.

On this view, fetuses are morally significant, but their status is relational rather than absolute. Unlike other human beings, fetuses do not have any indepen- dent existence; their existence is uniquely tied to the support of a specific other. Most non- feminist com- mentators have ignored the relational dimension of fetal development and have presumed that the moral status of fetuses could be resolved solely in terms of abstract metaphysical criteria of personhood. They imagine that there is some set of properties (such as genetic heritage, moral agency, self- consciousness, language use, or self- determination) which will entitle all who possess them to be granted the moral status of persons (Warren 1973, Tooley 1972). They seek some particular feature by which we can neatly divide the world into the dichotomy of moral persons (who are to be valued and protected) and others (who are not entitled to the same group privileges); it follows that it is a merely empirical question whether or not fetuses possess the relevant properties.

But this vision misinterprets what is involved in personhood and what it is that is especially valued about persons. Personhood is a social category, not an isolated state. Persons are members of a commu- nity; they develop as concrete, discrete, and specific individuals. To be a morally significant category, per- sonhood must involve personality as well as biologi- cal integrity.12 It is not sufficient to consider persons simply as Kantian atoms of rationality: persons are all embodied, conscious beings with particular social his- tories. Annette Baier (1985) has developed a concept of persons as “second persons” which helps explain the sort of social dimension that seems fundamental to any moral notion of personhood:

A person, perhaps, is best seen as one who was long enough dependent upon other persons to acquire

280 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

repercussions for women’s oppressed status gener- ally, it is important to ensure that abortion not only be made legal but that adequate services be made accessible to all women who seek them. This means that within Canada, where medically approved abor- tion is technically recognized as legal (at least for the moment), we must protest the fact that it is not made available to many of the women who have the great- est need for abortions; vast geographical areas offer no abortion services at all, but unless the women of those regions can afford to travel to urban clinics, they have no meaningful right to abortion. Because women depend on access to abortion in their pursuit of social equality, it is a matter of moral as well as polit- ical responsibility that provincial health plans should cover the cost of transport and service in the abortion facilities women choose. Ethical study of abortion involves understanding and critiquing the economic, age, and social barriers that currently restrict access to medically acceptable abortion services.14

Moreover, it is also important that abortion services be provided in an atmosphere that fosters women’s health and well- being; hence the care offered should be in a context that is supportive of the choices women make. Abortions should be seen as part of women’s overall reproductive health and could be included within centres that deal with all matters of reproduc- tive health in an open, patient- centred manner where effective counselling is offered for a wide range of reproductive decisions.15 Providers need to recognize that abortion is a legitimate option so that services will be delivered with respect and concern for the physical, psychological, and emotional effects on a patient. All too frequently, hospital-based abortions are provided by practitioners who are uneasy about their role and treat the women involved with hostility and resent- ment. Increasingly, many anti- abortion activists have personalized their attacks and focussed their atten- tion on harassing the women who enter and leave abortion clinics. Surely requiring a woman to pass a gauntlet of hostile protesters on her way to and from an abortion is not conducive to effective health care. Ethical exploration of abortion raises questions about how women are treated when they seek abortions;16 achieving legal permission for women to dispose of

and may well change over the course of any particular pregnancy. There is no absolute value that attaches to fetuses apart from their relational status determined in the context of their particular development.

Since human beings are fundamentally relational beings, it is important to remember that fetuses are characteristically limited in the relationships in which they can participate; within those relationships, they can make only the most restricted “contributions.”13 After birth, human beings are capable of a much wider range of roles in relationships with an infinite variety of partners: it is that very diversity of possibility and experience that leads us to focus on the abstraction of the individual as a constant through all her/his rela- tionships. But until birth, no such variety is possible, and the fetus is defined as an entity within a woman who will almost certainly be principally responsible for it for many years to come.

