Warren's Theory Of A Fetus Essay

(Antevil, Jeffrey. Supreme Court rules on Roe vs. Wade in 1973. New York Daily News. print.) So the court analyzed abortion laws and its history from then till now, and with that they found 3 justifications for outlawing abortions: "a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct"; protecting the health of women; and protecting prenatal life.” (McBride, Alex. Roe v. Wade (1973). The Supreme Court. December 2006. Print.) The Court denied the first two as they were pointless but as for the third, the Court disputed that fetal life wasn’t necessarily a "person" as said and guarded in the U.S. Constitution. Culturally, although a few associations view fetuses as human beings that justify full rights, no general agreement exists. The Court than stated that Texas was thus capturing that only one "view" of many individuals. Securing all fetuses beneath this outlook of prenatal life wasn’t amply valuable to explain the state's prevention of roughly all

There are many factors that are taken into consideration when determining if abortion is morally permissible, or wrong including; sentience of the fetus, the fetuses right to life, the difference between adult human beings and fetuses, the autonomy of the pregnant woman, and the legality of abortion. Don Marquis argues that abortion is always morally wrong, excluding cases in which the woman is threatened by pregnancy, or abortion after rape, because fetuses have a valuable future. Mary Anne Warren contends that late term abortions are morally permissible because birth is the most significant event for a fetus, and a woman’s autonomy should never be suspended.

Both articles address this idea of personhood, but neither one really wins. The good thing with defining personhood biologically—saying it’s a person at conception—quantifies it…it gives a definitive time, not some subjective date when certain sentient or reasoning qualities are met, and this lessens the confusion. But I still agree somewhat with the view held by Warren that fetuses can’t reason or fend for themselves nor (until cerebral development) do really anything other than exist. So again, I don’t think either side has a stronger case, because both Warren and Marquis have points that basically offset one another.

Warren felt that a fetus can meet none of the cases for personhood and therefore abortion should be legal without

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

While parts of both may be true, both cannot stand side by side as completely true when discussing abortion. As they stand today, fetus rights and female rights are incompatible in arena of abortion. Even the “other side” agrees that the two cannot stand shoulder to shoulder. In a chapter entitled “Abortion Does Not Violate Human Rights”, Christian Beenfeldt quotes Brian McKinely when claiming that female rights have a higher precedence than fetus rights: “It’s actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other.” So one question remains, which more important, fetus rights or female rights? The winner of this question can be decided by one simple factor: is the fetus to be considered a true, living human being at the point of conception, or does true human life not begin until after birth? A clarification should be made here, however. In this paper it will be assumed that everyone involved in this debate considers a newborn child to be a human being. That is, at the moment of birth, a child either becomes a human being or continues to be a human being; regardless of the fetus’s life state before birth, it will be assumed that all agree that birth “confirms”, so to speak, the life and human existence of the newborn.

The general argument made from Warren is (1) If a person, they have the right to life, (2) The fetus is not considered a person, and (3) Therefore, since the fetus is not a person they do not have a right to life. Also, (4) A human being needs all the morals of personhood to be considered a person, (5) An infant does not have morals, and (6) Therefore, an infant is not a person because the do not have the morals to be considered a person.

The debate about the legality of abortion involves debating the legal status of the fetus. If the fetus is a person, anti-choice activists argue, then abortion is murder and should be illegal. Even if the fetus is a person, though, abortion may have justified as necessary to women’s body self-govern but that wouldn’t mean that abortion is automatically ethical. Perhaps the state can’t force women to carry pregnancies to term, but it could argue that it is the most ethical choice.

Mary Anne Warren’s argument on the legal status of abortion stands on a concrete understanding and realization of an individual’s personhood. Now Mary Anne Warren’s unyielding argument on the basis of personhood is that, “If we assume that an entity is a person just because it happens to belong to our favored biological classification, we stand convicted of speciesism, close cousin to racism. There are properties that do qualify an entity as a person, but simply being human is not one of them” (124). To first be able to argue why the abortion of a fetus is permissible she needs to give a clear distinction of what can be established a decisive factor of personhood. To distinguish a line between a fetus and a human and if abortion is to be morally permissible there needs to be an understanding of when this cut off between the two officially happens. In an example of the potential personhood and a right to life Mary Ann Warren uses a hypothetical scenario of a space explorer who lands on an unknown plant. While on this plant he encounters a race of aliens. Now since he is on another plant in the presence of these alien beings how should he act towards these beings. He must first determine if they have the capability of morality or if it is acceptable to consume these aliens for food. To determine if these aliens are in fact part of a moral personhood maybe he can notice works of art, forms of tools, and communication. However, even without evidence of these things they could

It has the full potential of becoming a person. In that sentence is the distinction. A person has the right to live and to be treated with equal consideration among the rest of the population. A fetus, although undeniably a human, is not a person, and therefore does not have those rights. A single cell amoeba is extremely similar to a human zygote, it also has a unique set of DNA, uses oxygen for energy that allows its cells divide and grow just the same as a human zygote; but it would be absurd for someone to defend the life of this amoeba because it has a right to live. To refer to a fetus as a person that deserves rights is a blatant category mistake. A fetus is not a person in the same right as you and I, it is a bundle of human cells with the potential of becoming a person.

One of the more vulnerable parts of her arguments centers on the consideration of whether sentient fetuses are persons. While they may not have the ability to act upon their sentience, that does not mean that they are not persons. Here is where she brings up the reasons why infants are persons, and thus somehow morally above even sentient fetuses, and especially fetuses not beyond the first trimester. Her words are that: “not all sentient beings are persons with full and equal moral rights”(146). The difference between moral and empirical rationale behind how we act towards people is significant for Warren.

Abortion is a decision every person should decide for themselves. The major arguments against abortion are how a fetus is a person; a fetus has rights; and it is morally impermissible to take a life. Many consider abortion to be equivalent to murder. However, a fetus is not a person. There are important traits one most hold to be a person, 1) self-awareness, one must be able to make decisions regarding themselves 2) being able to converse with others and hold a relationship 3) consciousness, one must be able to make rational decisions and have thought (Warren). On important aspect of being person is the ability to be aware of its surroundings and decision making. Being a pregnant is not a situation everyone gets to experience and the

Mary Anne Warren is one of the top advocates for keeping abortion legal without any restrictions on it. She states that the morality of abortion is dependent on the moral status of the baby, not simply on the rights of the mother. She criticizes those who defend abortion as the right to control one's body: "it 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…" (The Monist, pg. 44) Using this analogy she shows that just because the fetus is inside us it does mean we have a right to terminate it.

“On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”, an essay written by Mary Anne Warren, defend abortion in any stage of a woman’s pregnancy (pg 468). Warren argues that the potential to become a human being is not the same as being human and deserving the same right to life (pg. 468-472). This essay asserts that in order to be human, one must possess five particular traits (pg. 470). These trait are consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the ability to communicate, and awareness of oneself (pg. 470). Warren claims that since a fetus has not yet acquired all of the traits, then that fetus is not human and therefore does not have the right to life (pg. 470).

The following essay will examine the morality of abortion with specific reference to the writings of Don Marquis, Judith Jarvis Thompson, Peter Singer and Mary Anne Warren. I will begin by assessing the strength of the argument provided by Marquis which claims that abortion is impermissible because it deprives a being of a potential “future like ours,” and then go on to consider the writings of Singer, Thomson and Warren to both refute Marquis claims and support my assertion that abortion is morally permissible primarily because of the threat to the freedom and bodily autonomy of women extending the right to life to a foetus in utero would pose.