Permitting Abortion and Prohibiting Prenatal Harm Essay

The fetus has a valuable future, just as we consider children, the retarded or mentally ill to have valuable futures, thus killing a fetus is not morally permissible. Another pro-choice argument is that the fetus has no desire to live and consequently there is no wrongness in killing. Marquis criticizes this viewpoint, as society believes it is morally wrong to kill those who have no desire to live, and those who are unconscious or suicidal (Gedge & Waluchow, 2012, p220).

Mary Anne Warren (p.195-196) points out the exceptional circumstances of pregnancy; where one human is entirely biologically reliant on another and where it is impossible for complete personhood rights to not be in conflict between the foetus and the mother. Consider the following case. A mother and an expecting mother both express an intent to kill their child or unborn child respectively. Services are available to take the postnatal children from their mother without affecting her body. Yet to protect the foetus, one would have to imprison the mother until birth, or worse, force a caesarean on her. Warren (193) points out that forced caesareans are not merely a hypothetical

In her essay “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” Margaret Olivia Little examines whether it should be permissible for the state to force the intimacy of gestation on a woman against her consent. Little concludes that “mandating gestation against a woman’s consent is itself a harm - a liberty harm” (p. 303). She reaches this conclusion after examining the deficiencies in the current methods used to examine and evaluate the issues of abortion. Their focus on the definition of a “person” and the point in time when the fetus becomes a distinct person entitled to the benefits and protections of the law fails to capture “the subtleties and ambivalences that suffuse the issue” (p. 295). Public debate on the right to life and the right

Mary Anne Warren argues in the position that abortion is morally permissible because the fetus is not a person therefore has no rights and not considered immoral to be killed. I shall argue that Warren’s argument in invalid since the claims of argument cannot be proven.

The debate about abortion focuses on two issues; 1.) Whether the human fetus has the right to life, and, if so, 2.) Whether the rights of the mother override the rights of the fetus. The two ethicists who present strong arguments for their position, and who I am further going to discuss are that of Don Marquis and Judith Thomson. Marquis' "Future Like Ours" (FLO) theory represents his main argument, whereas, Thomson uses analogies to influence the reader of her point of view. Each argument contains strengths and weaknesses, and the point of this paper is to show you that Marquis presents a more sound argument against abortion than Thomson presents for it. An in depth overview of both arguments will be

Proponents of punishing pregnant women, who put their fetuses at risk, have highlighted some pertinent legal and ethical issues. One is that a viable fetus (fetus after 27 weeks gestation) has certain rights and privileges. They are of the opinion that as soon as the fetus is viable and can survive independently from it mother, it becomes a

By arguing that the fetus has rights, it is implied that the fetus has a right to be in its mother?s womb regardless of her consent. This is obviously false, considering the mother has only let it be there by some form of her authorization. A fetus does not invade a woman?s body against her will, there was an act that the mother took part in, willingly or not, which allowed for a condition in which her egg was fertilized and began to mutate into a larger clump of her cells in her body and subsequently formed a fetus. If the fetus exists in a woman?s body only by her permission, how could we argue that it has a right to be there against her will? We can?t. It would be

It is a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. If she is the one that undergoes the stress that comes with childbirth, then it should be her right to ,and her right alone to decide whether or not she wants to go through it or not. Not doing so would violate her right to freedom of choice, as well as lead to unsafe abortions that could harm the mother (Nair, 2010). Another question is how could you kill a fetus or embryo when it is the same as a human being? Which begs the question, if the fetus is alive, then so are the eggs and sperm? How do you make the distinction?

Whether or not abortion is permissible has held controversy for several years. Many people believe it is impermissible to have an abortion because the fetus is a person, therefore, it is murder. Judith Thomson proposes that abortion is permissible. With both sides, there comes several different objections. I will argue against Thomson’s argument that abortion is permissible and show that it is, in fact, impermissible.

To believe that murdering an unborn child on circumstantial grounds and to believe in the modern court process is an obvious form of doublethink. However, the pro-choice position has a quick rebuttal to this question by claiming that the aborted fetus is not a person or a child so “they cannot be benefited or harmed” in the first place (157). In other words, the unborn fetus is not included in definition for child in the slogan: “Pro-Child / Pro-Choice”. Seeing that this rebuttal would quickly lead to an argument concerning what constitutes personhood, Boss moves on to examine the benefits abortion-on-demand gives to the second category, the born child.

The Feminists for Life of America also defends women’s rights and believe they do not come at the expense of others, especially those of the women’s preborn children (FFL 1998). The FFL also believes that a woman deserves the right to control her body no matter where she lives; even if she’s still living inside her mother’s womb (FFL 1998). Others make look at the view of “there are no rights of arms or of tumors or of any piece of tissue growing within a woman, even if it has the capacity to become in time a human being”(Rand qtd. in Stubblefield 1997). These two opposing sides illustrate why this issue will never be settled.

3. One argument is that the baby is not a human at conception. The Church says that studies have proved otherwise. Another argument is that a woman has the right to her body. The Church says that the baby's body is not the mother's, thus the mother does not have the right to hurt the embryo/fetus.

The right that a woman has to make choices concerning her own body is the basis for several prochoice arguments concerning abortion. While prolife advocates will tie their arguments to the moral status of the fetus we will look at some cases where the fetus’s right to life are not the focus of the abortion argument.

In the case of abortion, both the moral and physical statuses of the fetus serve as pivotal points to the ongoing debate regarding the moral justifiability on the termination of a pregnancy. Through this, popular arguments often involve an attempt to confirm or deny the humanity of the fetus human as being comparable to ourselves, and thus, if so, would call for the classification of abortion into a morally unjustifiable area. Whereas if the fetus can be proven to not satisfy the requirements of a human being, will allow for the justification of an abortion in most if not all cases. However, it would seem logical to conclude that the fetus during pregnancy should not be classified as a legitimate human and therefore, not entitled to the basic

Convenience is a priority in a fast movie world like today. Convenience is found in ending a life instead of facing the consequences for being irresponsible, murder for the sake of convenience. A baby’s life and therefore that of all children is considered disposable in the US. The baby, whether he/she is born or not, has the right to live. Who can say that the baby has no hope? It 's possible that the baby can have a better life than ours. Some defenders of abortion will concede that the entity in the womb is still not, or not yet, a "person.” "Not a person" has nothing to do with science and everything to do with someone 's own moral philosophy. With that thought we 're either persons or property; most people are reluctant to call a human child a piece of property. Many controversial thoughts are brought up in this subject abortion is about profit, Outlawing abortion will mean back-alley butchers and countless women dying, trauma and misery of infertility, abortion was not an act of empowerment but the result of abandonment, betrayal, and desperation, and how it has negatively affected their lives. We live in a world where it is simple to throw away anything or anyone that is an inconvenience. There is one difference of shooting someone point blank and abortion, abortion is legal. Abortion is murder of the innocent.