Abortion is unethical because it is denying a future human a future

The argument

Killing is wrong because it deprives an individual of their future, a future they were looking forward to. A fetus can be expected to have a future, and ending its life would deprive it of that future. Therefore, it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy. A fetus can be expected to have similar experiences to an adult, and terminating a pregnancy is akin to the premature death of an adult. Both things deprive an individual of a future, making both things morally wrong.

Premises

Counter-arguments

An adult human has the ability to look forward to their future and plan out what they would like it to become. A fetus, on the other hand, does not know what sort of experiences they could have, and they do not have the ability to plan out a future. As that is the case, a fetus is not aware that they are being deprived of anything when a pregnancy is terminated, the same way an adult is. Another counter to the argument is that it allows abortions in too many cases. If a fetus cannot be expected to have a similar future due to a disability or because it will be born into horrible living conditions, then aborting the fetus may be acceptable according to this argument. That is not acceptable, because abortion should always be wrong.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The account of why killing is wrong carries the whole argument and is not the only one available. Rival accounts locate the wrong in the frustration of desires a victim actually holds, or in the loss to a being with a continuous psychological life, and these come apart from the deprivation account precisely in the cases at issue. Taken on its own the premise also implies that anything foreclosing a valuable future is comparably wrong, which reaches well beyond abortion. [Rejecting P2] "Can be expected to have a future" trades on two senses of expectation — statistical likelihood, and something a being can look forward to. The comparison with an adult's premature death has force because an adult has plans, attachments and a point of view that death cuts off; the premise transfers that force to a case in which those features are absent, which is the disanalogy the counter presses. It also treats the future as already belonging to the fetus, which is part of what the argument was meant to establish. [Rejecting C] The conclusion leaves out the second party entirely. Even granting that abortion deprives a being of a valuable future, the ethical question involves a pregnant woman whose body sustains that future, and no account of that relationship — what it requires, and what its limits are — appears anywhere in the premises.