The moral and legal status of
Abortion
Two questions:
• Under what, if any, circumstances is it
morally permissible to have an abortion?
• Under what, if any, circumstances, ought
there be legal prohibition of abortion.
• If you think abortion is immoral, it does not
follow that you think it must be outlawed.
• But if you think abortion ought to be illegal,
you probably also think it is immoral.
Noonan: What makes an individual
human?
• Noonan holds that conception is when a
human being begins to exist. So:
• All Human beings have a right to life
• The fetus is a human being
• Therefore abortion is a serious wrong and
should be outlawed.
Other possibilities
• Does human life begin at viability?
• No, because viability depends on medical
advances. Also babies and young children are
not “viable” on their own.
• Does human life depend on experiences or
memories?
• No, b/c the embryo “is responsive to touch after
eight weeks and at least at that point is
experiencing. Also adult human beings lose
memories and still have right to life.
• People have different feelings when a
fetus dies as opposed to a “living child”
• Noonan: this will not make a moral
difference. Racism and other forms of
discrimination are usually based on
differences of feeling, but these are
unjustified.
• What about social visibility?
• Again, this seems arbitrary. Social visibility
can make anyone be treated as a nonhuman, but that does not make those
individuals non-human.
Biological probability
• N argues that conception is the likely
beginning of human life because the
chance of an embryo being born is 4 out of
5, whereas the chance that sperm and egg
meet is huge. It is a natural breaking point
in the development of life.
Questions for Noonan:
• Should we change our attitudes towards
the 20% of embryos that spontaneously
abort?
• Why is biological humanity so important?
Is having a unique genetic code enough?
What if someone takes a cell from my
body in order to clone it? Would squishing
the cell be murder?
• What about non-human animals?
Warren’s defense of abortion
•
•
•
•
The anti-abortion argument:
1. All human beings have a right to life
2. The fetus is human
3. Therefore the fetus has a right to life
• Is flawed. Human means one thing in
premise 1, another in premise 2
• Premise one involves the moral concept of
a human being, “being part of the moral
community,” personhood.
• Premise two is using a purely biological,
non-moral concept of a human being
(being alive, having human DNA)
Consider the space traveler
• Who lands on a planet chuck full of living
things. How should she determine her
moral attitude towards these living things?
Which would be appropriate food sources
and which would it be seriously wrong to
kill
• Biological humanity is not an issue here.
What matters are personhood
characteristics.
• On page 111, Warren lists personhood
characteristics.
• These are not all required to be a person,
but if a being lacks “all or most” of them,
then it is not a person.
Objections
• Fetus is a potential person
• W: moral status of potential people cannot
outweigh actual people (e.g. the mother’s
right over her body)
• New born infants are also not persons on
this view. So the personhood theory leads
to the morally unacceptable consequence
of allowing infanticide
Response to infanticide obj.
Newborns are not people, but they are close
to being people. So they have value (as do
chimps, dolphins etc).
Infants are dependent, but not dependent on
particular people. There are lots of people
wanting to adopt a newborn.
People value the life of babies.