In on the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Mary Essays - Ethics

In on the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Mary Anne Warren discusses a few arguments against abortion, namely bringing into play whether the fetus is actually a person, or "not a member of the moral community". She defends that abortion is a morally sound action. Don Marquis, in his essay An Argument that Abortion is Wrong, takes the opposite stance. He claims, "that abortion, except perhaps in rare instances, is seriously wrong". The first thing we read in Warren's article is the thought experiment first conceived by Judith Thomson. It's an analogy that uses a normal person, male or female, and a famous violinist. Let's say the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you, and hooks you up to this dying violinist. If you choose to unhook yourself, the violinist will die, but if you let him stay hooked up to you to use your kidneys, then he will be cured and both of you will be free. Thomson asks what a person's obligations in this situation are, and, to be consistent with Warren's argument, she says it would be ridiculous to be stay in bed with the violinist, and thus you are able to leave at any time. You shouldn't feel responsible for the death of the violinist. But Marquis, in his essay, points out that, while good for dealing with abortions due to rape, the analogy doesn't hold up. Thomson draws to our attention that in pregnancy a fetus uses the woman's body for life-support, but the woman doesn't use a fetus's body for life support. Thus, in an abortion the life that is lost is the fetus's, not the woman's. This leaves us with a standoff. I think this overall analogy is not significantly helpful for either side of the argument. Warren then discusses whether or not abortion is actually the killing of a "person", calling into question when a fetus matures to the point of personhood. She defines the moral community as having some of these six characteristics: sentience (capacity to have conscious experiences), emotionality (capacity to feel sad, angry, happy, etc.), reason (capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems), capacity to communicate (by any means), self-aware ness (concept of oneself), and finally moral agency (capacity to regulate one's own actions). This is clearly very sketchy, because infants and mentally or physically challenged people are still referred to and thought of as "people", or "members of the moral community", despite a lack of many of these traits. Both articles address this idea of personhood, but neither one really wins. The good thing with defining personhood biologically, saying it's a person at conception, quantifies itit gives a definitive time, not some subjective date when certain sentient or reasoning qualities are met, and this lessens the confusion. But I still agree somewhat with the view held by Warren that fetuses can't reason or fend for themselves nor do really anything other than exist. So again, I don't think either side has a stronger case, because both Warren and Marquis have points that basically offset one another. An interesting thing that Marquis then does is go on to talk about FLO, or "future like ours". He claims that killing deprives a person of a future that is like ours, and says that abortion is killing a fetus that will have a future like ours. Taking someone's entire future away from them is the worst of crimes, and he argues that abortion is this kind of deprivation of future. Killing an adult is an awful thing to do because it takes away that adult's future, a future that is of great value. The same goes for aborted fetusesthey had a future that would be valued but it was taken away from them. Warren also argues that a woman has a right to life, so she can make a decision that she sees fit, since her body belongs to her and only her. In response to this, Marquis says that, except during rape (when he believes it is permissible), a fetus has just as much of a right to life as the woman, and therefore an abortion is wrong. Marquis concludes that abortion is seriously wrong, except in unusual cases (rape, incest,