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Toward a Credible View of Abortion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

L. W. Sumner
L. W. Sumner*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

As little as a decade ago most moral philosophers still believed that the exercise of their craft did not include defending positions on actual moral problems. More recently they have come to their senses, one happy result being a spate of articles in the last few years on the subject of abortion. These discussions have contributed much toward an understanding of the abortion issue, but for the most part they have not attempted a full analysis of the morality of abortion. Such an analysis is too large a task for a single paper, but a sketch of it will be undertaken here, the details to be filled in elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , September 1974 , pp. 163 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Brandt, R. B. “The Morality of Abortion,” The Monist, LVI, No.4 (October 1972)Google Scholar; Brody, B. A. “Abortion and the Law,” journal of Philosophy, LXVIII, No. 12 (June 17, 1971)Google Scholar, and “Thomson on Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, I, No. 3 (Spring 1972); Gerber, R. J. “Abortion: Parameters for Decision,” Ethics, LXXXII, No.2 (January 1972)Google Scholar; Thomson, Judith Jarvis “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, I, No.1 (Fall 1971)Google Scholar; Tooley, Michael “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, II, No. 1 (Fall 1972)Google Scholar; Warren, Mary Anne “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist, LVII, No. 1 (January 1973)Google Scholar; Wertheimer, Roger “Understanding the Abortion Argument,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, I, No. 1 (Fall 1971)Google Scholar; Brody, B. A. “Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life”, American Philosophical Quarterly, X, No. 2, (April 1973).Google Scholar

2 The exceptions are the articles by Tooley and Warren (see footnote 1), each of which attempts to justify what I have classified as a liberal position on abortion. The present paper was completed before I encountered these articles and thus I have not commented on their arguments. Two of my purposes, however, are to discard this liberal view and to argue for an alternative to it.

3 A more thorough treatment of the matters discussed in this papers, and others pertinent to the abortion issue, is included in a book now in progress.

4 An answer to the first question is, however, an important step toward answering the second. The close connection between a particular view of the morality of abortion and a particular sort of abortion law is stressed by Brody, op. cit.

5 The unavoidability of this issue is the main point of the discussions by Brody.

6 For an account of this history see Noonan, John T. Jr. , “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, ed. Noonan, John T. Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

7 Catholic law professor Sergio Cotta, speaking for the Vatican against the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion: “By investigating the basic genetic structure of life, science has determined with unquestionable certainty that since the moment of conception the embryo is a living human being, entirely distinct from the parents.” Reported in the Toronto Star, January 24, 1973.

8 For a typical taxonomical profile of our species see Cockrum, E. L. et al., Biology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1966)Google Scholar.

9 For a standard classification and description of fetal abnormalities see Potter, Edith L. Pathology of the Fetus and Infant (2nd ed.; Chicago: Year Book Medical Publishers, 1961 )Google Scholar.

10 See the discussion of the intrauterine device in Grisez, Germain Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (New York and Cleveland: Corpus Books, 1970), pp. 106–109.Google Scholar

11 For the purpose of this discussion an individual is being treated as a full moral person when the conditions generally accepted as justifying the killing of that individual are those and only those which are generally accepted as justifying killing members of the species in general. In the language of the earlier discussion, he must be included within the scope of general moral principles concerning homicide.

12 A full defense of this view is made in the book referred to in footnote 3.