Abortion

CHAPTER 9
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Abortion
221
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, discussion 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, medical, psychological, semantic, and legal. Then we
consider how the moral theories discussed in previous 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 deliberate termination of a pregnancy by surgical or
medical (with drugs) means. The unintentional termination of a pregnancy (due to a medical disorder
or injury) is known as a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage. 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 provoked 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 victim 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 amendment to ban virtually all abortions; two women
who have been friends for years disagreeing bitterly 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 usually accompanied by uncritical or dogmatic thinking. 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
222 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 provoke 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 procedure, 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 abortions are performed, also called the first trimester), a
method called suction curettage (or dilation and suction 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 contractions 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 fertilization, 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 information 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 implantation until the eighth week after fertilization it
is known technically as an embryo. In the embryonic 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, doctors can detect brain activity. From the end of
the eighth week until birth (approximately week
forty), the embryo is known in medical terminology 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.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 223
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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 miscarriages) 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 Catholic; 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, fifteento seventeen- year- olds for 3 percent, and those
younger than fifteen for 0.2 percent.
• White patients accounted for 39 percent of abortion 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 abortion 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 parent or were having problems with their husband 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 percent of all nonhospital abortions in 2014 and
for 45 percent of abortions before nine weeks’
gestation.*
*Derived from “Fact Sheet” and “National Reproductive Health Profile,” data compiled and developed by
the Alan Guttmacher Institute, January 2017, January
2018, www.guttmacher.org (March 7, 2018).
Abortion in the United States: Facts and Figures
224 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
abortions; and held that states may require a girl
under eighteen to obtain either the informed consent of a parent or a court order before getting an
abortion.
MORAL THEORIES
How would a utilitarian judge the moral permissibility of abortion? How would a Kantian theorist or
a natural law theorist evaluate it? Let us take utilitarianism 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 unhappiness that could be caused by the mother’s remaining 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 pregnant as a result of rape or incest, the agony of bringing 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, unhappiness 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 biological 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 generally requires some use of abortion. Unless population 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 concern 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 trimester, 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 abortions 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 Constitution “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 justices 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 seeking an abortion does not have to notify her husband of her intent; affirmed that states may not
impose restrictions that present an “undue burden,” or excessive impediment, to women seeking
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 225
results from adhering to it. He could argue on various 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 produce 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 personal 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 interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or
no interest strong enough to support any limitation 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 protecting 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 personal 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 restrictions 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 justifications for intervention. Up to those points, the
abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and
primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician. If an individual practitioner abuses the privilege of exercising
proper medical judgment, the usual remedies, judicial and intra- professional, are available.*
*Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153–54, 165–66 (1973).
Majority Opinion in Roe v. Wade
226 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 quantity 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 abortion? 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 matter. There are certain passages, however, that
are often quoted by conservatives because they
seem to suggest that fetuses have full human status. 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 conservative 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 anything else of the kind is being discussed in this passage. 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 status of fetuses occurs in the 21st chapter of Exodus. This chapter is part of a detailed description
of the law of the ancient Israelites. Here the penalty 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 apparently regarded fetuses as something less than full
human beings.*
*James Rachels, from The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th Ed. pp. 59–60. Copyright © 2003 McGraw Hill
Education. Reprinted with permission.
ABORTION AND THE SCRIPTURES
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 227
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. Typically 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 position 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. Second, the theory is very clear about the treatment
of innocent persons: it is always morally wrong
to directly kill the innocent. So the direct, intentional 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 person 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 cancer by performing a hysterectomy on her or giving
her chemotherapy— treatment that has the unintended 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 plentiful 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 pregnancy 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.
228 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 fertilization. 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 properties 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 precise 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 probabilities 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 conservative 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 meanings 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.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 229
The positive argument for conception as the decision moment of humanization is that at conception
the new being receives the genetic code. It is this
genetic information which determines his characteristics, 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 organizations 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 physician 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 specified point in pregnancy.
• “ Partial- birth” abortion: Nineteen states have
laws in effect that prohibit “ partial- birth” abortion. Three of these laws apply only to postviability 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 coverage at an additional cost.
