Is Abortion Morally Wrong, or Is It Morally Permissible - Term Paper Example

? Is Abortion Morally Wrong, or is it Morally Permissible? Today abortion is a polarized, emotion-laden escalating controversy of absolutes in the United States. The consequentialist stance holds, basically, that varying abortion attitudes are products of varying interest. Pro-choice people are people whose interests are advances by abortion being available unfettered. Pro-life people are people whose interests are advanced by abortion not being available unfettered. In this paper I will discuss both pro-choice and pro-life arguments in the light of consequential theory. Pro-choice According to consequentialist theory, the results or consequences of actions (i.e. pain versus pleasure) are the primary relevant feature in evaluating actions. Consequentialist defending abortion rights typically argue that without the opportunity to decide independently issues essential to one's being and existence, such as reproduction, one's critical faculties and moral enlightenment are compromised. Reproductive choice is a freedom so fundamental to one's being that to withhold it from women is also to threaten their personhood by suppressing precisely those abilities that make one human: the conscience and the intellect (Luker 77). Put another way, denying women reproductive choice--turning the fact that women can bear children into the assumption that they (legally or quasi legally) should--will make them in some measure less human by essentially turning off their intellect and moral faculties, the sine qua non of humanness. In Beauvoir's terms, a capable actor is one possessed of moral and intellectual freedoms. Without these freedoms, political participation, democracy's modus operandi, is either hampered by a diminished quality of participation, as certain disadvantaged groups participate less effectively, or is altogether impaired, as these groups are so reduced in their humanity as to feel incapable, or excluded or alienated from the process. Without reproductive rights, including the right to choose or not choose abortion, individuals are denied freedoms so fundamental to their humanity, their intellect and morality, as to be ill-served to undertake any effective political and social engagement. The control of one's body denied by abortion prohibitions is the most basic civil right in democratic society, with deep roots in American political life. In 1891, the Court stated: "The right to one's person may be said to be a right of complete immunity: to be let alone" (Union Pacific, R. R. v. Botsford, 251). In her exhaustive analysis of abortion rights, Christine Luker borrows from Herbert Marcuse to argue that control of one’s body is a precondition of conscious engagement in social life (Christine 74). Marcuse posits that a connectedness with one's body is a precondition for the development of personality and the participation of individuals in social life (Herbert 72-78). Luker writes, drawing on Marcuse's theory of the body and political activity, that "control over one's body is a fundamental aspect of this immediacy, this receptivity [that is open and that opens itself to experience] ," which is a requirement of being a person and engaging in conscious activity (Luker 4). Thus the right to chart one's reproductive destiny helps to ensure that women's humanity comprising their feelings, intellect, and spiritual nature is not being suppressed, that they are not being relegated to the status of other where they languish in immanence and stagnation. In being denied the right to make the choice of whether or not to bear a child by being deprived of a right to abortion, women are not only denied the right to undertake the complicated moral reasoning and critical thought necessary for a decision in this important matter, but they are, more fundamentally, diminished as people. The reproductive choice is left, entirely in the hands of doctors (who decide as they see fit whether or not bearing a child will harm the pregnant woman). For this reason, the very ability to make the decision whether or not to undergo an abortion has significant political and social consequences. If women are denied the right to choose, they are denied participation in decisions germane to the control of their bodies, and this ability, along with the ability to make decisions essential to one's conscious existence, is a touchstone of free thought, social awareness, and political engagement. From this perspective, Justice Douglas's tragic observation in Doe echoes Justice Brandeis's in Whitney (a case cited by Justice Stone) despite its different focus (abortion rights and free speech, respectively) because this freedom to decide certain issues central to one's intellectual and moral existence is fundamental to one's humanity and therefore to one's political citizenship. Procreative decisions are among these profoundly important freedoms. The freedom to make independent reproductive decisions--decisions which are often the most important of one's life--encourages an intellectual autonomy enabling self-determination, moral reflection, and critical thought­-the essential elements of conscience existence and, of course, the effective political participation that makes democracy possible at all. Without the right to make such choices in matters fundamental to one's personhood, such as reproduction and education, one is scarcely a person--in the political, moral, or existential sense--let alone a capable actor. Less than full personhood for women thus has significant consequences for both women and the political system, consequences which footnote four was concerned to protect. Finally, another--though more attenuated--political consequence of losing reproductive freedom is the negative effects it has on women's perceived abilities in nondomestic spheres. The presumption motivating abortion prohibitions reveals the scant public regard for women's moral and intellectual sophistication and also perpetuates the sexism informing that opinion in the first place, all the while reinforcing prejudice against their intellectual and moral capabilities. If women are presumed incapable of making the abortion decision, then it stands to reason that they are presumed similarly incapable of making other important decisions. This it is not only insulting, of course, but deleterious as well. As Reva Siegel has observed, the denial of a right to choose denigrates "women's competence to make reproductive decisions that reconcile responsibilities to themselves and other family members, existing and potential" (Siegel, 238). Such denigration has demeaning and oppressive social, and therefore political, consequences to the extent that it undermines women's ability to be taken seriously in the world, thereby contributing to assumptions that they are not capable or qualified to be strong or effective public actors. This argument would begin to lose its force, however, as soon as society became more egalitarian. And, indeed, it is my principal argument here that abortion rights are not only a potential equalizer but, more fundamentally, guarantors of women's freedom in the first instance. In conclusion, given the importance that reproductive choice plays in one’s self-definition