Abortion

Abortion

A. Jonathan Glover, in his article Matters of Life and Death casts dispersions on both pro-abortion and anti-abortion debates citing them as too knee-jerk emotional reactions diminishing the inherent complexity of the other side (1. Glover, CC2006, p. 0110). Glover comprehensively addresses the key points of both sides of the abortion debate and evaluates their inherent virtues, especially for those who hold these opinions, then methodically points out its flaws. Ultimately, Glover comes to the conclusion that though a fetus is a human at the moment of conception, the right to abort lies with the mother and her own self-determination.

Glover begins his article by claiming that the status of the fetus, historically, has been solely discussed by and been determined by men and it has only been in relative recent history that women entered the debate and claimed the bearing of children was so intrinsic to the life women that the fetus was essentially controlled by women and to deny them decisions over their fetuses was a grave injustice (2. Glover, CC2006, p. 0105-6). This argument will later frame Glover's view that abortion is solely a woman's choice and that the moral underpinnings are up to her to decide. Elaborating on the idea of how linked women are to pregnancy, Glover points out the grim reality of however awful the nine months of unwanted pregnancy is pales to the state of a family throughout the lifetime of having to rear an unwanted child (3. Glover, CC2006, p. 0106). Glover espouses the virtues of abortion in maintaining functional families, preventing terrible physical afflictions and curbing world overpopulation and how these benefits are being usurped by the restrictive views and politics of abortion (4. Glover, CC2006, p. 0114). The consideration of the wholesomeness of family is often overlooked by the one-dimensional anti-abortion arguments who seem only to care about bringing the child into the world rather than how to make the child's life better once entering it. They assume that if the child is unwanted, then once born, there should be no qualms with giving it away without considering the fact that this is further emotional taxation for the new mothers who may or may not feel comfortable with letting their children or a part of them go, thus have to deal with raising the child. The choice to abort, then, seems like a viable route, but Glover counters by pointing out that pro-choice argument leaves no determination of the status of the fetus or in determining when a child has attained humanness.

Throwing a wrench in the whole notion of viability, or ability to survive outside of the womb that set some sort of line in the sand for which stage of pregnancy abortion is frowned upon once crossed, Glover looks into the future and sees that new advancements in medical technology will make viability possible even earlier than previous advancements, so a situation where two identical stage fetuses differ in viability based simply on the technology immediately available to them resulting in one being saved and the other aborted (5. Glover, CC2006, p. 0106). If the notion of viability is fluid, then it must be thrown out as a point of debate about when humanness occurs, as well as any other checkpoint of pregnancy since pregnancy is a continuous process rather than defined stages and it becomes too difficult to pinpoint any one marker to argue whether or not that marker is a sign of humanness. It is in this way that Glover is able to do away with the whole time between conception and the birth of a child and point only to conception as the time that can unequivocally be maintained as the moment a fetus has attained humanness regardless of what advancements in science may tell us about what happens during pregnancy. Glover, by using conception as a starting point, was also deftly able to avoid the debate over the self-consciousness of a fetus (seeing as how it has been proven that newborns and infants also do not have self-consciousness, but nobody is really going to kill a newborn on those grounds). So then if a fetus is human, then how can one justify killing it?

There are essentially three objections to murder: it takes away the victim's autonomy, it prevents the victim from years of life it was due, and the effects of others who had some relation to the victim (6. Glover, CC2006, p. 0110). Casting aside religious teachings because of the variety of religions, Glover focuses on these three objections. Glover claims that a fetus has no real autonomy of its own, thus can not be afforded its own rights and that even if the fetus did have rights, the rights and autonomy of the mother supercede the rights of the fetus (7. Glover, CC2006, p. 0113). In this way, the second reason also falls by the leeway because years of life due to the mother if her life was threatened by the pregnancy or the years she has to invest in raising an unwanted child is usurped by the birth of the fetus. And finally, though not explicitly mentioned, the only other person that a fetus has any relation or interaction with is the mother, thus if the mother wants the fetus aborted, the moral implications that arise reside solely with the mother.

It is in this way that Glover returns to his original assertion that to deny women the right to control what happens in their bodies is wrong, but cautions that a fetus is a human right at conception, so ending the life of the fetus is equal to ending the life of any human, yet the rights afforded to women trump all of this and whatever moral pitfalls that a woman may experience due to an abortion are for her alone.

B. Judith Thomson argues for the right of women to have abortions in her Defense of Abortion. Thomson would not necessarily agree with Glover's position that a fetus is a human from the moment of conception and would argue that not until sometime right before birth is the fetus human, but Glover's argument would be able to absorb this criticism since Glover was using that moment in pregnancy to make a point- a point that Thomson acquiesces in her own article to pursue an argument.

Like Glover, Thomson understands that establishing a line to determine humanness is a tricky line to draw and no real justification can be given for choosing one point over another; it is essentially arbitrary (8. Thomson, CC2006, p. 0084). Where Glover deduces that since all points in between are arbitrary, then the beginning point must be chosen, Thomson sees said choice as an incorrect one. Thomson sees the embryo as sub-human and though has the potential to become human, not quite there yet. She offers the analogy of an acorn and an oak tree pointing out that while the acorn has the potential to become an oak tree and has the same makeup as an oak tree, no rational person would see an acorn and call it an oak tree