Abortion – Is Abortion ethical or unethical?

The word abortion brings many different views and ideas to mind that range from a woman’s right to her body to outright murder. Although at the present, many governments in world allow abortions to a certain degree, millions of people have debated for years whether abortions are morally acceptable or not. It is in the opinion of this author that abortion, though a controversial topic is generally wrong and should not be allowed in the vast majority of cases.

In the Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II believes abortion is a very serious problem and should not be allowed. He states that people should not use euphemisms for abortion, but to call it by its real name: the killing of a person. Because Pope John Paul II views life as beginning at conception, he strongly opposes abortion at any stage. The basis for his argument is that an embryo is an innocent being that can not defend itself at all and is completely dependent on the mother for everything. This point is correct because an embryo has not done anything to anyone; the embryo was created by the actions of the mother and father, and it is for this reason it can be said the embryo is an innocent being. From his religious view point Pope John Paul views the murder of anyone innocent to be morally wrong because everyone has a right to life.

Don Marquis provides and interesting view on the abortion issue that many pro-life people support. He establishes his criteria by first describing why the majority of people view killings as wrong. According to Marquis, killing someone is wrong if the person has a “future like ours.” This means that if the being will develop life experiences and have potential for a future that will give rise to human values and values then it is wrong to kill that person. A great aspect of this theory is that it allows for euthanasia for those individuals that are in a persistent vegetative state or terminally ill; in these cases the individual would not have a future like ours and it would not be morally wrong to kill them. I believe this way of looking at the abortion argument is great because it avoids the controversial issue of the status of the embryo during its developmental stages. All embryos will develop into humans and therefore have futures like our own which would make it wrong to kill them.

One objection raised against the future like ours theory is on the issue of contraception and preventing sperm and eggs from uniting to form an embryo. Marquis maintains that his idea does not characterize contraceptives to be unmoral because he states that “there is no non-arbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of the contraception.” He also adds that millions of sperm are released and only one is able to fertilize the egg, the rest naturally die. So in this way contraception is not necessarily morally wrong. Also, normally if the egg of a woman is not fertilized, it to will die normally. Prior to the union, eggs and sperm do not have a future like ours and therefore are not wrong to “kill.”

Bonnie Steinbock argues that most abortions should be allowed and are not morally wrong. Her personal view is the “interest view,” which states that beings that are non-sentient, that is they do not have nervous systems, are of no moral significance. These beings can not feel pain or pleasure and thus have no interest in what happens to them. For example, a car can get scratched up, but since it does not feel pain there is no right to be conferred to cars protecting them. Likewise, Steinbock states that most scientists believe embryos usually do not become sentient until after the first trimester. This implies that fetuses do not feel pain, and under the interest view have no moral right to life. Steinbock continues by stating fetuses in the first trimester are unconscious beings that are not being deprived of life if they are killed. She states these beings are only living a biological life and not consciously alive, in which case it is not wrong to kill them.

I would like to raise an objection to this claim of consciousness being a necessity for having life. People who go into comas may be unconscious for days, months, or even years, yet it would be morally wrong to euthanize them within the first few days of unconsciousness. There is always the chance that person will come out of the coma and become a normal person once again. People are not considered dead if they become unconscious in which case they also do not feel pain or pleasure, and can technically be classified as non-sentient beings at the present. Likewise, although a fetus may be unconscious during pregnancy, there is a promise that it will develop into a baby and have consciousness. It is not a chance as in the coma example but a definite thing, and this is why applying the consciousness as life idea to the abortion controversy is wrong.

Judith Thomson, a well known proponent of abortion, cites interesting examples and ideas that many look upon to settle the controversy of abortion. Perhaps she is best known for her analogy of a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body. Her example is that you wake up to a famous unconscious violinist connected to you when you wake up in the morning. You had no idea about this until this morning and were kidnapped and operated on without your permission last night so the violinist may survive. Also, if you decide on disconnecting yourself from this person then he will die. From this scenario she says it would be morally kind to help out and allow this person to stay connected to you for nine months until they get better, but you would be under no moral obligation to do so. Obviously most people would find this to be outrageous and would not consider it morally obligatory to stay connected and help this person. She emphasizes the part of not being asked for permission first to relate this scenario to those of rapes that result in pregnancy.

I do not think this analogy correctly describes the situation of pregnancy for it has many flaws. First of all, the “person” being connected is not a stranger as Thomson describes in her analogy, but rather a part of the mother. The embryo/baby is at least 50% genetically the same as the mother. There is a major difference in having moral obligations to save your own children and complete strangers. Mothers share a special bond with their offspring and most people would agree that they do have to put their own convinces aside to help their children. Furthermore, concerning the rape case, Thompson does bring up a good point about the woman not giving permission to have a child in her body for nine months. However, I must point again to the fact that it is no stranger but genetically 50% similar to the mother that will be formed in her body. With that being said, aborting the fetus would be similar to killing a part of the mother in the form of the fetus. This is obviously wrong and should not be allowed. Many people would object to this claim because the woman’s choice is violated, but the embryo did not do anything wrong…

All in all, in my opinion abortions should not be allowed under most cases. The only exception that should be considered is those in which the mother’s life is at risk. In that case the decision should be left up to the mother and family to consider all the options and decide. This is important to allow the mother and family to decide because each case could have multiple factors that would impossible to form a generalized statement on. Overall I see the future like ours theory to best explain why abortions should not be allowed in the vast majority of cases. Embryos are considered by some to be persons, while others object to that claim, but everyone accepts that embryos are potential people. If left alone and allowed to take a natural course will indeed develop into a person. Aborting the fetus/embryo would end the life prematurely and is in fact equivalent to killing a person which is morally wrong because it ends a life that will develop consciousness, experiences, and feelings that all people have.