Abortion is something that has troubled our world for thousands of years. Most opposing arguments rely on the idea that a fetus is a person from conception and that we must treasure that. What makes this fetus a person? It does not really look, function, or act like a person, so can we really consider it a person? I have a hard time considering something so different from a person to be an actual person. I do not believe that the status of the fetus is all that relevant because it is quite hard to determine when a fetus becomes a person and so on. In this essay, I will argue that abortion is permissible when there is sufficient reasoning to perform one. Why is it that some people believe a fetus is a person from conception? It does not look …show more content…
This case would be like the case of the mother who wasn’t financially or emotionally ready. The future burden of this child on the mother’s life constitutes an abortion. Most antiabortionists can agree in some respect that in the case of a rape, a mother can abort the fetus. But if “all persons have a right to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others…that those who came into existence because of rape” must have less (Thomson 71). This sounds quite malice. Who decides what life is more or less important if these fetuses truly are persons? Philosopher Mary Anne Warren states that there are five traits that constitute personhood. These five concepts include consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness. A fetus that doesn’t even have a developed braid or body cannot fit into these categories. Warren also states that if 1 through 5 are correct, then genetic humanity is not necessary in establishing that something is a person. She believes that some humans are not persons and that non-humans can be considered persons. I do not agree that nonpersons can be humans, but I understand where she is coming
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Show MoreIn A Defense of Abortion (Cahn and Markie), Judith Thomson presents an argument that abortion can be morally permissible even if the fetus is considered to be a person. Her primary reason for presenting an argument of this nature is that the abortion argument at the time had effectively come to a standstill. The typical anti-abortion argument was based on the idea that a fetus is a person and since killing a person is wrong, abortion is wrong. The pro-abortion adopts the opposite view: namely, that a fetus is not a person and is thus not entitled to the rights of people and so killing it couldn’t possibly be wrong.
The argument that an acorn is not an oak tree delineates where the determination should be made concerning whether a person exists. Indeed, one of the main controversies in the debate over abortion rights, hinges on the question of whether a person exists at the point of conception, during its development in the womb, or after birth. Thomson (47-48) allows that the fetus clearly develops into a human being prior to birth. She points out that, by the tenth week of pregnancy, the fetus has quickly evolved into a living being with discernible human physical characteristics. That is to...
...t it is immoral. I also see that it may not be immoral for a woman to abort if she has made the most effort to avoid pregnancy using contraceptives. However, as Thompson states, I think in this situation a mother “ought” not to have an abortion. A fetus should have the right to life, however the mother should also have the right to determine how to use her own body. So I too find it difficult to determine a solid stance on this issue. I’ve always believe that a fetus is a person, but I’ve also always struggled to discern when it is that the fetus becomes a person. Regardless of whatever science can prove or not regarding when a fetus is a person or however much argumentation is done regarding the permissibility of abortion, this topic will forever be surrounded by debate. I don’t believe there will ever a unanimous opinion on whether or not abortion is moral.
The criterion for personhood is widely accepted to consist of consciousness (ability to feel pain), reasoning, self-motivation, communication and self-awareness. When Mary Anne Warren states her ideas on this topic she says that it is not imperative that a person meet all of these requirements, the first two would be sufficient. We can be led to believe then that not all human beings will be considered persons. When we apply this criterion to the human beings around us, it’s obvious that most of us are part of the moral community. Although when this criterion is applied to fetuses, they are merely genetic human beings. Fetuses, because they are genetically human, are not included in the moral community and therefore it is not necessary to treat them as if they have moral rights. (Disputed Moral Issues, p.187). This idea is true because being in the moral community goes hand in hand w...
Abortions occur for all types of reasons, whether it is because the pregnancy was unplanned, rape-induced, or that it holds a life threatening capacity for the woman herself. Pro-lifers believe once one is conceived, he or she are entitled to a right to live. It does not matter whether or not the pro-lifers are able to prove that a fetus consists of personhood. The life of a potential person should not be able to override the right to one’s body. Judith Thomson presents a though experiment where personhood is granted to a fetus, but how that mere fact still fails to override the woman’s right to her body.
Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” describes her justification that abortion is not a fundamentally wrong action for a mother to undertake. By forming a distinction between being genetically human and being a fully developed “person” and member of the “moral community” that encompasses humanity, Warren argues that it must be proven that fetuses are human beings in the morally relevant sense in order for their termination to be considered morally wrong. Warren’s rationale of defining moral personhood as showcasing a combination of five qualities such as “consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity of communication, and self-awareness” forms the basis of her argument that a fetus displays none of these elements that would justify its classification as a person and member of the morally relevant community (Timmons 386).
