From: utzoo!watmath!cbostrum Newsgroups: net.women Title: There is nothing wrong with Abortion Article-I.D.: watmath.4470 Posted: Fri Feb 4 22:27:30 1983 Received: Sat Feb 5 01:22:24 1983 To date, there has been no serious arguments in favor of abortion. So I thought I would try to give one. My extreme title was to get people to not type 'n'. There are a number of reasons that abortion might be wrong. The most powerful is that a foetus has a right to life. Even if it didnt, abortion might still be wrong on some other grounds, but only a weak case can be made. If a foetus has a right to life, this right must be played off against the mothers rights, such as right to self-determination of her body. I feel that the mother would have to lose out in such a contest. So it comes down to whether the feotus has such a right. Briefly, let us say an entity possessing such a right is a **person**. Note right away that there is NO apriori reason to suppose the class of persons co-extensive with the class of humans. The question becomes, is the feotus a person? And to answer that, we must find relevant conditions for the ascription of personhood. The basic principle is that: only an entity who has some conception of its life as something it possesses and something that will continue for a long time into the future if not acted upon unfavorably by external agents can possibly have a right to life. Alternately, if it makes no difference to the entity itself what is done to it, it cant possible matter to the entity what you do to it. For it to make a difference, the entity has to have the relevant understanding. (Of course it may make a difference to someone else; if you trash a famous painting, altho it has no right to life, you might upset its owner.) I think it is clear from what we know that a feotus does not, and that it is not too risky to work on this hypothesis. It is probably far more risky to work on the hypothesis that, for example, apes, dolphins and even cows have no right to life. I also think it is fairly clear that a newborn baby has no right to life in the above sense. However, some of the other reasons (with which, I mentioned above, only a weak case can be made) can be used more effectively with new born babies that feotues. But not much more.