• Refusal: Forty- five states allow individual
health care providers to refuse to participate
in an abortion. Forty- two states allow institutions to refuse to perform abortions, sixteen
of which limit refusal to private or religious
institutions.
• State- mandated counseling: Sixteen states mandate 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 specified 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).
State Abortion Laws
230 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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. Premise 1, then, is the crux of the liberal’s argument (just
as Premise 1 is the heart of the conservative’s argument). 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 communicate, 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 probably 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 genetically 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 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 [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 longer a person; defective human beings, with no appreciable 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 conservative’s argument, the liberal’s is based on a particular
view of the moral status of the fetus. But in opposition 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 permissible 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 conservative one have a common premise: it is wrong to kill
an innocent person. Thus the liberal and the conservative agree on the immorality of murder. Their
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 231
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 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
’
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 abortion 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 consciousness, specifically the capacity to have sense experiences. If being sentient (especially the capacity to feel
pleasure and pain) is proof of personhood, then personhood must not arise in the fetus until the second
trimester, when neurological pathways are developed enough to make sense experience possible. But
why should we regard sentience as a marker for personhood 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 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
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 criteria 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 objection 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 physiological 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, moderates 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 experience), 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 getting better at sustaining fetal life outside the womb,
gradually pushing viability further back toward conception. 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 responsibility 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 development 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 performed by widening the cervix and drawing out the
embryo from the uterus with a syringe (manual vacuum 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 violinist, 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 contraception. (Like most people involved in the abortion
debate, Thomson also thinks that abortion is morally 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 terminate 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, sustaining 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 yourself 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 abortion. 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 regulate 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 preserve 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 permissible. The conservative case is built on the supposition 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 positions between these two extremes, asserting on various 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,” Commonweal 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 Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics, ed. Ronald Munson,
7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004).
John T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” 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 Abortion 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: Clarendon 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 Morality,” in Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (New York:
Macmillan, 1970).
ETHICAL DILEMMAS
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 economic 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-ethnicgroups-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 abortion 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 dangers 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.
READINGS
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 argument. 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 reason 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 Blackwell 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 imagine 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 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 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 argument I mentioned a moment ago.
In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you
didn’t volunteer for the operation that plugged the violinist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abortion 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 development 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 “slippery 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 prospects 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 discuss any of this. For it seems to me to be of great interest 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 commonly 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 explanation, 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 239
to grant— the sum of her rights now outweighing the
fetus’ right to life?
The most familiar argument here is the following. 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 killing 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 person is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion 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 conclusion 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 performs 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 sympathize, 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 question 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 pregnancy 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 impermissible 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 cardiac 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 mother’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 abortion 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 simply 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 intervene.” 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 weakened 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 supposition 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 certain 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 interesting, namely the sense that one has a right to refuse to
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 241
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 suppose 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 kidneys. 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 difficulty 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 securing 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 perform 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 granting 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 reason 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.
242 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
given him any such right. But we have to notice that in
unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violinists, 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 violinist 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 killing. 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 responsibility 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 kidneys. 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 something 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 present 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 opponents 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. Suppose 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 chocolates, he is unjust to him, for the brother has been
given a right to half of them. But suppose that, having 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 243
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 carpets 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 furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t
do— for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway 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 voluntarily 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 purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details
make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I therefore 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
244 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 kidneys, 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 possibility 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 commitments, 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 person 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 245
even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police. Minimally 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 Samaritan 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 person who has no special right (we were leaving open
the possibility of this) to demand it.
Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions, no one in any country in the world is legally
required to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone 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 liberalization of abortion laws, in fact working toward having 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 raiment, 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 compassion on him.
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring 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 perhaps 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
246 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 responsibility 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 violinist; 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 abortion 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 standard 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 seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the
should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled 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 sacrifices 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 Samaritan would extricate him. There you are, you were kidnapped, 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 analogies 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 responsibility 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.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 247
thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again. She may therefore 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 powerful 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 conception. 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 permissibility 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, sustaining 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 yourself 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 difficulties 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 abortion. 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 terminating, 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.
