Topics Abortion

Question The moral question of whether abortion is wrong is whether or not it is a person. Well, I don't understand why people say that a fetus is not a person. How are a fetus and an infant any different. An infant doesn't understand the future just the way a fetus doesn't. At 14 weeks a fetus begins to move and "explore" the womb and itself. That shows some curiosity and some sort of "thinking". On a genetic level or the form of the fetus also at 14 weeks it is "a person". So then at the very least shouldn't abortion be illegal after that? If we should not kill an infant, which is very illegal, why can we kill a fetus which in many instances is on the same level as the infant? If anything we should not kill the fetus because it is innocent and the infant is not. An infant cries just to be held where it should cry because it needs something. Just as a small example.

Accepted:
December 4, 2008

Comments

It's been famously argued -- both by Mary Ann Warren and by Michael Tooley -- that an infant isn't a person either. The rough idea is that to be a person, a being needs to have at least a rudimentary understanding of its future that even a small infant still lacks. The point isn't to endorse that conclusion, but rather to point out that the premise of your argument -- that an infant is a person -- isn't universally accepted.

That said -- it's hard to make the case that there is a difference in the moral status of a late-term fetus and a newborn (though that doesn't settle the abortion issue by itself.) But if we allow the term "fetus" to include early stages of pregnancy, then the further back we go, the more glaring the differences become. When we reach the point of a newly fertilized ovum, we have a gulf that one philosopher pointed out (sorry; I forget who) is quite stark. Some people insist that the conceptus has the full moral status that you or I have. Others can't even imagine what it would be like to believe that. I will confess to being quite a bit closer to the latter camp: at very early stages of pregnancy the idea that the embryo is the moral equivalent of a child baffles me. The differences are too many and too great. But that's perhaps more of a confession than an argument.

In addition to Allen's points, it should be noted that not everyone agrees that the issue of abortion boils down to the issue of whether the fetus is a person. Judith Thomson has famously argued that other persons do not have a right to use my body, even if preventing them from such use would cause their death. For example, if I had a rare blood type and was taken into custody an hooked up to someone who needed blood of my type, this would be a violation of my rights and I would be permitted to resist, or unplug myself. Because a fetus is using the pregnant woman's body, sometimes against her will (think of rape especially, but also contraception failure), she does not have a moral obligation to allow such use. In some cases it would be very kind of me to allow such use, e.g., if it wasn't at great cost to me, but even if we count the fetus as a ful person, it doesn't have a right to such use.

See: Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defense of Abortion. Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971).

There is more relevant discussion in response to Question 2107, where I remark on the moral differences between early fetuses and newborn infants that we seem to make in our thinking about the natural or accidental death of fetuses as against babies.