HUM 3710 MOD 2 DB ABORTION

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HUM3710Abortionlecture.pptx

Over the last 35 years, no moral issue has been as prominent in the United States as abortion. Mention the word “abortion” and unless you’re careful, you’re likely to find yourself in a heated debate before too long. The issue tends to inflame people’s passions on both sides. Opponents of legalized abortion call themselves “pro-life”; by implication, the other side is against life itself. Meanwhile, advocates of abortion rights call themselves “pro-choice”; by implication, the other side is against freedom to choose. Anti-life or anti-freedom – no wonder people get so defensive and emotional! Indeed, people often get so emotional about abortion that it can sometimes seem like there’s little point to discussing the issue just when people disagree. All too often, discussions of abortion end with someone saying, in essence, “Look, you’re just not going to change my mind about this. That’s what I believe and I’m sticking to it.” But the fact remains, aside from the emotionally charged nature of the topic, it is possible to address the issue of abortion reasonably and civilly. In this class, we’ll examine the views of several thinkers concerning the morality or immorality of abortion. It’s important to remain civil over the course of the discussion, and to keep an open mind on both sides. It’s also important to understand the legal issues involved and how they relate to the moral dimension of the topic. So it’s straight to the Roe v. Wade decision that we now turn.

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The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in the Roe v. Wade case is extraordinarily important for understanding contemporary politics in America. However, despite its importance, very few Americans have read it. And I would argue that it doesn’t really mean what the vast majority of citizens, commentators, and politicians seem to think it does, whether they are pro-life or pro-choice. We need to take a careful look at the excerpt provided here.  First, the specifics of the case. A state law in Texas had made abortion, except where the life of the mother is at stake, a crime punishable by two to five years in prison. In 1970, this law was challenged by a young pregnant woman named Norma McCorvey (designated “Jane Roe” in the case to protect her identity). As plaintiff in the case, she sought to have the law overturned in order to obtain an abortion legally. The defendant was Henry Wade, the District Attorney of Dallas representing the state of Texas. The U.S. District Court ultimately decided in McCorvey’s favor, but the judges declined to issue an injunction against enforcing the law as it existed. The results were that McCorvey actually had her baby, but the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. After several years of procedural problems and bureaucratic delays, the Court eventually decided in her favor and struck down the Texas statute.

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It’s not uncommon for cases to begin with historical background to the problem at hand, and that’s how Roe v. Wade begins as well. In ancient Greece and Rome, abortion was permissible. (In the event of severe birth defects or deformities, even infanticide was sometimes practiced.) When abortion was disallowed, it had more to do with consideration for the father, not the mother. The English “common law” tradition held that abortion was at worst a minor legal offense up until “quickening.” Quickening is an antiquated denoting the moment of the first movements of the fetus, at which point the fetus was considered to have become animated – literally, to have received its soul. The moral importance of quickening is actually discussed even earlier: medieval theologians and canon law came to regard quickening as approximately forty days for males and eighty days for females. Prior to quickening, a fetus was considered part of the mother and its termination was not considered wrong. The degree of wrongness involved in abortions after quickening, moreover, was a subject of much disagreement. In the United States, explicit legislation gradually replaced the common law tradition. The new formal codes included prohibitions on abortion, with the specifics varying from state to state. Initially, abortion legislation tended to repeat the distinction between abortions before and after quickening, with differences in penalties accruing to either side of the divide. But eventually, the distinction based on quickening – which was never precisely defined – was removed from most statutes, and abortion was generally disallowed. By the time the Supreme Court heard Roe v. Wade, however, some of the states had adopted more liberal abortion legislation, lessening the penalties for abortions, or even legalizing them in some instances.

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How, then, is the Supreme Court going to decide whether the Texas law is or isn’t constitutional? It might be helpful first to look at what it’s not going to consider. The Court expressly said that it would not render a decision on when life begins: “Texas urges that… life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary… is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” (93) The Court recognized that there were widely differing opinions over when exactly life began, even among experts who’ve looked at the issue. Insofar as the justices believed they had even less expertise on the subject, they found it inappropriate to decide the issue. So however the court was to decide on the case at hand, it would have to use standards other than that of when life begins.