“I argue that it is personhood, and not genetic humanity, which is the fundamental basis for membership in the moral community” (133). This is the central idea in Mary Anne Warren’s argument on the personhood of a fetus. She argues that in order for a genetic human being to be considered a person, he or she would have to possess all of the six criteria’s of personhood which include sentience, ability to reason and emotionality. In order to determine the viability of the personhood of a fetus she argues two things. Firstly, Warren argues that even on the surmise that a fetus has a strong right to life, abortion can still be seen as morally permissible. Warren demonstrates this by using Judith Johnson’s Violinist analogy, which asks the basic
In order for the pro-life argument to be valid, it must have both a true premise and true conclusion. It falls short of validity by assuming that a fetus up to 22 weeks old is a person, and has its own rights independent of its host, or what we often refer to as its mother. First we must recognize the subtle, yet extremely important distinction between a human being and a person. It is obvious that a fetus is a member of the human ...
Abortion has been the topic of controversy for many decades. Many people believe that when a woman terminates a pregnancy, she is committing murder and others argue that a woman has the right to choose life or abortion. There are different procedures to choose when having an abortion, depending on the gestational age and the woman 's health a pill form abortion may be used up to 9 weeks gestation (mifepristone and misoprostol), but for women who are over 12-weeks gestation (late-term abortion), surgical abortion is used (Berer 25). In 1973, the supreme court ruled that abortion was to be legalized, Roe vs. Wade. Women were given the legal right to choose to terminate their pregnancies and make the correct arrangements for their decisions. Different states have different restrictions to accessing abortion procedures, making the woman 's choice to terminate pregnancy less accessible. Restricting a woman 's access to appropriate abortion clinics limits her right to choose.
The birth of a child is usually a wonderful and priceless occasion. However, on June 5, 2015, an eleven-year-old girl gave birth to a newborn girl. Approximately a year before she gave birth, her 40-year-old father repeatedly sexually assaulted her. In this case, the unprepared eleven-year-old child decided to have the baby. This is a prime example that illustrates that the right to abortion should always be vested in the woman. Abortion, which has been debated for centuries and will continue to be fought upon for centuries to come, is a hot issue among social, political, and religious entities. This research paper will inform the reader about abortion using scholarly journals to define abortion, specifically when a fetus becomes a human being,
As previously stated, the point at which humanity determines a fetus becomes a human or a person is a tremendous source of argument between the pro-life and pro-choice movements. This argument centers around the point does a person become a human – at conception or birth? Thomson expands on this argument by stating that “we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become human person well before birth”(Thomson, 352). She exemplifies this with the following facts: “by the tenth week...it already has a face, arms, and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and brain activity is
Singer first points out that the different opinions on abortion come from the debate on when a human life actually begins. He formulates the common argument against abortion as follows: it is wrong to kill an innocent human being; a human fetus is an innocent human being; therefore, it is wrong to kill a human fetus. It is because killing a human being is undoubtedly wrong and immoral that the opposition instead attempts to deny the second part of the argument “a human fetus is an innocent human being”. By doing so, critics argue that the fetus does not have the status of a human being. This debate results in focusing on whether, or when, the fetus can be considered a human being, and therefore given the same rights against being killed as another human being. Singer however claims that it is difficult to find a moral dividing line between a fetus and a human being because the development of the human egg to a child is gradual. To prove his point, he describes four commonly proposed moral lines (birth, viability, quickening, and consciousness), which he then denies with strong arguments.
According to Don Marquis, the fetus is a person and has the right to live because it is a biological human being and a human being in a moral sense (Lewis,2013, pp. 320). A fetus is a person some may say because it possesses some of the personhood characteristics. In the woman’s womb, a fertilized sperm turns into a blastocyst after 5 days and later turns into an embryo (human fetus), which eight weeks later the fetus develops a brain, heart, and all the other body cells and tissue (Lewis, 2013, pp. 293). At that moment, the fetus is conscious and alive, because the brain is slowly functioning and is pumping blood throughout the whole body. Soon, the fetus would form into a human figure and kick the mother’s tummy, and when the mother places her hand on her tummy, the fetus stops kicking shows a communication or connection. So, it is a wrongful act to abort the fetus because it has the potential to develop into a person.
Abortion in the United States is a legal form of murder. Each and every year over a million babies are murdered and it must be stopped now before it will continue to get out of hand each and every day. We have discussed in this essay that a fetus is a living humans and not something that can just be thrown away. An unborn child is still a child and he or she needs an opportunity to grow and live a long successful life just like the rest of us have gotten the privilege to do. Abortion cannot go on any longer. More and more live are lost every day.
“In Twenty-first Century America, there are two classes of human beings, one protected by constitutional law and the other not. Human beings fully protected by constitutional law are those individuals who have already been born, and are recognized in law as persons. The second group consists of the unborn, which can be defined as the unborn human being from the time of its creation, in or outside of the human body and encompasses all forms of its existence, growth, and development, including zygote, pre-embryo, embryo, and fetus. The law does not recognize these “humans” as persons. Judicial fiat institutionalizes this status of being “separate and unequal.” An unborn human being is doomed unless it is wanted and chosen by its mother to be born alive” (Lugosi 226). Besides a few circumstances, most abortions are morally wrong because they are equivalent to murder, deny the right to life, and brutal.