248 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 abortion 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 abstraction 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 generally 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 antiabortionist 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 without becoming involved in problems about what entitles 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 problems 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 argument 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 adequately come to grips with the conceptual issues surrounding 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 consequences 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, breaking 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 abortion, we cannot hope to convince those who consider
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 249
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 unconscious 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 obligations 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 certainly 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 particularly invidious, for it amounts to the decision that it
is appropriate, in deciding the moral status of abortion, to leave the rights of the pregnant woman out
of consideration entirely, except possibly when her
life is threatened. Obviously, this will not do; determining 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 essential, 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 Section 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 conclusiveness which is essential to our hopes of convincing those who are skeptical about the morality of
abortion, and that we therefore cannot avoid dealing with the question of whether or not a fetus really
does have the same right to life as a (more fully developed) human being.
In Section II, I will propose an answer to this question, namely, that a fetus cannot be considered a member 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 membership in this community. I will argue that a fetus, whatever 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.
250 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 probably 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 considers 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 seventh 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 permissible 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 intuitions 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 faithfully, 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 antiabortionist 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 responsibility, and hence the extent of her obligation. This is an
extremely unsatisfactory outcome, from the viewpoint 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 forgetting 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 251
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 voluntarily joined this society, knowing the possible consequences, 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 violinist. 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 agreement 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 sometimes 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 realization 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 demonstrate the moral innocuousness of abortion, since
this apparently has not been adequately done before.
II
The question which we must answer in order to produce 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 considered a person? This is obviously not the place to
attempt a complete analysis of the concept of personhood, but we do not need such a fully adequate analysis 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 manufacturing of tools, weapons, or shelters, since these factors 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 fallaciousness 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 member 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 becoming human in the moral sense.
2. Defining the Moral Community
Can it be established that genetic humanity is sufficient 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 253
that he had no notion at all of what a person is—
perhaps because he had confused the concept of a person 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 irreconcilably 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. Furthermore, I think that on reflection even the antiabortionists 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 concept; 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 community. 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 problems 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
254 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 personlike 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 relative safety of the new techniques of artificially inducing 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 abortion, 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 educating 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 suggestions 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 paradigm, in particular how far advanced since conception, 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 continuous 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 genetically human, or having recognizably human facial
and other physical features, or detectable brain activity, 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 255
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) person. 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 maintain 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 permitting 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 justified 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 having 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 person 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 person? 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 person 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
256 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
3. Of course, the principle that it is (always) wrong to kill innocent human beings is in need of many other modifications,
e.g., that it may be permissible to do so to save a greater number 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 pregnancy 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 precautions against a highly unlikely event (as opposed to reasonable 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 abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether
or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously 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 importance 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 abortion 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 deliberate abortions are seriously immoral.
The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seriously immoral has received little support in the recent
philosophical literature. No doubt most philosophers
affiliated with secular institutions of higher education believe that the anti- abortion position is either
a symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclusion 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 ethics 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 Philosophy LXXXVI, 4 (April 1989): 183–202. Reprinted by permission of
the publisher and the author.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 257
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 problem 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 killing 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 mentally ill. Therefore, we seem again to have a standoff.
The anti- abortionist charges, not unreasonably, that
pro- choice principles concerning killing are too narrow to be acceptable; the pro- choicer charges, not
unreasonably, that anti- abortionist principles concerning killing are too broad to be acceptable.
I.