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What it settled on was an interpretation of the right to privacy. The right to privacy is not one of the rights expressly mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. However, the Ninth Amendment makes it clear that just because a right is not specifically mentioned in the text, that doesn’t mean that right doesn’t exist; the Founders wanted rights to be protected by the government, but not necessarily granted by it. And in the long history of the interpretation of the Constitution by the federal courts, the right to privacy has consistently been upheld. What the Supreme Court found in Roe v. Wade was that a woman’s decisions about whether or not to carry her pregnancy to term are included in this right to privacy. The court lists a number of reasons for this on page 92. If the state took this decision away from a pregnant woman entirely, then any number of harms might befall her, including the possibility of significant and long-lasting injury, even death; psychological trauma (particularly noteworthy in cases of rape); and the stresses of insufficient childcare, including financial burdens. The state, according to the court, did not have the power to deprive a woman of such fundamental decisions about her present and future well-being. So far this sounds like the Roe v. Wade many of us are familiar with (or at least that we’re familiar with hearing about). But…

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There is significantly more to the decision than just this decision regarding privacy rights. In the very paragraph after the Court’s description of the right to an abortion included within the right to privacy, the Court begins the process of limiting that right: “On the basis of elements such as these, [some proponents of abortion] 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. … The Court’s decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate.” (92) It is important to keep in mind that in Constitutional interpretation, there’s no such thing as an absolute right. The right to free speech, for example, doesn’t allow you to slander your rivals, or to yell “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater. Freedom of religion and the right to privacy allow you to engage in religious practices of your choosing – but they certainly don’t allow you to perform human sacrifices in the basement. And the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms – but is not held to allow private citizens to own nuclear weapons. So the upshot is, even though the right to privacy does include a right to an abortion, there is still room for reasonable regulation of abortion.  So just when can the law regulate a right? The court invokes a general principle on page 94: “Where certain ‘fundamental rights” are involved, the Court has held that regulation limiting those rights may be justified only by a ‘compelling state interest,’ and that legislative enactments must be narrowly drawn to express only the legitimate state interests at stake.” The principle of “compelling state interest” has a long history in Constitutional interpretation. But like most judicial principles, it is a bit vague, to say the least. What are the state’s interests, where abortion is concerned? And when does the state’s interest in abortion become “compelling” enough to allow regulation? The discussion begins near the end of page 94 in the book.

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Where abortion is concerned, the Court finds two interests that the court may seek to protect: the health of the pregnant woman on the one hand, and the potentiality of human life on the other. And it asserts that the interest in protecting each of these interests grows as pregnancy progresses. The state’s interest in protecting maternal health becomes compelling at approximately the end of the first trimester; after that point, state regulations to protect the health of the mother may be enacted and enforced. The state’s interest in protecting potential life becomes compelling at viability, the point where the fetus could survive outside the mother’s womb; after this point, the state may go so far as to restrict abortion altogether, though there must still be exceptions concerning the mother’s health.

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The upshot of the decision, then, is to lay out a three-part way of looking at the legal permissibility of abortion. From conception until the end of the first trimester, very few if any restrictions are permitted. At this point, the mother’s right to privacy guarantees her the right to make decisions about her pregnancy without interference from the state. From the end of the first trimester until viability, some restrictions are permitted. Specifically, restrictions that protect the mother’s own health – restrictions on what procedures may be used, for example – would be acceptable. From viability until birth, very significant restrictions are permitted, perhaps even a near-total ban. This is so that the state may protect potential life.  The Texas law in dispute was found to be overly broad. It was not tailored to the narrow interests of the state in regulating privacy with regard to abortion. It was simply a blanket ban on abortion in all cases except where the mother’s life was at stake. As a result, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional. In several other cases since Roe v. Wade (most notably Planned Parenthood v. Casey), the Court has attempted to clarify just what sorts of abortion regulations are acceptable or not, as well as other abortion-related laws such as what opponents of abortion may or may not do to discourage women from receiving abortions. However, in all of these cases, the court has reaffirmed the “central holding” of Roe v. Wade itself, which is that the state has interests in protecting both maternal health and potential life, and that these interests become increasingly compelling as pregnancy proceeds.

