Abortion - “the Wrong of Abortion”

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Abortion is one of the most controversial topics of all times. The definition most people associate with abortion is the termination of unwanted pregnancy. In their essay, “The Wrong of Abortion”, Patrick Lee and Robert P. George argue that intentional abortion is unjust and therefore objectively immoral no matter the circumstances. Also, they argue that “the burden of carrying the baby is significantly less than the harm the baby would suffer by being killed; the mother and father have a special responsibility to the child; it follows that intentional abortion (even in few cases where the baby’s death is an unintended but foreseen side effect) is unjust ” (24).
I am personally in between pro-life and pro-choice. On the one hand, I agree
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This means that the woman has a duty or a responsibility of taking care for her child regardless if she wanted the baby or not. “Since we have special responsibilities to those with whom we are closely untied, it follows that we in fact do have a special responsibility to our children anterior to our having voluntarily assumed such responsibility or consented to the relationship” (23). Abortion is clearly used to avoid responsibility and the authors call this unjust or intentional killing.
Nevertheless, while the authors argue that abortion is intentional killing most of the time, they also claim that causing death as a side effect is morally permissible. For example, if the pregnant woman has cancer in her uterus that will surely endanger the woman’s life, then Lee and George claim that, in this case, it can be morally right to remove the cancer with the baby still in her womb, even if the baby (fetus) dies as a result. They consider the baby’s death as a side effect as well as the ending of the pregnancy itself but they claim that the mother’s life is more important. This type of abortion is known as indirect or non-intentional killing (21). However, they also assert that not every death that is caused because of side effects is right. For instance, if the mother or the father have a bad habit of smoking when they know for a fact that this will endanger the baby’s (fetus)

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