Abortion is unethical because a fetus will transform into a human

The argument

The argument grants the objection it is answering. While a fetus may not have many of the essential characteristics of a person, it will grow to have such characteristics — and the claim is that this future is what makes ending its life wrong, rather than anything about its present condition. The concession is made explicitly. A fetus is not rational or self-aware, and thus lacks characteristics that make a person. Considered out of context in its fetal state, it may not be as valuable as other creatures that do possess those capacities already. The argument does not dispute that; it denies that the present state is the relevant thing to assess. What replaces it is the trajectory. A fetus will become a fully rational and self-aware creature, which makes it a potential person, and a potential person has value on that account. The value is located in what is coming rather than in what is already present: it has value because it has a valuable future — the experiences, relationships and choices that a person's life consists of, all of them ahead of it and none of them yet had. The wrong of ending that life follows directly. What is lost is not a present capacity, since there is none to lose, but the whole of the future that would otherwise have been lived. Terminating its life would deprive the world of that future, and would deprive the being whose future it was of everything that future contained. On this reasoning the usual test for personhood is asking the wrong question. Whether a being is rational and self-aware at this moment settles nothing if it is on course to become both. It is therefore wrong to end its life, and abortion is unethical.

Premises

Counter-arguments

We do not generally afford the same rights to potential things that we afford to things. For instance, we do not give the child all of the rights an adult has. An adult has the right to vote, and though a child is a potential adult, we do not grant it the right to vote. The same can be said of other things. Since we do not tend to give the same rights to potential things, there is no reason a potential person should have the same right to life a person has.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] It is not wrong to kill potential people.