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Abortion Final Draft

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Kaleo Regalmuto

Word Count: 2,025

Is Abortion Morally Permissible?: Based on the moral intuition of the potential mother

1: Issue and Survey of Positions.

When a woman finds out she is pregnant, it can be a life changing moment for her and

her partner. If they decide to do nothing, it is likely they will have a baby in nine months. If they

decide to get an abortion (likely in pill form), their lives won’t change much. Very much like

Blue pill/Red pill scenario in the movie “The Matrix”, the decision or whether or not to have an

abortion is the decision between a life that one knows, and a life that one can only imagine.

Regardless to whether a couple decides to get an abortion or not, there stands the question, “Is

abortion morally permissible?” The people that try to answer this question can be filtered into

three groups: Those that think abortion is morally permissible, those that think it is morally

impermissible, and those that think abortion is morally permissible under certain circumstances.

2. Survey of Arguments

The word abortion is defined as the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy. While

fetuses are human beings it does not necessarily follow that they are moral persons. A human

being is an organism that is biologically human, while a moral person is a being with full moral

status. As stated by John-Stewart Gordon in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The

central moral aspect concerns whether there is any morally relevant point during the biological

process of the development of the fetus from its beginning as a unicellular zygote to birth itself

that may justify not having an abortion after that point” (Gordon). In other words, If there is
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immorality in the act of aborting a fetus, where exactly does it lie? Or when is it that a fetus

becomes a moral being worth protecting?

One of the central argument for those that think that abortion is totally morally

impermissible is, in logical form:

1. The killing of human beings is prohibited.

2. A fetus is a human being.

3. The killing of fetuses is prohibited. (Hoerster, 159)

This argument and many others rely on the premise that a fetus is a human. To get around this,

Don Marquis, in his paper “Why Abortion is Immoral,” states that a fetus solely because it has a

valuable future has a right to live (Marquis).

The Main arguments for those that think that abortion is morally permissible hinge on the

assumption that fetuses are not human beings. For example, in logical form,

1. The fetus is no person since it lacks the criteria of personhood

2. Thus, an abortion is justified (Warren 1984, 110-113).

Thomson, in attempt to get around this, in her article, “A defense of abortion,” says that even if

fetus’s are human beings, it still follow that:

1. People have rights over their bodies.

2. Thus the concerns of whether or not abortions are morally permissible are up to the

pregnant woman to decide (Thomson, 174-175).

Thomson wants to point out that even if a fetus is a human being, it doesn’t immediately follow

that is has a right to live.

A more moderate viewpoint is that abortion is morally permissible in certain

circumstances. We will call this the pragmatic argument. According to John-Stewart Gordon, the
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pragmatic argument argues that there are morally impermissible and morally permissible reasons

to have an abortion. Morally permissible reasons for having an abortion would be, “(i) rape, (ii)

endangerment of the woman’s life, and (iii) a serious mentally or physically disabled fetus.”

Morally impermissible reasons are, “(i) a journey, (ii) career prospects, (iii) by virtue of financial

or social grievances” (Gordon). This Moderate viewpoint straddles the line between the extreme

liberal and conservative approaches.

Your statement of your position is confusing. Your arguments are for the position
that abortion is always morally permissible. Referring to the mother's intuition
does not seem clearly relevant to this position. Are you saying that abortion is only
immoral if the mother chooses to have an abortion even though she has an intuition
that it is immoral? It's unclear. Also, why should the mother's intuition determine
moral truth in this case? It seems arbitrary. We don't generally think that people's
intuitions determine the truth of whether or not they are permitted to kill
something. The moral status of the thing they kill is what determines whether
killing it is permissible or not.
3. My position and Main Argument

If the the moral intuition of the potential mother is in favor of having the child then

abortion is immoral in that case and if her moral intuition is not in favor of having the child then

abortion is moral in that case. The main arguments that support my position are given by

Thomson. Those being:

1. People have privacy rights over their own bodies.

2. Thus the concerns of whether or not abortions are morally permissible are up to the

pregnant woman's private decision. (Thomson, 174-175)

and

1. People have a right to a pursuit of happiness


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2. Thus nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other

interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or

even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive (Thomson 52).

4. My Developed Argument:

The reasons that I weigh the intuition of the mother over the life of the fetus in my

argument are manyfold. One being that the mother of the child is the one who has to go through

the process of at least having a fetus grow inside her for nine months. Then she must suffer

through childbirth and give herself completely to make sure the child grows up safe and healthy.