No human, and especially no fetus, can exist apart from relationships; feminist views of what is valuable about persons must reflect the social nature of their existence. Fetal lives can neither be sustained nor destroyed without affecting the women who sup- port them. Because of a fetus’s unique physical status— within and dependent on a particular woman—the responsibility and privilege of determining its specific social status and value must rest with the woman car- rying it. Fetuses are not persons because they have not developed sufficiently in social relationships to be per- sons in any morally significant sense (i.e., they are not yet second persons). Newborns, although just begin- ning their development into persons, are immediately subject to social relationships, for they are capable of communication and response in interaction with a variety of other persons. Thus, feminist accounts of abortion stress the importance of protecting women’s right to continue as well as to terminate pregnancies as each sees fit.

FEMINIST POLITICS AND ABORTION

Feminist ethics directs us to look at abortion in the context of other issues of power and not to limit dis- cussion to the standard questions about its moral and legal acceptability. Because coerced pregnancy has

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also object to the conditions which lead women to abort wanted fetuses because there are not adequate financial and social supports available to care for a child. Because feminist accounts value fetuses that are wanted by the women who carry them, they oppose practices which force women to abort because of pov- erty or intimidation. Yet, the sorts of social changes necessary if we are to free women from having abor- tions out of economic necessity are vast; they include changes not only in legal and health- care policy, but also in housing, child care, employment, etc. (Petchesky 1980, p. 112). Nonetheless, feminist ethics defines reproductive freedom as the condition under which women are able to make truly voluntary choices about their reproductive lives, and these many dimen- sions are implicit in the ideal.

Clearly, feminists are not “ pro- abortion,” for they are concerned to ensure the safety of each preg- nancy to the greatest degree possible; wanted fetuses should not be harmed or lost. Therefore, adequate pre- and postnatal care and nutrition are also impor- tant elements of any feminist position on reproduc- tive freedom. Where anti- abortionists direct their energies to trying to prevent women from obtain- ing abortions, feminists seek to protect the health of wanted fetuses. They recognize that far more could be done to protect and care for fetuses if the state directed its resources at supporting women who con- tinue their pregnancies, rather than draining away resources in order to police women who find that they must interrupt their pregnancies. Caring for the women who carry fetuses is not only a more legiti- mate policy than is regulating them; it is probably also more effective at ensuring the health and well- being of more fetuses.

Feminist ethics also explores how abortion poli- cies fit within the politics of sexual domination. Most feminists are sensitive to the fact that many men sup- port women’s right to abortion out of the belief that women will be more willing sexual partners if they believe that they can readily terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Some men coerce their partners into obtaining abortions the women may not want.19 Feminists understand that many women oppose abor- tion for this very reason, being unwilling to support

their fetuses if they are determined enough to manage the struggle should not be accepted as the sole moral consideration.

Nonetheless, feminists must formulate their dis- tinctive response to legislative initiatives on abortion. The tendency of Canadian politicians confronted by vocal activists on both sides of the abortion issue has been to seek “compromises” that seem to give something to each (and, thereby, also deprives each of important features sought in policy formation). Thus, the House of Commons recently passed a law (Bill C- 43) that allows a woman to have an abortion only if a doctor certifies that her physical, mental, or emotional health will be otherwise threatened. Many non- feminist supporters of women’s right to choose consider this a victory and urge feminists to be satis- fied with it, but feminists have good reason to object. Besides their obvious objection to having abortion returned to the Criminal Code, feminists also object that this policy considers doctors and not women the best judges of a woman’s need for abortion; femi- nists have little reason to trust doctors to appreciate the political dimension of abortion or to respond adequately to women’s needs. Abortion must be a woman’s decision, and not one controlled by her doc- tor. Further, experience shows that doctors are already reluctant to provide abortions to women; the opportu- nity this law presents for criminal persecution of doc- tors by anti- abortion campaigners is a sufficient worry to inhibit their participation.17 Feminists want women’s decision- making to be recognized as legitimate, and cannot be satisfied with a law that makes abortion a medical choice.

