Analysis Of Abortion Is Immoral By Don Marquis

In “Why Abortion is Immoral” by Don Marquis, Marquis attempts to undermine the belief that anti-abortion arguments and rhetoric are based on religious or dogmatic arguments, and posits that using only ethical arguments, the reader may draw the conclusion that abortion can be equated with murder, or “killing an innocent adult human being” (Marquis 183). Marquis makes it clear that he will not explore the issues of abortions performed after a rape, or when the life of the mother is in danger were she to give birth, and that he is only arguing that an “overwhelming majority of deliberate abortions” are immoral (184).

Firstly, Marquis makes clear that we are working under the assumption that the fundamental disagreement present in the abortion debate is whether or not the fetus is a being worthy of being saved, and cites several writers that also believe in this fundamental disagreement to support his case. He then examines this paradigm as it pertains to the abortion argument, with pro-choicers on one side saying that fetuses are not rational actors, and pro-lifers on the other side saying that life begins at conception and making emotional appeals. He writes that the prima facie cases of the pro-choice and anti-abortionist movements are, respectively, that “being a person… gives intrinsic moral worth,” It is only… wrong to take the life of a member of the human community;” “It is always… wrong to take a human life,” and “it is always… wrong to end the life of a baby.” Marquis does not, in actuality, reject the validity of either side’s claims (185).

What Marquis instead does with these claims is point out to us the difficulty in resolving the abortion issue by surpassing this fundamental disagreement. On one side, you have pro-cho...

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...t,” or the second consideration, is that there is no empirical way of deducing what the fetus’s future existence will be like, and we are back to working under the same sort of broad assumptions he considers a problem with the current pro-choice/anti-abortionist paradigm. I do agree that Marquis is correct when he says that these broad and narrow assumptions bring us difficulty in solving the problem; I do not agree with the solution that he proposes. He has, however, managed to provide a much less problematic approach to the entire situation as his method of deductive reason produces a more logically valid response than either side of the divide with the current abortion argument, but it is only slightly more epistemologically respectable than the current arguments, as they all utilize internal knowledge in place of empiricism at some point or another (Chisolm 3).