A sketch of standard anti- abortion and pro- choice
arguments exhibits how these arguments possess certain symmetries that explain why partisans of those
positions are so convinced of the correctness of their
own positions, why they are not successful in convincing 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 similarities. 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 sufficient 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 characterizing 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 obligation 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
258 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 biological 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 ‘person’ is typically defined in terms of psychological
characteristics, although there will certainly be disagreement 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 provide 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 objection (he calls psychological personhood “commonsense personhood”):
The characteristics that confer commonsense personhood 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 position 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 culture 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 independent 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 difficulties 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 symmetries in the two positions. In addition to counterexample 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 explaining why a merely biological category should make a
moral difference. Why, it is asked, is it any more reasonable to base a moral conclusion on the number of
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 259
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 standard 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 subject 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 wrongness 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 projects; 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 capacities 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 hierarchies, 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 psychological person under some description is a necessary 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 connection 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 ultimately 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 analysis 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 killing 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 victim of more than perhaps any other crime. In the second 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 consists 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 murderer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and relatives, 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 biological life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects,
experiences, and enjoyments which would otherwise
have constituted my future personal life. These activities, 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 261
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 children 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 theory 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 plausibility 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 killing 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 further merit of this theory. Accordingly, it seems that
this value of a future- like- ours theory of the wrongness 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 feature 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 biologically 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 common 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 additional 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 controversial. 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 theories 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 speaking, the value of a human’s future which makes killing 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
262 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 serious wrongness of abortion is also sound, for the structure 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 without recourse to the category of person. In neither argument 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 animals is the correct account. Is it? In the first place, it
seems plausible. In the second place, its major competition 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 animals 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 someone 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 dealings 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 analysis 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 inference that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong
to kill potential persons also. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the category of having a
valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood. The argument to the conclusion that abortion 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 wrongness 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 infliction 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 animals causes suffering. Since causing suffering is what
makes the wanton infliction of pain wrong and since
the wanton infliction of pain on animals causes suffering, it follows that the wanton infliction of pain on
animals is wrong.
This argument for the wrongness of the wanton 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 recognize that the wrong- making feature of these immoral
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 263
valuable experience to continue. Therefore, it might
be said, what makes killing wrong is the discontinuation 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 killing 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 abortion 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 having 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 seriously 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 standard 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 appropriate 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 argument, if sound, shows only that abortion is prima
facie wrong, not that it is wrong in any and all circumstances. 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 justified 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 presumption 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 consequence? This account does not have to be an account
of the necessary conditions for the wrongness of killing. 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 analysis 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 wrongness 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 plausibility. One account is based on the obvious fact that
people value the experience of living and wish for that
264 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 experience 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, projects, 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 situation 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 killing 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 addition 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 killing, 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 argument 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 morally relevant property, the possession of which is sufficient 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 promising 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 position. Obviously, if it is the continuation of one’s activities, 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. Accordingly, 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.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 265
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 preceding 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 cannot conceive of the nature of the procedure. And, as
Tooley himself has pointed out, persons who have
been indoctrinated, or drugged, or rendered temporarily unconscious may be literally incapable of caring 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 discontinuation account of which it is a part.
IV.
The analysis of the previous section suggests that
alternative general accounts of the wrongness of killing 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 ambiguities. 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. Furthermore, my future can be valuable to me even if
I do not value it. This is the case when a young person attempts suicide, but is rescued and goes on to significant 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 follows that, since fetuses lack the conceptual capacity
to desire to continue to live, they lack the right to life.
266 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 unworthy of survival, even though it possessed genuine literary 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 victim. The problem is that the basic intuition that renders 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 victimizability 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 follows 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 contraception 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 contraception 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 explanation is that their lives consist of mere metabolism and
mere metabolism is not enough to ground victimizability. 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, however, that, in the case of children and in other such
cases, “potentially comes into play only where victimizability has been secured on other grounds. . . .”
Bassen’s defense of his view is patently question-
begging, since what is adequate to secure victimizability 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 victims, 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 267
to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion 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 killing which is close to self- evident, because the crucial
morally relevant property clearly applies to fetuses,
and because the argument avoids the usual equivocations 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 contraception. 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 contraception 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 arbitrary, 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 misleads. At the time of contraception, there are hundreds 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 immorality 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 argument for the serious presumptive wrongness of
abortion subject to the assumption that the moral permissibility of abortion stands or falls on the moral status 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 pregnancies, 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 supposition about the morality of abortion, according to virtue 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, inconsiderate, 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 consists 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 commonly discussed in relation to just two considerations: 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 second, and less predominantly (when, that is, the discussion concerns the morality of abortion rather than
the question of permissible legislation in a just society), 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 discussion very similar to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s.1
Now if this is the way the virtue theorist’s discussion 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 prohibiting or permitting it. If we suppose that women do
Rosalind Hursthouse, excerpts from “Virtue Theory and Abortion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20(3): 233–44. Copyright ©
1991 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Reproduced with permission of
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 269
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 extraterrestrial 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 reproduction 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 philosophical literature on abortion has got badly out of touch
with reality.