Feminists support abortion on demand because they know that women must have control over their reproduction. For the same reason, they actively oppose forced abortion and coerced sterilization, prac- tices that are sometimes inflicted on the most pow- erless women, especially those in the Third World. Feminist ethics demands that access to voluntary, safe, effective birth control be part of any abortion dis- cussion, so that women have access to other means of avoiding pregnancy.18

Feminist analysis addresses the context as well as the practice of abortion decisions. Thus, feminists

282 Á  PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES

irresponsible; they ought not to be perpetuated. Women, seeking moral guidance in their own deliberations about choosing abortion, do not find such hypothetical discus- sions of much use.

3. In her monumental historical analysis of the early roots of Western patriarchy, Gerda Lerner (1986) determined that patriarchy began in the period from 3100 to 600 B.C. when men appropriated women’s sexual and reproductive capac- ity; the earliest states entrenched patriarchy by institutional- izing the sexual and procreative subordination of women to men.

4. There are some women who claim to be feminists against choice in abortion. See, for instance, Callahan (1987), though few spell out their full feminist program. For reasons I develop in this paper, I do not think this is a consistent position.

5. There is a lot the state could do to ameliorate this condi- tion. If it provided women with adequate financial support, removed the inequities in the labour market, and provided affordable and reliable childcare, pregnancy need not so often lead to a woman’s dependence on a particular man. The fact that it does not do so is evidence of the state’s complicity in maintaining women’s subordinate position with respect to men.

6. See Petchesky (1984), especially Chapter 5, “Considering the Alternatives: The Problems of Contraception,” where she documents the risks and discomforts associated with pill use and IUDs and the increasing rate at which women are choos- ing the option of diaphragm or condom with the option of early legal abortions as backup.

7. See Zillah Eisenstein (1988) for a comprehensive theory of the role of the pregnant body as the central element in the cultural subordination of women.

8. Thomson (1971) is a notable exception to this trend.

9. This seems reminiscent of Aristotle’s view of women as “flower pots” where men implant the seed with all the impor- tant genetic information and the movement necessary for development and women’s job is that of passive gestation, like the flower pot. For exploration of the flower pot picture of pregnancy, see Whitbeck (1973) and Lange (1983).

10. Contrast Warren (1989) with Tooley (1972).

11. The definition of pregnancy as a purely passive activity reaches its ghoulish conclusion in the increasing acceptabil- ity of sustaining brain- dead women on life support systems to continue their functions as incubators until the fetus can

a practice that increases women’s sexual vulnerabil- ity (Luker 1984, p. 209–15). Thus, it is important that feminists develop a coherent analysis of reproduc- tive freedom that includes sexual freedom (as women choose to define it). That requires an analysis of sexual freedom that includes women’s right to refuse sex: such a right can only be assured if women have equal power to men and are not subject to domination by virtue of their sex.20

In sum, then, feminist ethics demands that moral discussions of abortion be more broadly defined than they have been in most philosophic discussions. Only by reflecting on the meaning of ethical pronounce- ments on actual women’s lives and the connections between judgments on abortion and the conditions of domination and subordination can we come to an adequate understanding of the moral status of abor- tion in our society. As Rosalind Petchesky (1980) argues, feminist discussion of abortion “must be moved beyond the framework of a ‘woman’s right to choose’ and connected to a much broader revolution- ary movement that addresses all of the conditions of women’s liberation” (p. 113).

NOTES

1. For some idea of the ways in which traditional moral theory oppresses women, see Morgan (1987) and Hoagland (1988).

2. Critics continue to want to structure the debate around the possibility of women making frivolous abortion deci- sions and hence want feminists to agree to setting boundar- ies on acceptable grounds for choosing abortion. Feminists ought to resist this injunction, though. There is no practi- cal way of drawing a line fairly in the abstract; cases that may appear “frivolous” at a distance, often turn out to be substantive when the details are revealed, i.e., frivolity is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no evidence to sug- gest that women actually make the sorts of choices wor- ried critics hypothesize about: e.g., a woman eight months pregnant who chooses to abort because she wants to take a trip or gets in “a tiff” with her partner. These sorts of fanta- sies, on which demands to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate personal reasons for choosing abortion chiefly rest, reflect an offensive conception of women as

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REFERENCES

Addelson, Kathryn Pyne, 1987. “Moral Passages.” In Women and Moral Theory. Edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.

