The Abortion Debate

Abortion is ending of pregnancy by removing the fetus or embryo. As discussed in the lecture, abortion is also defined as, “the non-birth involving ending of a pregnancy.” Abortion is an extremely controversial topic in bioethics, giving it the reason why there is generally moral debate over it. Many believe that killing of a fetus is wrong, but others opposing this argument says, a woman has the right to her own body, which gives her the right to do what she pleases. Both have their own viewpoints and stand right on their own grounds. There are three most general position one can take on the morality of abortions, the conservative view, the liberal view, and the moderate view.

Firstly, according to the conservation view, abortion is never

According to Thomson, the fetus has the right to life, but that does not trump that the women have the right to her own body. In her paper, “A defense of abortion” she has two main goals, the first is to challenge the arguments for the moral impermissibly of abortion, and the second to argue the permissibility of abortion in certain cases. She challenges the right to life argument which states that, if a fetus has the right to life, then it is morally impermissible to kill a fetus, a fetus has a right to life, therefore, it is morally impermissible to kill a fetus. According to her, premise 2 is not true but she does not want to challenge it, but she does challenge premise 1 but saying that, if premise 1 is true then it is morally impermissible to kill a fetus conceived through rape. It is not the case that it is morally impermissible to kill a fetus conceived through rape. Therefore, it is not the case that premise 1 is true.

To support her paper, she gives an example of the famous violinist. In the famous violinist case, she establishes two things, firstly, abortion in the case of rape is morally permissible. Secondly, the first premise of the right to life argument against abortion is

It states that killing is wrong because it is taking away their desire to continue living. The second, the discontinuation account of killing’s wrongness, which states that killing is wrong because it involves their discontinuation of people’s valuable experience of living.

Lastly, according to Michael Tooley, abortion is morally permissible because the fetus does not have the right to life, but even if the fetus does have the potential to become something that has the right to life, this does not make abortion morally wrong.

In his paper she argues over the two potentiality arguments, potentiality principle 1 and potentiality principle 2 by saying that they are only plausible if the generalized potentiality principle is plausible. Then he offers two augments against them, first the kitten argument against GPP. “If GGP is true, then it is wrong to inject kitten with neutralizing serum after injecting enhancement serum but before it develops its enhanced capabilities. It is not the case that it would be wrong to inject a neutralizing serum into a kitten after injecting it with enhancement serum but before its capabilities. Therefore, it is not the case that GPP is