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Roe v. Wade is, obviously, a legal decision. Yet in this class, we are concerned not with legality but morality. So why start with a problem of law? The answer is that the moral dimension of the case itself cannot be ignored. Roe v. Wade, makes much out of the concept of “viability.” Once a fetus is “viable,” the Court actually permits an almost total ban on abortion. We need to ask ourselves what is so important about viability. The fact is, regardless of when one thinks life begins, by the late stages of pregnancy a fetus is very similar to an infant already born. At that point, the basic body structures are all in place, though they certainly need further development. Importantly, the main components of the nervous system are in place. With this nervous system, the fetus can move itself within its mother’s uterus and reacts to stimuli in its prenatal environment. This very capacity makes an issue of how viable fetuses are treated an issue for consideration – for what if, in addition to responding to stimuli, fetuses in the later stages of pregnancy can feel pain? Many people would feel understandably uneasy with aborting a late-term pregnancy, on the moral grounds of the pain the fetus may well suffer during the procedure.

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It goes without saying that Roe v. Wade has been a controversial decision. The legal reasons for disputing it are beyond the scope of this class. The moral reasons, however, are not. We begin with a critic of abortion whose work actually predates the Court’s decision, although it addresses the same issues. John Noonan believes that the central issue in the abortion debate is precisely the one that the court does not address, namely: when does something become “human life” in the relevant sense? He begins his essay by rejecting several answers to this question, and the most important is exactly what the court does use, namely: viability.

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Noonan sees viability distinctions in abortion the following way. Before a fetus has attained such-and-such an age, it cannot live apart from its mother. Ergo, the fetus is not truly a human being, for it has no life of its own. We therefore do a fetus no grievous moral wrong if we abort it before it has attained the age of viability. But Noonan sees two main problems with the viability distinction. The first is that it is impossible to determine when exactly a fetus becomes viable. Some fetuses develop more quickly than others, and so they may be viable even when other fetuses of exactly the age are not. If we set the chronological viability line arbitrarily, then some physiologically viable fetuses may be aborted. Furthermore, technological advances change the whole notion of what “viability” is over time. There are technologies for saving premature babies now that were unthinkable when Roe v. Wade was decided; one day it may even be possible to save a fetus at any stage of development after conception! What would then qualify as “viable?” There is a second, much bigger problem in Noonan’s eyes. If we say that independence from the mother is necessary for viability, then strictly speaking, even infants and children aren’t viable! Surely, no one would want to use viability to justify infanticide. But that is exactly what Noonan fears viability could be used to justify.

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He wants to use a distinction other than that of viability. The moment he takes to be decisive is conception: “if you are conceived by human parents, then you are human” (97). Now, Noonan himself has religious reasons for believing this. However, he is writing in a legal context, and he knows that using religion as a grounds for particular details of public policy will never pass constitutional muster. More importantly, he’s trying to convince people to agree with him even if they don’t share his religious views. He wants to find a distinction that isn’t arbitrary like viability, but that isn’t tied to a particular religion, either.

