There are obviously profound moral issues in the abortion debate, and I for one, while respectfully disagreeing with the Catholic Church's position on the legality of abortion, can't even begin to understand its opposition to birth control. And perhaps it is worth emphasizing, for the record, that it is with this aspect of the Church's position that I disagree. Like most who would defend its legality, I am not a fan of abortion. That said, however, it is unfair to accuse opponents of abortion of the sort of hypocrisy you do. While they may or may not be right in their desire to see abortion criminalized, many of those who hold this view do actively assist pregnant women in placing their children for adoption. The Catholic Church, for example, has long actively supported adoption. That is not to say there have not been controversies in this area, too: Some adoption agencies, especially in Latin America, have been accused of discouraging women from placing their children for adoption. But that is a...

The short answer is that one has to ask whether the analogy is a good one, and my immediate intuition is that it is not a good one in the case of AIDS, at least not as you are using it. To what, in that case, is the expanding baby supposed to be analogous? The AIDS virus? If so, then what the thought experiment suggests is that one woudl be justified in killing the AIDS virus. But of course we already knew that. If the thought experiment is supposed to "justify killing everyone who had AIDS", then, the expanding baby would have to be analogous to a person who had contracted the AIDS virus. But it isn't: People who have the AIDS virus do not pose an imminent risk of death to those who do not, and killing all such people is (fortunately!) not the only way to save oneself, if one has not contracted the virus. Whether the analogy is a good one in the other case is a different question, and one's answer to that question will turn upon one's understanding of the relationship between a woman and the...

These are obviously questions about biology, not philosophy. I'd try a good biology text. That said, it isn't plausible that personhood has to do with number of cells. Number of cells is roughly proportional to size. One would therefore expect that the number of cells in a large tree would dwarf the number of cells in a mature human being. Same for elephants and whales, let alone the strange fungus that is reported to be the world's largest living creature.

There need be nothing inconsistent about this position. The first view, that abortion is morally impermissible, is a moral or ethical view. The second view, that each woman should be permitted to choose for herself whether to have an abortion, is a political view, one about what laws a state ought to have. The combination istherefore consistent so long as one denies that, if it is morallyimpermissible to do A, then it ought to be illegal to do A. Whymight one deny that claim? One might well ask why one should endorseit, but there is a better answer. Suppose one believed the following: Alaw must be justifiable on the basis of principles that cannotreasonably be rejected by any citizen, where a rejection is"unreasonable" if it is flatly irrational or, more interestingly, basedupon too many particulars of one's actual situation. Inparticular, religious doctrine cannot figure in the justification ofany law, since one's finding the appeal to any religious doctrineconvincing depends...

There are many excellent philosophical discussions of abortion, andmany of these do tie the question to general moral issues. One classicarticle is Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion", Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), pp. 47--66. Thomson's argument begins, contrary to what public political discussion might lead one to expect, by granting that the fetus has all the rights of a person. She argues that abortionis nonetheless justified because it involves a conflict of rights. Her central example goes like this. Suppose you were kidnapped by music lovers and connected via tubes and wires to a famous violinist whose life now depends upon your remaining connected to him. If you remove the tubes, he dies; if you remain connected for nine months, you both live. Do you have a moral duty not to remove the tubes? Thomson grants that it would be very nice of you not to do so, but, intuitively, you have no such moral duty. The example is meant to be analogous to cases of rape. Here's a...