Now if we are using virtue theory, our first question is not “What do the familiar biological facts
show— what can be derived from them about the status 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 relevant 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 appendectomy is mistaken.4
The fact that the premature termination 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 person 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 discoveries 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 conclusion, it is in a sense relevant, but only in the sense that
the familiar biological facts are relevant. By “the familiar biological facts” I mean the facts that most human
societies are and have been familiar with— that, standardly (but not invariably), pregnancy occurs as the
result of sexual intercourse, that it lasts about nine
months, during which time the fetus grows and develops, that standardly it terminates in the birth of a living 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, deriving 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 relevance 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 literature on abortion, namely, that, far from treating abortion as a unique moral problem, markedly unlike any
270 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 unexpectedly 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 children; 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 appropriate 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 pregnancies 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 disregard this fact about it, to think of abortion as nothing 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 dedicated proponents of the view that deliberate abortion
is just like an appendectomy or haircut rarely hold the
same view of spontaneous abortion, that is, miscarriage. 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 development. 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 271
their connection with having the right attitude to parenthood 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 abortion untouched.
Speaking in terms of women’s rights, people sometimes 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 natural life cycle. The familiar facts support the view that
parenthood in general, and motherhood and childbearing 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 abortion. Nor does a woman who has been a good mother
and is approaching the age at which she may be looking 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, necessarily, 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 manifesting 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 crawling 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 childbearing 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 abortion 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
272 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
or guilt inappropriate. For, by virtue of the fact that
a human life has been cut short, some evil has probably 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 contraception. 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 circumstances 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 cowardly or irresolute or irresponsible or light- minded,
but because lack of the requisite opposite of these failings 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 correct 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 preponderance of male doctors) that only women instigate. 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 intrinsically 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 particular, 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 parenthood 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 manifesting 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 virtuous could recommend— it does not follow that there
is no sense in which having the abortion is wrong,
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 273
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 knowledge 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 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” (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 appropriate, 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 happens 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 important 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 callousness and kindness were allowed more weight.
2. One possible qualification: if one ties the concept of justice 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.
274 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 envision very different sorts of policies for this purpose
than those considered by non- feminist sympathizers.
For example, Kathleen McDonnell (1984) urges feminists 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 consider 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 virtually 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 abortions 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 mainstream literature.
Among the many differences found between
feminist and non- feminist arguments about abortion, 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 questions, ignoring (and thereby obscuring) relevant connections to other social practices that oppress women.
They are generally grounded in masculinist conceptions 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 injustice 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, including 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 Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 275
she will have—between one and three more than her
working childless counterpart” (Petchesky 1984, p.
150). In many circumstances, having a child will exacerbate 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 determining when abortion is morally justified. Women’s
personal deliberations about abortion include contextually defined considerations reflecting her commitment 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 complex 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 universal way. Women must be acknowledged as full moral
agents with the responsibility for making moral decisions 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 evaluation of abortion. Even without patriarchy, bearing a
Although anti- abortion campaigners imagine that
women often make frivolous and irresponsible decisions 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 difficulties 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 ability 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 relationships 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 psychological 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 anticipate: 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 profound 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
276 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 involuntary 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 combination with spermicidal foams or jelly. But these
methods also pose difficulties for women. They may
be socially awkward to use: young women are discouraged 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 factor 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 frequency 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 themselves from male dominance.4
Many perceive the
commitment of the political right wing to opposing
abortion as part of a general strategy to reassert patriarchal 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 vulnerability 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, feminist analyses of abortion direct attention to the question of how women get pregnant. Those who reject
abortion seem to believe that women can avoid
unwanted pregnancies by avoiding sexual intercourse. 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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 277
The woman on whom the fetus depends for survival 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 irresponsible 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 characteristics, e.g., eyes, fingers, and toes. The fact that the fetus
in its early stages is microscopic, virtually indistinguishable 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 defenders and opponents of women’s right to choose abortion 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 dependent 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 feature 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 available; pregnancy is explicitly a condition associated
with the female body.7
Because the need for abortion
is experienced only by women, policies about abortion 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 question 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 proponents 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 concentrated on showing that the fetus is indeed without 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 important, 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.
