Formerly the Catholic Church maintained that the first movement of the fetus shows that it is the breathing of life into the human body animation which separates the human fetus from animals. This line of thinking is out-of-date and the Catholic Church no longer uses it. Another point is that the first movement of the fetus that women experience is irrelevant since the real first movement of the fetus is much earlier. Ultrasonic testing shows that the real first movement of the fetus is somewhere between the 6th and 9th week.
But even if one considers the real first movement problems may arise. The physical ability to move is morally irrelevant.
One counter-example: What about an adult human being who is quadriplegic and is unable to move? In general, proponents of moderate views believe that consciousness and the ability to feel pain will develop after about six months. However the first brain activities are discernable after the seventh week so that it is possible to conclude that the fetus may feel pain after this date. In this respect, the ability to suffer is decisive for acknowledging a morally significant break.
It is logically unsound to conclude from the bare fact that the fetus feels pain that it is morally reprehensible or morally prohibited per se to abort the fetus. Proponents of the extreme conservative view claim that the morally significant break in the biological development of the fetus is given with the unicellular human zygote.
They argue that the unicellular zygote is a human person, and thus, it is prohibited to have an abortion because one kills a human being for example, Schwarz. The extreme conservative proponents argue that biological development from the fetus to a human being is an incremental process which leaves no room for a morally significant break liberals deny this line of thinking.
If there is no morally significant break, then the fetus has the same high status of a newborn, or the newborn has the same low status of the fetus. At best, one may maintain that the zygote will potentially develop into a human being. Except the potentiality argument is flawed since it is impossible to derive current rights from the potential ability of having rights at a later time. Opponents for example, Gert also object to any attempt to base conclusions on religious considerations that they believe cannot stand up to rational criticism.
For these reasons, they argue that the conservative view should be rejected. He has been attached to your kidneys because you alone have the only blood type to keep him alive.
You are faced with a moral dilemma because the violinist has a right to live by being a member of the human race; there seems to be no possibility to unplug him without violating this right and thus killing him. However, if you leave him attached to you, you are unable to move for months, although you did not give him the right to use your body in such a way Thomson , First, Thomson claims that the right to live does not include the right to be given the means necessary for survival.
She argues that everybody has a right of how his own body is used. Second, Thomson contends that the right to live does not include the right not to be killed. If the violinist has the right not to be killed, then another person is not justified in removing the plug from her kidneys although the violinist has no right to their use. What is the legal status of the fetus embryo, conceptus, and zygote? Before the question is answered, one should pay some attention to the issue of the genesis of a legal system.
Which ontological status do legal rights have? Where do they come from? Other conceptions which had been provided in the history of human kind are:. However, let us take the following description for granted: There is a legal community in which the members are legal entities with legal claims and legal addressees with legal obligations. Is the fetus a legal entity or not?
It was previously stated that the fetus as such is no person and that it seems unsound to claim that fetuses are persons in the ordinary sense of the notion. If rights are tied to the notion of personhood, then it seems appropriate to say that fetuses do not have any legal rights. According to this line of argument, it seems sound to claim that fetuses also have quasi-rights. It does not follow that the quasi-rights of the fetuses and the quasi-rights of the animals are identical; people would normally stress that the quasi-rights of fetuses are of more importance than that of animals.
However, there are some basic rights of the pregnant woman, for example, the right of self-determination, the right of privacy, the right of physical integrity, and the right to live. On the other hand, there is the existential quasi-right of the fetus, that is, the quasi-right to live. If this is the case, what about the relation between the existential quasi-right of the fetus and the basic legal rights of the pregnant woman?
The answer seems obvious: quasi-rights cannot trump full legal rights. The fetus has a different legal status that is based on a different moral status see above. On this view there is no legal conflict of rights. Another important point in the debate about the ascription of legal rights to the fetus is the topic of potential rights. Feinberg maintains that there may be cases where it is illegal or wrong to have an abortion even when the fetus does not have any rights or is not yet a moral person.
Thus, it seems incorrect to derive actual rights from the bare potential ability to have legal rights at a later time. It should be added that Benn — despite his criticism on the argument of potential rights — also claims that there are valid considerations which do not refer to the talk of rights and may provide plausible reasons against infanticide and late abortions even when fetuses and newborns are lawless beings with no personhood.
There is always a chance that women get pregnant when they have sex with their heterosexual partners. However, what does the sphere of decisions look like? A pregnancy is either deliberate or not.
If the woman gets deliberately pregnant, then both partners respectively the pregnant woman may decide to have a baby or to have an abortion.
Less good reasons seem to be: vacation, career prospects, or financial and social grievances. If the pregnancy is not deliberate, it is either self-caused in the sense that the partners knew about the consequences of sexual intercourses and the contraception malfunctioned or it is not self-caused in the sense of being forced to have sex rape.
In both cases the fetus may be aborted or not. The interesting question concerns the reasons given for the justification of having an abortion. Second order reasons are reasons of justifications which are, in comparison to first order reasons, less suitable in providing a strong justification for abortion, for example, i a journey, ii career prospects, iii by virtue of financial or social grievances.