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Hence, he approaches the moment of conception from the standpoint of probabilities of biological development, as seen on page 99. This is the famous “Argument from Probabilities.” Individual egg cells stand at best a 1 in 100,000 chance of developing into human beings that get born. Individual sperm cells are even less likely to become human. But when sperm and egg unite to form a zygote, the probabilities change immediately and drastically. If left to their natural development, zygotes have a four in five chance of becoming functional human beings. Therefore, if we have an interest in protecting potential life, we ought to have an interest in protecting even zygotes. Abortion is impermissible right from the moment of conception.Noonan does admit one exception. He grants that if the mother’s own life is (probably) in serious danger from the pregnancy, her right to life may be at least equal to that of the zygote or fetus developing within her. This is a tragic circumstance, in which the choice is between two lives. In such a situation, he does not believe that a mother could be forced to prefer her developing child’s life to her own, especially if she already has a family to take care of. She could certainly be allowed to risk her life and carry the pregnancy to term, but no one could require her to do so.

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Noonan’s argument suffers from a significant difficulty, a difficulty we saw in considering natural law near the end of the first lecture. So it’s perfectly natural for 80% of pregnancies to develop into functional human beings. But why does “natural” always mean “good?” There are many natural phenomena that we regard as bad. If I contract bacterial meningitis, it is extremely likely that I’ll die without treatment, and bacterial meningitis is an entirely natural disease. But I’d be crazy to disregard treatment just because that somehow goes “against nature.” Just because 80% of pregnancies naturally do develop to term, that doesn’t mean that 80% of pregnancies morally should be required to develop to term. And what of cases where it is highly likely that a child would have dangerous birth defects? Anencephaly is a condition where a child is born without most of the brain, skull, and scalp. It is not merely probable but certain that an anencephalic child will live for no more than a few days after birth. Should such children be born, simply to let nature take its course? Noonan makes a strong case. His argument from probabilities is indeed not arbitrary, and it is not constrained by particular religious traditions. Nonetheless, he also seems to provide a classic example of failing to observe the Is-Ought distinction. Just because something will likely be a fully human being if left to nature, that doesn’t mean that we ought to allow nature to take its course.

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Mary Anne Warren makes precisely this criticism of Noonan’s account in her own essay on abortion. She writes on page 116: “[W]hat [Noonan] needs to show, in order to support his version of the traditional antiabortion argument, is that fetuses are human beings in the moral sense – the sense in which all human beings have full and equal moral rights. 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 human chromosomes in the fetus’s cell nuclei.”  What we need, in Warren’s view, is not a discussion of biological facts. What we need is a discussion of moral personhood, and it’s not clear how morality could derive from biology.

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Instead of relying on genetic humanity, Warren uses moral personhood as her criterion for what deserves equal moral consideration. Her analysis is admittedly rudimentary, but she provides six characteristics that she says define persons as members of “moral communities” (found on page 116): 1) Sentience. Persons have a capacity for conscious experience, including experiences of pleasure and pain.2) Emotionality. Persons have feelings.3) Reason. Persons have a capacity to use their minds to solve problems.4) Communication. Persons can communicate ideas to one another.5) Self-awareness. Persons understand themselves as distinct from other individuals, yet also as belonging to groups.6) Moral agency. Persons can regulate their behavior according to principles and ideals.  Warren is not saying that a being must have all of these characteristics to be a person. But anything that lacks all of them is not a person (and anything that lacks most of them is probably not). This means that any being lacking all (or most) of these characteristics should not be granted equal moral status to those who possess most or all of them.

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The very paradigm case of a non-person for Warren is, of course, an early-stage fetus. In the first several weeks of pregnancy, a fetus doesn’t even have a functional nervous system in order to have any experiences at all, whether pleasant or painful. For this reason, they have no emotions or reasoning, and they do not communicate. They aren’t aware of themselves and cannot control themselves in any way. Hence, early fetuses aren’t persons, and there may well be times when it is morally permissible to abort them.