278 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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 competition 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 examined 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 morally irrelevant if one discounts the perspective of the
pregnant woman: feminists seem to be alone in recognizing her perspective as morally important.10
Within anti- abortion arguments, fetuses are identified as individuals: in our culture which views the
(abstract) individual as sacred, fetuses qua individuals 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 medical 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 practice 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 adversarial (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
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 279
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 humbler fact that each person has a childhood in which a
cultural heritage is transmitted, ready for adolescent
rejection and adult discriminating selection and contribution. Persons come after and before other persons. (P. 84–85; her emphasis.)
Persons, in other words, are members of a social community which shapes and values them, and personhood 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 primary and particularly intimate relationship with the
woman in whose womb it develops; any other relationship 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 asymmetrical, 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 otherwise, 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 reality, 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 particular fetuses they carry, and choose to see their pregnancies 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 individual fetuses varies dramatically from case to case,
in many theoretical accounts. Fetuses develop in specific 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 independent existence; their existence is uniquely tied to the
support of a specific other. Most non- feminist commentators 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 community; they develop as concrete, discrete, and specific
individuals. To be a morally significant category, personhood must involve personality as well as biological integrity.12 It is not sufficient to consider persons
simply as Kantian atoms of rationality: persons are all
embodied, conscious beings with particular social histories. 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 generally, 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 abortion 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 greatest 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 political 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 reproductive 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 resentment. Increasingly, many anti- abortion activists have
personalized their attacks and focussed their attention 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 relationships. 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 support 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 carrying it. Fetuses are not persons because they have not
developed sufficiently in social relationships to be persons in any morally significant sense (i.e., they are not
yet second persons). Newborns, although just beginning 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 discussion to the standard questions about its moral and
legal acceptability. Because coerced pregnancy has
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 281
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 poverty or intimidation. Yet, the sorts of social changes
necessary if we are to free women from having abortions 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 dimensions are implicit in the ideal.
Clearly, feminists are not “ pro- abortion,” for
they are concerned to ensure the safety of each pregnancy to the greatest degree possible; wanted fetuses
should not be harmed or lost. Therefore, adequate
pre- and postnatal care and nutrition are also important elements of any feminist position on reproductive freedom. Where anti- abortionists direct their
energies to trying to prevent women from obtaining 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 continue 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 legitimate 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 policies fit within the politics of sexual domination. Most
feminists are sensitive to the fact that many men support 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 abortion 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 distinctive 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 satisfied 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; feminists 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 doctor. Further, experience shows that doctors are already
reluctant to provide abortions to women; the opportunity this law presents for criminal persecution of doctors 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, practices that are sometimes inflicted on the most powerless women, especially those in the Third World.
Feminist ethics demands that access to voluntary,
safe, effective birth control be part of any abortion discussion, 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 discussions 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 capacity; the earliest states entrenched patriarchy by institutionalizing 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 condition. 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 choosing 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 important 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 acceptability 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 vulnerability (Luker 1984, p. 209–15). Thus, it is important that
feminists develop a coherent analysis of reproductive 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 pronouncements 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 abortion 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 revolutionary 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 decisions and hence want feminists to agree to setting boundaries on acceptable grounds for choosing abortion. Feminists
ought to resist this injunction, though. There is no practical 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 suggest that women actually make the sorts of choices worried 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 fantasies, on which demands to distinguish between legitimate
and illegitimate personal reasons for choosing abortion
chiefly rest, reflect an offensive conception of women as
CHAPTER 9: ABORTION Á 283
REFERENCES
Addelson, Kathryn Pyne, 1987. “Moral Passages.” In
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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 pregnant 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 apparent 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 committee 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 Commons 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 control 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.
284 Á PART 4: ETHICAL ISSUES
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