Many pro-choice advocates maintain that, though abortions should be permissible, they are regrettable nonetheless. For instance, Bill Clinton famously said that he wanted to keep abortions "safe, legal and rare." I don't understand this view. To my mind, whether abortion is immoral turns on the question of whether a fetus is a person with a right to life. But this seems a clear dichotomy--either fetuses have such a right, or they don't. If they do, then abortion is immoral. If they don't, then not only should abortion be permitted, but there is nothing objectionable about them at all. Indeed, it is every bit as innocuous as using condoms.
Sometimes I think that what is happening is that people who advocate this position are still captive to some kind of residual pro-life sentiment. They believe that abortions should be permissible, but they can't shake the feeling that they are still, somehow, a bad thing. (And not just because of circumstantial considerations, such as that women who need abortions are...
It could be, as Gene Outka, has argued that we have a false dichotomy here. A fetus is neither a person or nor an inanimate object but a unique kind of entity. It is not an object and neither does it have the rights of a person. Either way, I don't see any problem with holding that abortion should be permissible and at the same time believing that abortions are sad events. Many believe that was is sometimes justified and yet regrettable. What is there to regret in an abortion? Ending a life that is something more than a pure potential. Indeed, I would argue that when the day comes that having an abortion is akin to having a tooth extracted, we'll be in bad shape, we'll have lost a sense of the sacred. Of course, there are many who believe that losing that sense makes sense but I would beg to differ.
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