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Michael Tooley's Abortion And Infanticide

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Michael Tooley takes a liberal approach on abortion. He believes that killing a fetus is morally acceptable. He debates that abortion during any stage of pregnancy should be accepted with his reason being that a fetus does not have “a serious right to life”. In his work "Abortion and Infanticide", he discuss "what characteristics [a fetus] must have in order to be considered a person." He believes that a person’s identity is progressively attained, and the fetus is not a person until birth. Tooley argues that since an embryo is not “capable of desiring to continue existing as a subject of experiences” (from class notes provided), then it is ethically acceptable to terminate the unborn. In his opinion, if it lacks complete awareness then it
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However, she continues on to state that neither the abortion of a fetus nor the killing of a neonate could count as murder of a person because both, a fetus and an infant, lack all of the plausible components of personhood. Warren explicates that in an impoverished society that is unable to care for its infants without jeopardizing the health and safety of its members, infanticide cannot be deemed morally wrong. She also claims that infanticide is morally justified in the form of euthanasia where the child is born with severe abnormalities and the parents are unable to afford the financial and emotional burdens of its treatment. Warren’s response to infanticide is completely justified because in case of life or death, the life of an actual person far outweighs the life of a potential

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Patrick Lee and Robert George assert that abortion is objectively immoral. One of Lee and George’s main reason for coming to this conclusion is that human embryos are living human beings. This essentially validates that abortion is indeed the process of killing a human. Another main point said by the two is a rebuttal to a common argument used in favor of abortion, which states that a potential mother has full parental responsibilities only if she has voluntarily assumed them. The rebuttal to this was that the potential mother does indeed have special responsibilities to raise the child.

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Judith Thomson’s A Defense of Abortion is an article defending abortion on the grounds of rights, duties, and justice. Thomson uses various thought experiments to represent different circumstances surrounding a pregnancy and the permissibility of abortion in these circumstances. One such thought experiment that she uses in her argument is the burglar example. If you open a window and a burglar climbs into your house, anti-abortionists would argue that the burglar has a right to stay in your house and you have a duty to shelter him because you are partially responsible for his presence there. Even if you install bars specifically to keep out burglars and the burglar still manages to break in then you are still partially responsible and he still

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The “awareness” is why I think the child should have permission to use the woman’s body for its right to life. If a person feels so strongly about not wanting to have any chance of becoming pregnant, then that person should not participate in consensual sex. It is unjust to kill a fetus just because it was the unwanted result of your risky actions. To further explore the violinist example, if there was a tiny chance of getting

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In Olson’s article on “Was I Ever a Fetus” he states that even scientists prove that embryos are not persons, “embryologists tell us that a human fetus that is less than about six months old cannot remember or experience anything, and has no mental capacities worthy of the name… One's psychological contents or capacities could not be continuous with those of a being with no psychological contents or capacities at all…nothing could be a fetus-or at any rate a fetus that cannot yet think-at one time and a person later on. No person was ever a fetus, and no fetus ever becomes a person”. If we say that a fetus is a human then we are saying that an acorn is already an oak tree and a seed is already a flower, although these objects have the potential to become something, they are not yet actually connected to that future object and therefore are not the future object, they are a whole different type of form. So as Olson explained in his article, since a fetus is not a person, especially because it is not aware of what is going on because it has no psychological contents, then it wouldn’t even matter if it was to be aborted, because it is not feeling anything, the only person feeling a thing is the mother, the carrier of the fetus.

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Philippa Foot presented a series of moral dilemmas when she discussed abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect. One famous problem of her was the trolley dilemma: “..he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track onto another; five men are working on one track and one on the other; anyone the tack he enters is bound to be killed.” (Foot, 1967, p. 2) What should the driver do? Despite what he does, he will harm someone!1

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Mary Anne Warren establishes a belief that a fetus’s right to live is overruled by an expecting mother’s right to an abortion because it is not a technically a true person until it is born. Warren supports her argument by saying that a nearly full-developed fetus is no more significant than a small embryo because “…it is not fully conscious… it cannot reason or communicate message… and has no self-awareness” (Warren, page 499). In contrast, our text states that “…some fetuses develop the capacity to survive outside the womb…” after nearly being two-thirds fully developed; this means that a fetus is ultimately capable of communication and awareness through it’s movements (Munson and Lague, page 469).

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1261 Words | 6 Pages

Abortion is not only a fluctuating concept in our society, but an ethical and emotional debate, as well. The image I have chosen presents concepts from a cultural and historical background, as well as presents an ethical, emotional, and logical appeal to the audience. The debate about abortion has simply been overblown and exhausted. The truth of the matter is, abortion is murder. Ending a life, whether innocent or guilty, is murder.

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Annotated Bibliography "Abortion ProCon.org." ProConorg Headlines. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

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Abortion is a huge problem, not just in the United States but also all over the world. Abortion is a termination of a pregnancy, usually within the first 28 weeks. Some people believe abortion is murder, while others believe it is not. Abortion is a social problem. In order to be a social problem, the issue must affect a group of people.

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listland.com, says “while fetuses of that age lack a fully developed cortex experiments on animals lacking a cortex show that they withdraw from painful stimuli.” “Dr Nathanson, an early proponent of abortion became a pro-life campaigner after he saw 12 week fetuses shrink from instruments and open their mouths in a scream during an abortion.” This is such a brutal act. This means is that when a baby is in the mother’s stomach it is in fact alive. Most “pro-choice” people say that the reason that they commit abortion is because the baby is not alive yet.

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Parker Garland Dr. Wion Ethics 12/10/16 Utilitarianism and Abortion Imagine how the world would be if everybody consistently acted in a manner in which what was best for everyone and animals was the main goal of each and every action and decision made. Do you think the world would be a better place? The is what the moral theory of Utilitarianism argues that it would be. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that believes that the best action is the one that maximizes utility.

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However, in most cases it is the embryo that is aborted and not a fetus, which is the stage in which the embryo starts to develop. As such an embryo cannot be written in statistics as a life lived as it is dependent solely on the carrier, thus aborting at this stage technically should not be considered as the taking of life but as a decision on whether to facilitate this possible life. Personhood begins after a fetus is able to survive outside the womb, not at conception. Conclusion

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1021 Words | 5 Pages

“Abortion -should it be a right of every woman in the present context- A critical analysis” 1. Introduction I elected to present my dissertation on a topic based on ‘abortion’ since it is a hidden social menace in our society. It is like an iceberg. The tip represents the reported abortions, which everyone sees.

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The termination of pregnancy by removing a fetus or embryo from the womb before it can survive on its own is called abortion. Nowadays, abortion is so common that more than forty percent of all women will perform abortion at some time of their reproductive lives. While this numbers are scary, what is more troublesome is that several countries support this dreadful act. Society is now considering this act of murder each day more normal, and position the mother 's rights before the baby´s rights. Killing an adult is no different than killing a fetus, both are genetically unique and were made by God.

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