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We might quibble with Warren’s list of characteristics. Why reason, say, or communication? But I don’t think this is a particularly relevant criticism. She admits that her analysis is far from complete. We could revise it later if necessary. For now, let’s just accept the list she provides, if only for the sake of argument. Better criticisms have to do with just who else might get ruled in or out of moral personhood by the characteristics Warren has chosen. For starters, even late-term fetuses might qualify as members of the moral community. Perhaps this isn’t too big a problem, either. Research indicates that large majorities of Americans (at least) strongly object to late-term abortions, and even those who don’t tend to regard it as morally problematic. Warren herself believes that late-term abortion, if it should be allowable at all, is a “more serious” matter than early-term abortion. But what else gets ruled in? As she notes, “there may be persons who belong to other species” (117). Warren isn’t thinking of extraterrestrials here, but rather of certain animals, like chimpanzees or dolphins. There’s no doubt at all that these animals are sentient, emotional, and communicative. Sure, their problem-solving skills are much less-developed than ours; sure, the social norms that regulate their behavior aren’t as complex; but they do solve problems and use behavioral rules. And they even have self-awareness: like humans, they can recognize themselves in mirrors. So are chimpanzees and dolphins moral persons? (File these thoughts away for animal rights chapter….)

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More difficult than what gets ruled in is the issue of who gets left out of the moral community. Presumably the mentally retarded are still in; the only characteristic they seem to lack is reason, and even then it’s just a matter of degree. Schizophrenics, by contrast, may not have enough self-awareness or moral agency to qualify – and that might not be entirely bad. But what about, say, people with severe brain damage? Or people who are in long-term comas? She notes that “Persons who have permanently and irreparably lost all capacity for sentience, but who remain biologically alive, arguably still have strong moral rights by virtue of what they have been in the past” (117). But why should that be the case? It may indeed be “arguable,” but Warren isn’t providing the argument. Moreover, suppose that we grant that the severely, permanently disabled retain their status as moral persons in virtue of their past characteristics. But then, why shouldn’t entities that could – and if Noonan is right, very probably would – come to possess sentience and the other relevant characteristics be granted the status of moral persons in advance? That is, shouldn’t fetuses be considered moral persons because of what they’ll be like in the future?  In Warren’s defense, there is a difference here. We already know that the disabled actually possessed the relevant characteristics of moral personhood, prior to their disability. In contrast, a fetus only potentially possess those characteristics. She argues (119 ff.) that the needs and rights of actual persons always trump the needs and rights of potential persons. So: we have Noonan’s emphasis on changing probabilities at the moment of conception and Warren’s focus on criteria for equal consideration as a person in a moral community. I hope these make plain how deceptively easy notions like “person” really are. And you can see why the Supreme Court didn’t want to touch the problem with a ten-foot pole in its own decision! But there are thinkers who’ve tried to resolve the abortion dispute without deciding what is or isn’t a person. We turn now to two of them.

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Judith Jarvis Thomson actually thinks there are good arguments that a fetus isn’t a person. She claims that, just as we wouldn’t say an acorn is an oak tree, we shouldn’t say a fetus is a person. However, she also thinks that arguments over what is or isn’t a person are entirely beside the point when looking at abortion.

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Thomson decides to take a different approach. What if we accept, for the sake of argument, that a fetus is a person. What follows from that? Here’s how she takes the standard pro-life argument against abortion to run: “Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide 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.” What Thomson wants to know is, does this conclusion really follow from the personhood of the fetus and its attendant right to life? Thomson actually thinks not, and she constructs a famous argument by analogy to make her case, beginning on page 103.

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Suppose you wake up to discover yourself in a hospital bed next to a famous violinist. He suffers from a fatal kidney problem, and no donors were available. The Society of Music Lovers, apparently desperate to save their hero, learned that you alone match the violinist’s blood type and kidnapped you. You’ve been rescued and taken to the hospital – but not before the musical terrorists joined your circulatory systems, so that the violinist is using your kidneys to clean his blood. And the doctors don’t want to separate you: if they do, it will kill him. Unfortunately, this is a long process: he won’t be cured before he’s used your kidneys for nine months. Sorry.

