Abortion - "the Wrong of Abortion"

In his essay Why Abortion is Immoral Don Marquis attempts to argue that abortion is almost always wrong except for a few special circumstances such as when the life of the mother is being threatened by the pregnancy. In his thesis Marquis asserts that abortion is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being and the ethics of abortion is solvable. The strongest argument that Marquis presents to defend his thesis is the claim that what makes killing wrong is the loss of the victim’s future. In this paper, I will argue that this argument fails because aborting a fetus is not in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being.

Abortion is a polarizing issue that many have firm opinions about. Abortion is a moral issue because it involves whether or not a fetus has the right to life and if ending that life is considered to be murder or not. Don Marquis presents the argument that abortion is morally wrong because it deprives the fetus of a future. Marquis continues that any action that robs a person of a future, such as abortion, is morally wrong. Marquis’ argument for abortion is unsound, especially for cases such as rape. To illustrate, if Marquis argues that any action that robs a person of a future is morally wrong, then it follows that a woman who suffered the consequences of rape is also robbed of a potential future. It is important to consider involuntary pregnancies

The author argues that abortion can be done to save a mother’s life. For example, if a mother has a health problem that will not allow her to carry the pregnancy then abortion should be done in order to save her life (Feinberg and Shafer-Landau 28, 29). Furthermore, she argues that even though abortion is presumed as killing a child, the refusal to perform an abortion to an ill mother similarly results in the death of the mother. So it is unfair to the mother as both of them have equal rights to life and no one is inferior to the other (Feinberg and Shafer-Landau 642). In addition, the author states that the extreme view that abortion is killing/murdering an unborn child is false (Feinberg and Shafer-Landau 30). In a like manner, if a pregnancy poses a death risk to a mother, she has the right to defend herself even if in doing so involves killing the unborn child.

Many people bring up science about the babies being a fetus, not an actual person. But eventually, the babies are no longer a fetus, they are an actual human being. According to Daniel Mills, a PhD student at the University of Southern Denmark, you have to have oxygen to survive. A baby can only breathe to absorb the oxygen. So this means that the baby has to be living if it is inside the mother’s womb. If it is living, and we abort it, we have killed it. This shows that abortion is murder, and we aren’t doing about

The justness and morality of abortion has long been a topic of contention in the United States. In the article ‘A Defense of Abortion’ Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible in certain circumstances even if that fetus has a right to life. This essay will serve to lay out the positions that Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article takes in the defense of abortion in certain circumstances. I will present an argument that agrees with Thomson and further justifies abortion in cases that deal with pregnancies that are a result of rape, failed contraceptives, and in procedures that are recommended to save the life of the mother.

There are many arguments surrounding the controversial topic of abortion, which for the purpose of this paper is taken to mean the intentional killing of a human fetus. On the one hand, I and many others argue that a fetus has the same right to life as an adult human and therefore abortion is immoral. On the other hand, others argue that this is not the case and that the fetus either doesn’t have the same right to life as an adult or that this right is of secondary importance to the rights of the mother. They therefore argue that abortion is not immoral.

When an embryo should be considered an actual human has a variety of answers, “some have sought to reject that the early human embryo is a human being, according to one view, the cells that comprise the early embryo are a bundle of homogeneous cells that exist in the same membrane but do not form a human organism because the cells do not function in a coordinated way to regulate and preserve a single life”.(Siegel)

An Abortion is the deliberate dissolution of a human pregnancy, most often implemented in the course of the first 28 weeks of pregnancy. Individuals in the general public are pro-life and more or less are pro-choice. Some people feel abortions are becoming more and more justified. Others who consider America’s moral principles and standards feel the carnage of an unborn fetus is ethically wrong, consequently death is morally wrong. Abortion has developed into a debatable topic in American society.

Pro-life supporters feel that life begins right after fertilization takes place. Pro-life advocates associate abortion with murder. Another reason people who stand behind the pro-life movement greatly debate abortion is because it claims the life of an innocent human being, the unborn fetus. They feel conception starts after fertilization and abortions extinguish that life if they are performed. Pro-lifers feel even though a fetus hardly resembles a human being in the early developmental stages, it is still a human being with an individualized genetic

Abortion continues to be a controversial issue long beyond the U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade. Although the Supreme Court ruled abortion to be a basic right, there are still many who contest this decision. Those in favor of abortion, defend their view based on their belief that the government should not hold control over a woman’s right to her body. Yet those against abortion, also known as “pro-life”, claim that a life begins upon the fertilization of an embryo; thus maintaining abortion procedures are murdering innocent children. In order to decide if abortion is morally correct or incorrect, one must examine when a life truly beings, and if aborting a fetus accurately constitutes murder. This essay examines when a life is considered to

Many people opposed to abortion rely on the fact that the fetus is a human being from the moment that they are conceived. At that moment a unique DNA is created and they argue that God places a human soul in that just fertilized Ovum (Robinson, p.1). This has seemed to be a continuing debate between both sides. Pro-life activists disagree with the argument that a fetal life becomes a person only when electrical activity begins in the cerebral cortex. They argue that at the time of conception all major decisions as to what that fetus will become have been determined. For example, whether it will be male of female, what height it will be, what build it will be, and what colour it's

Every fetus from the moment of conception is a human with their own rights as a citizen. The world has come to an agreement that it is morally wrong to kill another human being. Therefore abortion is morally wrong because they are taking another human's right to live. From the view of the human community, we are not extending the equality of human rights to the unborn children if we make it legal to kill them before they even have a voice. Not to say that all forms of taking a human life are considered to be morally and ethically wrong, for instance in war or self-defense. If there is an instance where the mother and baby will die if the baby is not surgically removed and it dies that is not a situation where

Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by removal of the fetus from the mother’s womb. It is estimated that there are 30-40 million abortions conducted a year (Trupin). Abortions have been legal in the United States since the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, however there is still a major controversy surrounding abortion as to whether or not abortions are morally acceptable. While some argue that abortion is morally impermissible, as it involves the killing of a fetus, others will contend that abortions are morally acceptable because the fetus is not a rationale human being. When discussing the controversy of abortions, common questions revolve around the moral status of the fetus, and the rights of the woman. Prominent philosophers such as Judy Jarvis Thomson and Don Marquis have opposing stances on the issues. Thomson comes to the conclusion that abortion is morally permissible based on a series of analogies and thought experiments focusing on women’s rights. Unlike Thomson, Marquis argues that abortion is morally wrong except in extreme cases, based off of his reasoning of why killing is wrong. This paper will first reconstruct Marquis’ argument, and then argue that his argument is weak because it contains flaws that makes his conclusion invalid.

The distinctive connection between moral and immoral permissibility of abortion can be understood by understanding what is legally at stake for the women if she continue with the gestation of the fetus and her moral violation of human right if she is forced to continue gestation. According to (Rothman.1989) the decision to abort isn’t with the intension of destroying but rather of refusal to create, therefore the reason to abort lies with the mother or the parents of the fetus, the creators of

First, I will start with the premise that if a person has the right to life, killing a person is morally wrong. Second premise, a fetus is a person since the moment of conception.