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.