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Thomson’s point is that you would surely find this situation “outrageous.” And it is, because it is a gross violation of our autonomy, as free individuals. Intuitively, it’s hard to imagine someone who thinks that saving his life obligates you to put your own life on hold for the next nine months. Obviously, she is trying to make an analogy with unplanned pregnancies. If you remove the fetus (the violinist), it will die. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be impermissible for you to remove the fetus, any more than it should be impermissible for you to unhook yourself from the violinist.

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Now, there is a crucial disanalogy between the violinist example and most pregnancies, though. In the violinist example, you weren’t responsible for being hooked up in the first place. But in most pregnancies, you are responsible for getting pregnant. You chose to have sex, with whatever level of protection you used. And no matter what level of protection you used, there is always some possibility, even if only an extremely small possibility, of pregnancy. Recognizing this weakness in her argument, Thomson immediately addresses pregnancy by rape. If there is any sort of pregnancy that her violinist example does seem directly analogous to, that’s it. And of course, even many opponents of abortion are willing to make exceptions for rape.

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But she actually thinks that her larger point holds even in some other cases as well. And so she proceeds to attempt dismantling several different versions of pro-life thinking. The first (numbered “1” in the text) is what she calls “the extreme view” (104). According to this view, abortion is impermissible even to save the mother’s life. The fetus, after all, is an innocent person, and abortion would directly cause its death. The mother, meanwhile, would not be directly killed, even though letting nature take its course might well kill her. So she must not take this innocent person’s life, and allow herself to risk death. Thomson’s response is to appeal to the woman’s autonomy, specifically her right of self-defense. When our own lives are in danger, we nearly always make exceptions to our usual prohibitions against killing. Suppose that you willingly hooked yourself to the violinist, but later learned that remaining with him would probably cause you to die. Would anyone regard it as morally impermissible of you to unplug yourself? Thomson thinks not. And she thinks not in the case of a non-raped but life-threatening pregnancy as well. (The second argument Thomson addresses is just a modified version of the first. Skip it. The next argument will combine her treatment of numbered arguments three and four.)

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Thomson also discusses cases where the sex is consensual but the mother’s life is not in danger. There may be health consequences – there always are with pregnancy – but they fall somewhere short of death. According to this very typical pro-life view, the right to life of the fetus outweighs the mother’s right to some lesser value. With this example, Thomson is getting right to the heart of the matter. What does it mean to have a “right to life?”  There are two main possibilities. The first is that one is entitled to be given the bare minimum of resources that one needs for continuing to live. The other is the weaker claim that one has a right not to be killed unjustly. The first version is belied by our intuitive feeling that the violinist doesn’t have a right to your kidneys just because he doesn’t have a working pair of his own. Why must you be made to suffer – and suffer you shall, for nine months – just for the material benefit of someone else? Consider areas other than abortion. How many people would accept being forced to give up their houses to serve as homeless shelters, just because the homeless need places to stay? Not many. It would of course be kind to give up your own resources for the benefit of others – perhaps, to use Aristotelian language, we could say that it’s virtuous. But it’s not obligatory. As people who appreciate personal freedom, we dislike being compelled to do kind things. (And it might even be argued that forcing people to be kind undermines the kindness involved.) So the first possible understanding of a right to life doesn’t seem to work. The second possibility fares little better. Suppose that a right to life means merely the right not to be killed unjustly. All fine and dandy, but: now the burden is to explain what “unjustly” means. Whatever it means, it can’t include “violating the right to life” without clear circularity: “The right to life is the right not to be killed without violating the right to life.” An empty statement! There may indeed be cases when abortion is equivalent to unjust killing. But that is a far cry from claiming that all abortion is equivalent to unjust killing.