Baier, Annette, 1985. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Callahan, Sidney, 1987. “A Pro- life Feminist Makes Her Case.” Utne Reader (March/April): 104–14.

CARAL/Halifax, 1990. Telling Our Stories: Abortion Sto- ries from Nova Scotia. Halifax: CARAL/Halifax (Canadian Abortion Rights Action League).

Daly, Mary, 1973. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philoso- phy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby, 1988. “American Feminism and the Language of Control.” In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern Uni- versity Press.

Eisenstein, Zillah R, 1988. The Female Body and the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hoagland, Sara Lucia, 1988. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies.

Lange, Lynda, 1983. “Woman Is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Edited by Sandra Harding and Merill B. Hintickka. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.

Lerner, Gerda, 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York Oxford.

Luker, Kristin, 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Mother- hood. Berkeley: University of California Press.

MacKinnon, Catherine, 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McDonnell, Kathleen, 1984. Not an Easy Choice: A Femi- nist Re- examines Abortion. Toronto: The Women’s Press.

McLaren, Angus, and Arlene Tigar McLaren, 1986. The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Poli- tics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880–1980. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 1987. “Women and Moral Mad- ness.” In Science, Morality and Feminist Theory. Edited by

be safely delivered. For a discussion of this new trend, see Murphy (1989).

12. This apt phrasing is taken from Petchesky (1986), p. 342.

13. Fetuses are almost wholly individuated by the women who bear them. The fetal “contributions” to the relationship are defined by the projections and interpretations of the preg- nant woman in the latter stages of pregnancy if she chooses to perceive fetal movements in purposeful ways (e.g., “it likes classical music, wine, exercise”).

14. Some feminists suggest we seek recognition of the legitimacy of non- medical abortion services. This would reduce costs and increase access dramatically, with no appar- ent increase in risk, provided that services were offered by trained, responsible practitioners concerned with the well- being of their clients. It would also allow the possibility of increasing women’s control over abortion. See, for example McDonnell (1984), chap. 8.

15. For a useful model of such a centre, see Wagner and Lee (1989).

16. See CARAL/Halifax (1990) for women’s stories about their experiences with hospitals and free- standing abortion clinics.

17. The Canadian Medical Association has confirmed those fears. In testimony before the House of Commons commit- tee reviewing the bill, the CMA reported that over half the doctors surveyed who now perform abortions expect to stop offering them if the legislation goes through. Since the Com- mons passed the bill, the threats of withdrawal of service have increased. Many doctors plan to abandon their abortion service once the law is introduced, because they are unwilling to accept the harassment they anticipate from anti- abortion zealots. Even those who believe that they will eventually win any court case that arises, fear the expense and anxiety involved as the case plays itself out.

18. Therefore, the Soviet model, where women have access to multiple abortions but where there is no other birth control available, must also be opposed.

19. See CARAL/Halifax (1990), p. 20–21, for examples of this sort of abuse.

20. It also requires that discussions of reproductive and sexual freedom not be confined to “the language of con- trol and sexuality characteristic of a technology of sex” (Diamond and Quinby 1988, p. 197), for such language is alienating and constrains women’s experiences of their own sexuality.

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_____. 1984. Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexu- ality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern Uni- versity Press.

Sumner, L. W., 1981. Abortion and Moral Theory. Princ- eton: Princeton University Press.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1971. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1:47–66.

Tooley, Michael, 1972. “Abortion and Infanticide.” Phi- losophy and Public Affairs, 2,1 (Fall): 37–65.

Van Wagner, Vicki, and Bob Lee, 1989. “Principles into Practice: An Activist Vision of Feminist Reproductive Health Care.” In The Future of Human Reproduction. Edited by Christine Overall. Toronto: The Women’s Press.

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Overall, Christine, 1987. Ethics and Human Reproduction: A Feminist Analysis. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.

Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 1980. “Reproductive Free- dom: Beyond ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose.” In Women: Sex and Sexuality. Edited by Catherine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.