Abortion should be allowed when pregnancy endangers the mother

The argument

The argument does not rest on any claim about the moral status of the foetus, which is what makes it available to people who disagree about that question. It proceeds instead by analogy with a principle already accepted in law and in ordinary moral reasoning: in much the same way as killing another person is morally justified if that person was trying to kill you, so it is morally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy if the foetus puts the mother's life at risk. The analogy is chosen carefully. Self-defence is the case in which taking a life is permitted even by those who hold that life to be fully valuable. The justification does not depend on the attacker mattering less; it rests on the fact that one of two lives will be lost, and that the person facing the threat is not required to be the one who loses it. Applied here, the argument can grant the foetus whatever moral status its opponents wish to assign it and still reach the same conclusion. The obvious disanalogy is addressed directly, and it concerns intention. Even though the foetus represents a threat to the mother's life unintentionally, it nonetheless poses a threat. The reply offered is that the justification for self-defence tracks the danger rather than the culpability of its source: someone facing a lethal threat is not required to establish that the threat was meant before being permitted to act, because what makes the defensive act permissible is the prospect of their own death rather than the blameworthiness of whatever is causing it. Therefore, it is reasonable to permit the termination of the pregnancy. In these cases, it should be permissible for a mother to have an abortion — which is precisely the extreme situation the position identifies as grounds for an exception.

Context

Even if we acknowledge that a foetus is a person, it has an inalienable right to life, and to abort it is tantamount to murder. That doesn't mean that a foetus has any more right to live than the mother. In cases where continuing the pregnancy to the full term puts the mother's life in danger, then difficult choices have to be made.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The mother knowingly bought the danger unto herself by choosing to become pregnant. Therefore, she is not acting in pure self-defence. As a result, abortions carried out to save the mother's life are not an act of self-defence and should not be permitted. Even in cases where the mother's life is at risk, neither the parents nor the doctor should be permitted to take any measures that would deliberately end one or the other's life. The physician has the responsibility to do everything in his or her power to save both lives. If the child dies as an unintended consequence of treatment, then this is not an abortion and the physician and parents are morally justified. However, if the child is deliberately killed, this is unacceptable and there must be legal sanctions in place to punish those responsible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] This would not fall under self-defence as the foetus is not deliberately attacking the mother. Also, the mother willingly became pregnant and was presumably well aware of the risks associated with pregnancy.