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The last argument Thomson considers says that abortion is unkind or uncompassionate. You ought not to have one out of decency. But again, just because a behavior is unkind, this doesn’t mean that you are positively obligated not to do it. We might think very highly of your character if you stay hooked up to the violinist. That just doesn’t meant that you have to. Similarly, there may be many cases where we’d say you shouldn’t get an abortion. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you mustn’t. Thomson is not saying that anything goes, and that abortion is always justified. She actually objects to the notion of abortion as birth control. But she doesn’t think that a putative right to life automatically prohibits abortion. Still, the biggest weakness of Thomson’s violinist example seems to come from the disanalogy. We can readily see why violations of our autonomy should be overcome when we did not cause the putative violation ourselves. However, when our own consensual activity results in the limitation of our freedom, it is less apparent why we should be excused from the consequences of our actions. All told, the analogy with the violinist applies best in cases of rape, where the pregnant woman played no willing role in becoming pregnant in the first place. In other circumstances, Thomson’s critics find her argument less compelling.

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Like Thomson, Don Marquis also doesn’t think that the abortion debate hinges upon the issue of personhood. But unlike Thomson, who generally supports abortion rights, Marquis is an abortion opponent.

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He begins by acknowledging certain exceptions: danger to the life of the mother, rape, very early-term, inherently fatal birth defects. But in all other cases, Marquis’s position couldn’t be more clear: “abortion, except perhaps in rare instances, is seriously wrong” (122). And the reason why abortion is wrong will turn out to be the same reason that killing anyone is wrong – anyone, including me, you, and any other man or woman, child or elder. He takes it for granted that killing us is generally wrong. (Thank heavens!) The question is, why is it wrong to kill?  The argument is surprisingly simple (although it can get a bit repetitively phrased at times). The key discussion is found on pages 125 to 127. Killing isn’t wrong, Marquis thinks, because of what it does to the loved ones who survive. If I am killed, my friends and family will surely suffer, and that’s a bad thing. But it’s wrong to kill me because of what it does to me, and even if I were old and alone, it would still be wrong to kill me for just this reason. Killing me imposes upon me “the misfortune of premature death.” Premature death is a misfortune because I lose my life. Not my past life – that’s “already gone.” Premature death takes away my future life, during which I had hoped to accomplish many things great and small – finish school, get married, visit Rome, have kids, start my own business, write a book. And this future is something of value to me. It’s one thing if I lose this valuable future in an accident, say, under a crashing boulder. But it’s another thing entirely if someone takes that future of value from me. Summing up his view, Marquis writes: “What makes killing us wrong, in general, is that it deprives us of a future of value. Thus, killing someone is wrong, in general when it deprives her of a future like ours” (an “FLO”) (127).

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This account of the wrongness of killing applies to any being that has a future that is potentially valuable to it. Certainly infants have such a future, and infanticide is immoral for just that reason. But fetuses have such futures as well, so the conclusion is easy to draw: abortion is wrong.

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Marquis’s argument has received a great deal of attention, because it is well-grounded in very general moral considerations about the wrongness of killing. Indeed, these considerations are so general that they would apply to virtually every religion and philosophical system on earth. But what if a fetus doesn’t seem to have good odds at having a future like ours? What if the fetus would be born into a poor family with an abusive father? How “like ours” does a future have to be in order to be worth living for? This is the major difficulty with Marquis’s theory. He holds that it is wrong to abort because doing so takes away the fetus’s future of value. But if we believe that a fetus’s future will not be particularly valuable, even to itself, then we no longer have any reason for thinking that abortion is wrong in such circumstances. Consider one of Marquis’s own exceptions: anencephaly. An anencephalic child will never become conscious, and therefore cannot make value judgments. It will never have a future like ours in that sense – and so it’s not wrong to abort an anencephalic fetus. This is an extreme case, of course. But what if we have reason to believe that less extreme circumstances will also impair the ability of a potential person to make value judgments – or at least to make them correctly? Perhaps, even by Marquis’s own standard, there are many more abortions that would be acceptable than he would care to admit. Clearly, these considerations of Roe v. Wade and four philosophical essays will not decide the issue. It is up to each of you to consider the ideas expressed and the arguments made, and determine for yourselves when abortion is right and when it is wrong. And as good discussion of these issues can help each of us make that determination, I hope to see an active conversation over on the discussion board very soon!

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