Kantian Argument Against Abortion

All though Kant’s moral thoery does not itself address the morality of abortion, I believe that it can be effectively applied to the contemporary discourse on the moral status of abortion. Some modern thinkers, like Harry Gensler for example, use Kantian moral theory to argue that abortion is to be seen as morally impermissible while others, like Susan Feldman, Judith Jarvis Thompson and Lara Denis for example, agrue pro-choice and hence make abortion seem problematic, yet nevertheless morally permissible. In this essay I shall atempt to do just that – to argue that according to Kantian ethics, abortion is morally permissible and hence, that the woman’s right to self-defence is in fact her duty towards herself and as such outweighs the fetus’

89). That is in fact what H. Gensler attempts to do in his work ‘’A Kantian Argument against Abortion’’; he argues that since each of us has at some point in their life been a fetus, and since each of us would currently oppose the idea of having been aborted as a fetus, hence abortion fails the universibility test – since it is all right if some other fetus is aborted but not me, and we fail to meet the logical consistency requirement as well – since I accept the principle of abortion but not the logical consequences with regard to our life I am not consistent in my moral views. Thus it follows that my view of abortion irrational and inconsistent and had my view been consistent then the act of abortion would seem to be morally

For the sake of the following argument I shall grant the fetus the status of a person in the same way J. J. Thompson does in her ‘’In defense of Abortion’’. She then asks whether or not a person's right to life is stronger than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body. If so then the fetus should not be killed, hence making abortion morally impermissible. But she argues differently – the mother’s right to choose what happens to her body is more stringent than the person’s right to life. She tries to support her argument with her famous violinist case; she asks the reader to imagine being kidnapped and then waking up next to an unconscious famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment who’s circulatory system was plugged into yours for nine months, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own by the Music Lovers Society. Even though all persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons just as a fetus is, your perfect self-regarding duties are stronger than your duties towards either of the two. Hence, unplugging yourself or aborting the baby is problematic but not morally impermissible. Yet in the case Thompson asks us to imagine we were kidnapped, or in other words it only applies to pregnancies which occured as a result of a rape. Does it follow that this