Abstract

Is abortion morally permissible? Does the human fetus have a serious right to life--a right comparable in moral force to ours? Would abortion, in case a fetus is normal and does not threaten its mother's health, violate that right? In examining these questions, I begin the dissertation by considering and rejecting Judith Thomson's well-known argument in "A Defense of Abortion" that a fetus's right to life would not, in typical cases, give it a valid moral objection to an attempt to abort it. ;I next turn to the three conditions often thought to confer a serious right to life. One is status as a human being. The second is actual possession of the features that characterize mature persons of whatever possible kind. A third is potential possession of these person-making features. ;I argue that reliance on any of these conditions is either implausible or of no help in the resolution of our moral problem. And I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to suppose, as these theories do, that the question whether a fetus has a right to life can be resolved by attending to the features that distinguish mature actual or possible beings who clearly have the right from mature beings who lack it. We need, instead, to attend to the possibly quite different features that distinguish beings who have come to have the right from those, if any, who do not yet possess it. ;My positive conclusions are these: We are, essentially, mental beings. We begin to exist when the fetuses who become us first begin to have rudimentary mental activity. At that point of fetal development a being comes into existence who may well have the important goods of human life and happiness in its future. Such a being has, I argue, a serious right not to be deprived of those future goods and, therefore, a serious right not to be aborted