The moral and legal status of Abortion

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The moral and legal status of Abortion
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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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• What about social visibility?
• Again, this seems arbitrary. Social visibility
  can make anyone be treated as a non-human, but
  that does not make those individuals non-human.

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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.

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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?

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Warrens 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

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• 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)

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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.

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• 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.

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Objections

• Fetus is a potential person
• W moral status of potential people cannot
  outweigh actual people (e.g. the mothers 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

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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.