If a mother doesn’t want to go through this process it is morally permissible for them to have an

abortion. Yes it may seem cruel and callous to society at large but in the end it isn’t morally

incorrect. The core of my argument lies in Thomson’s telling of the sickly violinist. The

abbreviated story goes like this: “Imagine you wake up in a hospital connected by blood to a

sickly violinist. The reason you both are connected is because a society of music lovers found

out that you had the only blood that would save the violinist and he would die is disconnected

from it. Now in order for the violinist to live you have to be connected to him for 9 months”

(Thomson 49). This analogy assumes that fetus are moral persons but even though they are, that

doesn’t mean that their rights outweigh individual right. In my opinion, it is not ones moral

obligation to forfeit their life in order to save others. It would be incredibly nice but not morally

necessary. The truth is, it would be silly if everyone had to forfeit their lives to save everyone

else from death. This argument holds true in the case of pregnancy by rape. It would be silly if a

victim of a thing as horrible as rape was morally obligated to bear a lifelong burden of raising her

aggressors child.
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Assuming that a fetus is a person, even if it is killed, it is done so to protect the rights of

the females body in question. On the other hand if the potential mother wanted to keep the child

but was forced to abort because of minor genetic defects of the fetus or because she was raped, it

would be wrong to force an abortion on an unwilling mother as well. Thus Abortion based on the

moral intuition of the women holds its own even in the harder cases where the morality of

abortion isn’t so clear.

5. Objections to my Argument:

An objection to women bodily rights over the rights of the fetus is that a woman’s right to

her body is equal or lesser than a fetus’s right to live.

An objection to a the right to pursuit of happiness over a fetus’s right to live would be

that people are morally obligated to save those who are in danger at the expense of themselves.

6. Detailed Objections to my Arguments:

Objections to a woman right to her body rights over a fetus’s right to live come in many

forms. All of which, when carefully examined are flawed if it is given that a woman has rights to

her body. A conservative objection to a woman’s right to her body over a fetus’s right to live is

that, even if the mother would die from childbirth if an abortion is not performed, it is still

immoral for a third party to perform an abortion. Those in support of this argument argue that the

fetus’s right to live and the mothers right to live are equal because both have a future. Because of

this a third party shouldn’t decide which life is worth more. If they don’t decide, then an abortion

is not performed and the mother dies naturally. If they do decide to abort the fetus then they have

killed a person and that isn’t morally sound.


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Objections to peoples right to freedom over the right to save others include that it would

be immoral to not go out of your way to save someones life if they were in danger. One might

use the thought experiment Peter Singer gave of saving a child at the expense of ones new shoes

vs. sending money to save children in developing countries (Singer 229-243). One could argue

that it is our moral obligation to save others at the expense of ourselves, after all if we let the

person in need die then we’d be at fault for not saving them.

7. My Rebuttals

The flaw in the argument of a fetus’s right to live over a women’s bodily right is that the

fetus has no claim on the woman’s body. If the woman and the fetus were independent then yes

the fetus’s right to live is stronger than the woman’s right to her body, but because the fetus is

growing inside the woman then it is the mothers decision of if she wants the fetus to be there.

This is because the woman owns her body and her ownership gives her rights to evict unwanted

tenants. Thomson gives an excellent analogy for this when she says, “If Jones has found and

fastened on a certain coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also

needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says "I cannot choose between

you" when Smith owns the coat” (Thomson 53). What Thomson is pointing out is that women

have entitlement and ownership of their own bodies and therefor are the only people allowed to

make decisions for their bodies. The fetus is a guest in a woman’s body whether welcome or

unwelcome. It not morally obligated to be there.

The flaw to the argument that it is immoral not to save people that are in danger is that in

application to abortion, the woman isn’t just saving the life of the fetus, she is also expected then

to raise and care for it. That sort of commitment at the expense of her own goals and desires is
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far and beyond just saving someones life. While it may be perceived as selfish and callous to

abort a fetus, it is not a moral obligation to sacrifice the next nine years of one’s life to save the

life of a fetus.

8. Sources

Hoerster, Norbert (1995), Abtreibung im säkularen Staat, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Gordon, John-Stewart. “Abortion.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,


www.iep.utm.edu/abortion/.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1,
1971, pp. 47–66. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2265091.

Marquis, Don. “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, no. 4, 1989, pp.
183–202. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2026961.

Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-
243

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