and the importance the abortion decision can play in one’s moral and intellectual existence, the denial of this right is a degradation of a women’s humanity, of her intellect and conscience. Pro-Life Consequentialist theory judges the consequences of the rightness (or wrongness) of an act on its outcome in terms of general welfare, which is understood as the aggregate balance of pleasure over pain. In abortion debate it is essential to ask of a fetus whether they it is as victimized by death as a more mature human being would be. According to Jeff McMahan the post-conscious fetuses are not as harmed by death as an older human being because the fetus' time-relative interest in continued existence is so minimal that it is almost negligible, and as such death does very little harm to the fetus (p. 66-80). McMahan concedes that if we were to consider the fetus' overall interests in continued existence, then death ought to be considered a great harm for her, for death does indeed deprive the fetus ofa great good: a standard human life. Yet he maintains that when it comes to the morality of killing, what we need to consider is whether the fetus' time-relative interest in continued existence is very strong, rather than focusing on the fetus' overall interest in continued existence (McMahan, 233-276). It is also a fact that a newly born lacks just as many strong psychological connections with his future self as it did while it was in the womb. Despite the differences in the sensational content of the (full-term) neonate and the younger post-conscious fetus, neither of the two are related to their future self in the ways that McMahan thinks matters in order to have a time-relative interest in continued existence. The freshly born neonate does not possess the "psychological architecture… to carry it forward into the future" any more than he did as a fetus (McMahan, 277). None of us remember being born; indeed very few of us have any memories prior to about two or three years of age. An infant has no goals for the future; his desires do not extend beyond his immediate needs. Indeed, a newborn infant, like a post-conscious fetus, is a sentient creature who experiences sensational content but lives in a perpetual state of the present But if the neonate has no more of a time-relative interest in continuing to live than a fetus (indeed, they are both so psychologically disconnected from their future that such a future might as well "belong to someone else"), it seems to follow that any time-relative interest that a woman possesses that favors abortion would also favor infanticide. Very few women have abortions because they dread the process of pregnancy, no matter how invasive it is, unless their own lives or health is at stake. Rather most women have an abortion because they desire not to have the child that would result from carrying the pregnancy to term. So, for example, if it is morally permissible for a woman to procure an abortion because she does not want the responsibilities of parenthood, and she does not desire anyone else raising her child, because her time-relative interest in this far outweighs the post-conscious fetuses' overall interest in continued existence (since the fetus has little, if any, substantial time-relative interest in continued existence), it should also be morally permissible, according to McMahan's view, for her the to have the newborn killed for the same reasons, since the infant's time-relative interest in continued existence is no stronger than a fetus.' Since the infant undergoes no intrinsic change with respect to his time-relative interest in continued existence from fetus to neonate any reason that may justify abortion also justifies infanticide, no matter how trivial, for remember that McMahan argues that "there will be a range of justifications for late abortion that appeal to considerations capable of outweighing the developed fetus' time-relative interests in continuing to live - for example, the interests of the pregnant woman" (p. 275). If a woman's time-relative interest in not having a child in the world (whether raised by her or someone else) was strong enough to by itself to morally permit abortion, then it is strong enough to permit infanticide. The fetus undergoes no intrinsic change from gestation to birth when it comes to his time-relative interest in continued existence; if he is not harmed by death in any substantial way during gestation (after consciousness sets in) given that he is so far removed psychologically from his future self, he is not harmed by death as a neonate for the same reasons. In other words, I believe that if McMahans’s argument for mid- to late-term abortion is correct, the same argument can be used in favor of infanticide. Thus, the morality of harm in reference to the violation of interests should be governed by overall interests. Consequently, since a post-conscious fetus' welfare interest in continued existence is just as strong as the welfare interest that any other individual has in continued existence, killing a fetus, a full-term fetus, or an infant is just as prima facie morally impermissible as killing any other individual that has a standard human future ahead of him. By doing so, we deprive the fetus of all the goods that belong to his future; we deny him the possibility of achieving any of the goods that a standard human life consists of. By killing a fetus we are robbing him of his future and violating the most basic and fundamental interest any human being can possess. We harm a post-conscious fetus just as much as we harm any other individual when we violate his welfare interest in continued existence. Therefore, in accordance with consequentialist perspective, killing a fetus is just as prima facie morally wrong as killing any other healthy conscious human being because doing so violates the fetus' interest in continued existence. Conclusion The abortion debate is often described as a clash of absolutes in which middle ground is elusive. It is important to seek a middle ground between the pro-life and pro-choice sides. Daniel Callahan (1970), author of one of the most exhaustive and thoughtful treatises on the morality of abortion, proposes that a balance be struck between two opposing moral issues: the right to life of fetus and women’s right to chart her own destiny. He favors abortion with restriction, something between abortion-on-demand and total prohibition. Work Cited Callahan, Daniel, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (New York: MacMillan, 1970) Christine Luker, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Norteastern University Press, 1990. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, trans. And ed. H. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage, 1989. Grosjean v. American Press, Co, 297 U.S. 233, 244 (1936) Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon, 1968, 166-71. McMahan, Jeff. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987. Reva Siegel. “Reasoning From the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection,” 44 Stan. L. Rev. 261, 338 (1992). Rubenfeld, Jeb. Article: The Right of Privacy, 102 Harv. L. Rev. 737 (1989). Union Pacific, R. R. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 350, 251 (1891) Read More