It would be cruel and callous to force the pregnant woman who had been raped to give birth to a child. It seems obvious in this case that the raped woman has a right to abort. Forcing her not to abort is to remind her of the rape day-by-day which would be a serious mental strain and should not be enforced by law or morally condemned.
He claims that. In these terms, once the humanity of the fetus is perceived, abortion is never right except in self-defense. With this exception, now of great rarity, abortion violates the rational humanist tenet of the equality of human lives. Hence, the woman has no right to abort the fetus even if she had been raped and got pregnant against her will. Potential life should not be more valued then actual life.
To force her at the risk of her life means to force her to give up her right of self-defense and her right to live.
There seems to be no good reason to suspend her basic right of self-defense. It is hard to say when exactly a fetus is seriously mentally or physically disabled because this hot issue raises the vital question of whether the future life of the disabled fetus is regarded as worth living problem of relativity. Hence, there are simple cases and, of course, borderline cases which lie in the penumbra and are hard to evaluate.
Among the simple cases take the following example: Imagine a human torso lacking arms and legs that will never develop mental abilities like self-consciousness, the ability to communicate, or the ability to reason.
It seems quite obvious to some people that such a life is not worth living. But what about the high number of borderline cases? Either parents are not entitled to have a healthy and strong offspring, nor are the offspring entitled to become healthy and strong.
Thomson assumes, just for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person from conception. She then tries to show that, even given that the fetus has a right to life, it does not follow that abortion is morally impermissible. The anti-abortion argument:. For the sake of argument, Thomson assumes that 1 and 2 are true. She then argues that 4 does not follow from 3.
This much is easy to see, since most of us agree that it is not wrong to kill in self-defense. But Thomson argues that the gap between 3 and 4 is much wider than this. Along these lines, one suggestion is that a mother has a right to decide what happens in and to her body, and that this might outweigh the fetuses right to life. Instead, she argues that the right to life has been misunderstood. Once it is understood correctly, it will be seen that 4 does not follow from 3.
Thomson proposes a thought experiment:. 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 is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
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. I agree. 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. Thomson concludes that i it is not true that the violinist has a right to your body, and so, by analogy ii it is not true that a fetus that is a product of rape has a right to your body, but iii there is no easy way for the anti-abortion argument to be amended to account for this. This means that the argument is invalid; the conclusion 4 does not follow from the premises. So what does the right to life consist in? One suggestion:. Objection: Sometimes the bare minimum is something you have no right to.
Violinist example. Objection: Sometimes you can be killed by being deprived of something you have no right to. Also, there is self-defense. Henry Fonda example. Therefore, the right to life overrides the right to control one's own body and abortion is wrong. Considerations like these have suggested to both opponents of abortion and supporters of choice that a Thomsonian strategy for de-.
In fairness, one must note that Thomson did not intend her strategy to generate a general moral permissibility of abortion. The above considerations suggest that whether abortion is morally permissible boils down to the question of whether fetuses have the right to life. An argument that fetuses either have or lack the right to life must be based upon some general criterion for having or lacking the right to life. Opponents of abortion, on the one hand, look around for the broadest possible plausible criterion, so that fetuses will fall under it.
This explains why classic arguments against abortion appeal to the criterion of being human Noonan, ; Beckwith, This criterion appears plausible: The claim that all humans, whatever their race, gender, religion or age, have the right to life seems evident enough.
In addition, because the fetuses we are concerned with do not, after all, belong to another species, they are clearly human. Thus, the syllogism that generates the conclusion that fetuses have the right to life is apparently sound. On the other hand, those who believe abortion is morally permissible wish to find a narrow, but plausible, criterion for possession of the right to life so that fetuses will fall outside of it.
This explains, in part, why the standard pro-choice arguments in the philosophical literature appeal to the criterion of being a person Feinberg, ; Tooley, ; Warren, ; Benn, ; Engelhardt, This criterion appears plausible: The claim that only persons have the right to life seems evident enough. Thus, the syllogism needed to generate the conclusion that no fetus possesses the right to life is apparently sound. Given that no fetus possesses the right to life, a woman's right to control her own body easily generates the general right to abortion.
The existence of two apparently defensible syllogisms which support contrary conclusions helps to explain why partisans on both sides of the abortion dispute often regard their opponents as either morally depraved or mentally deficient. Which syllogism should we reject? The anti-abortion syllogism is usually attacked by attacking its major premise: the claim that whatever is biologically human has the right to life.
This premise is subject to scope problems because the class of the biologically human includes too much: human cancer-cell cultures are biologically human, but they do not have the right to life. Moreover, this premise also is subject to moral-relevance problems: the connection between the biological and the moral is merely assumed.
It is hard to think of a good argument for such a connection. If one wishes to consider the category of "human" a moral category, as some people find it plausible to do in other contexts, then one is left with no way of showing that the fetus is fully human without begging the question. Thus, the classic anti-abortion argument appears subject to fatal difficulties.
