Should abortion be legal?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should abortion be legal?
Position‹3 of 3: Abortion should be illegal.
Argument‹5 of 6›: A foetus is a person

A fetus is a living being and thus abortions are a form of murder.

The argument

The argument for prohibiting abortion begins from a premise its defenders take to be uncontroversial: murdering a person is a crime, and the law rightly treats it as among the gravest. Everything then turns on whether the fetus is a person, and on this view it is. The ground offered for that claim is the moment of conception. At conception a unique genetic identity comes into existence, not a part of the mother's body and not an earlier organism continued, but a new and distinct one. That identity does not change afterwards; it accompanies the fetus through gestation, through birth and through the whole of the life that follows. The individual who exists at conception and the individual who exists decades later are, on this account, the same individual, because what makes each of them who they are was settled at the outset and persists unbroken. If that is right, proponents argue, then the usual distinctions drawn between a fetus and a born child cannot bear the weight placed on them. Size, location, degree of development and dependence on others are differences of circumstance rather than differences in what the entity is, and none of them is the sort of thing that ordinarily determines whether killing is permitted. The being in the womb and the child outside it are the same being at different stages, so there is no morally relevant difference between ending the one and ending the other. The conclusion follows from the two premises together. To abort is to erase that unique identity, to end the life of the individual who was constituted at conception and would otherwise have continued. If killing a person is murder, and the fetus is a person, then aborting a child is tantamount to murder, and on this view the law should treat it accordingly: abortion should be illegal.

Premises

[P1]At the moment of conception a unique genetic identity is created that accompanies the fetus throughout its life. [P2] There is no morally relevant difference between killing a fetus in the womb and killing a born child. [P3] Since murdering a person is a crime, aborting a fetus that already has its own identity is tantamount to murder. [C] Therefore, because a foetus is a person, abortion should be illegal.

Counter-arguments

A fetus is not a person. It is a fetus. It is an extension of the mother. It cannot live outside the womb or independently of its mother. Therefore, it is not a human or a person. It is a part of the mother. Aborting it is no more murder than a woman having a mole removed or getting a haircut.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A foetus is not a person at conception. It becomes a person later. [Rejecting P3] Killing a foetus is not always wrong. When it saves the mother's life it is necessary.

Proponents cited

Mitt Romney
“When you create this clone, when you take the nucleus of a skin cell of a male and put it in an egg of the female, do you at that point have life?...And they said, 'No question, it is life. Once you put these together, you have life.' That's all I need to know for when the definition of when human life begins.”
Marco Rubio
“The science is settled, it's not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life beings at conception.”
Dr. Jerome Lejeune
“The genetic makeup of a human being is complete from the moment of fertilization: Not a single scientist doubts it... If a human being is a half-inch long, does she deserve respect? If she is 20 inches long, does she deserve 40 times more? People who use years and pounds to quantify the respect due to another human being are not well intentioned.”
Mike Moon
“I believe when we’re talking about a human life, how barbaric is it to consider snuffing out a human life before it has a chance to breathe on its own?”