These difficulties with the classic anti-abortion argument are well known and thought by many to be conclusive. The symmetrical difficulties with the classic pro-choice syllogism are not as well recognized. The pro-choice syllogism can be attacked by attacking its major premise: Only persons have the right to life.
This premise is subject to scope problems because the class of persons includes too little: infants, the severely retarded, and some of the mentally ill seem to fall outside the class of persons as the supporter of choice understands the concept.
The premise is also subject to moral-relevance problems:. Being a person is understood by the pro-choicer as having certain psychological attributes. If one wishes to consider "person" a moral category, as is often done, then one is left with no way of showing that the fetus is not a person without begging the question. Pro-choicers appear to have resources for dealing with their difficulties that opponents of abortion lack.
Consider their moral-relevance problem. A pro-. This is essentially Engelhardt's [] view. The great advantage of this contractarian approach to morality is that it seems far more plausible than any approach the anti-abortionist can provide.
The great disadvantage of this contractarian approach to morality is that it adds to our earlier scope problems by leaving it unclear how we can have the duty not to inflict pain and suffering on animals. Contractarians have tried to deal with their scope problems by arguing that duties to some individuals who are not persons can be justified even though those individuals are not contracting members of the moral community.
For example, Kant argued that, although we do not have direct duties to animals, we "must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men" Kant, , p. Feinberg argues that infanticide is wrong, not because infants have the right to life, but because our society's protection of infants has social utility.
If we do not treat infants with tenderness and consideration, then when they are persons they will be worse off and we will be worse off also Feinberg, , p. These moves only stave off the difficulties with the pro-choice view; they do not resolve them.
Consider Kant's account of our obligations to animals. Kantians certainly know the difference between persons and animals. Therefore, no true Kantian would treat persons as she would treat animals.
Thus, Kant's defense of our duties to animals fails to show that Kantians have a duty not to be cruel to animals. Consider Feinberg's attempt to show that infanticide is wrong even though no infant is a person.
That is quite compatible with killing the infants we intend to discard. This point can be supported by an analogy with which any pro-choicer will agree. There are plainly good reasons to treat with care and consideration the fetuses we intend to keep.
This is quite compatible with aborting those fetuses we intend to discard. Thus, Feinberg's account of the wrongness of infanticide is inadequate. Accordingly, we can see that a contractarian defense of the pro-choice personhood syllogism fails. The problem arises because the contractarian cannot account for our duties to individuals who are not persons, whether these individuals are animals or infants.
Because the pro-choicer wishes to adopt a narrow criterion for the right to life so that fetuses will not be included, the scope of her major premise is too narrow. Her problem is the opposite of the problem the classic opponent of abortion faces. The argument of this section has attempted to establish, albeit briefly, that the classic anti-abortion argument and the pro-choice argument favored by most philosophers both face problems that are mirror images of one another.
A stand-off results. The abortion debate requires a different strategy. Why do the standard arguments in the abortion debate fail to resolve the issue? The general principles to which partisans in the debate appeal are either truisms most persons would affirm in the absence of much reflection, or very general moral theories.
All are subject to major problems. A different approach is needed. Opponents of abortion claim that abortion is wrong because abortion involves killing someone like us, a human being who just happens to be very young. Supporters of choice claim that ending the life of a fetus is not in the same moral category as ending the life of an adult human being. Surely this controversy cannot be resolved in the absence of an account of what it is about killing us that makes killing us wrong.
On the one hand, if we know what property we possess that makes killing us wrong, then we can ask whether fetuses have the same property. On the other hand, suppose that we do not know what it is about us that makes killing us wrong. If this. Surely, we will not understand the ethics of killing fetuses, for if we do not understand easy cases, then we will not understand hard cases. Both pro-choicer and anti-abortionist agree that it is obvious that it is wrong to kill us.
Thus, a discussion of what it is about us that makes killing us not only wrong, but seriously wrong, seems to be the right place to begin a discussion of the abortion issue. Who is primarily wronged by a killing? The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the loss to the family and friends of the victim.
Perhaps the victim is a hermit. Perhaps one's friends find it easy to make new friends. The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the brutalization of the killer. The great wrong to the victim explains the brutalization, not the other way around.
The wrongness of killing us is understood in terms of what killing does to us. Killing us imposes on us the misfortune of premature death. That misfortune underlies the wrongness.
Premature death is a misfortune because when one is dead, one has been deprived of life. This misfortune can be more precisely specified. Premature death cannot deprive me of my past life. That part of my life is already gone. If I die tomorrow or if I live thirty more years my past life will be no different. It has occurred on either alternative. Rather than my past, my death deprives me of my future, of the life that I would have lived if I had lived out my natural life span.
The loss of a future biological life does not explain the misfortune of death. Compare two scenarios: In the former I now fall into a coma from which I do not recover until my death in thirty years. In the latter I die now. Most of these arguments are to be read in the context of the first two arguments above. People who don't believe abortion is always morally wrong use arguments like this:.
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