Abortion and Its Ethicality - Essay Example

Abortion and Its Ethicality Abortion has been a topic that has been the source of many arguments, with one side supporting it while the other rallies against it. Unfortunately, no middle ground has been able to be arrived at by these two sides and most people are either for it or totally against it. Two individuals who have been popularly involved in this argument are Mary Anne Warren who supported it and Don Marquis, a philosopher who is against it. Both these individuals present compelling bases for their arguments and bring out valid points on the subject.

Mary Anne Warren supports abortion rights with her main argument being that fetuses cannot actually be said to be persons. She goes on to set out a number of criteria that should be met for one to be considered an actual person. This involved characteristics such as the existence of consciousness and in particular the ability to feel things such as pain and to be aware of their surroundings. The other abilities that Mary Anne listed included communication, reasoning, self motivated movement and the presence of self awareness, which meant that the individual had to be aware of their existence.

Mary Anne argued that since a fetus had none of these capabilities then it could not actually be considered as a person, and thus the act of abortion cannot be construed as taking a life. This is because the fetus would not be aware that it even had a life to live and technically speaking it would not have developed to the stage where it could be considered to be a life/person and thus the act of abortion would be preventing the process of it developing into a person but could not be classified as the taking of a person’s life as no person had yet developed for their life to be taken (Peter, 2005).

Don Marquis on the other hand saw it differently and through his main argument, which is popularly referred to as the deprivation argument to state the case that abortion is not an acceptable activity no matter the stage of development that the fetus is in (Pecorino, 2002). In summary, the deprivation argument stated that the act of abortion is the same as the taking of a life since it would be preventing the fetus from attaining their potential life (Pecorino, 2002). The philosopher stated that since every individual had to pass through similar stages of being a fetus before they attained their life, the act of abortion can be viewed as the taking of a future person which is the same as killing a mature person.

In other words, the act of abortion denies the fetus of its potential future that it would have enjoyed otherwise. This includes all the activities, experiences and accomplishments that the fetus would have potentially attained had it been let  to live out its life in full instead of being cut short even before it started. It is with this argument that Don Marquis argued that the majority of abortions that took place were immorally wrong and were similar to the act of killing an innocent person.

However, the philosopher agreed that there were certain situations that the act was an acceptable necessity such as when the mother’s life was endangered by carrying the fetus to full term. Abortion under such conditions was acceptable and he likened them to situations such as when an individual took a life in self defense when they were left with no choice (Peter, 2005). If I was to find myself 3 months pregnant, and it was discovered that my child would 90% likely to have severe physical and mental handicaps, then I would get an abortion.

This would be because the offspring that would result from the pregnancy would not be able to truly enjoy their life thus negating Don Marquis’ argument for a valuable future because many of its life experiences will be more than likely filled with trials and complications that would leave them unable to be appreciative of many of the things that life would have to offer. Thus, it can even be argued that carrying such a pregnancy to full term would be considered an act of cruelty if one already knew what awaited the child and the life that they would have to ensure.

It would be better to stop it early than leaving the child to suffer later on. There is also the extremely high likelihood that if given the choice, an individual suffering from such physical and mental handicaps would have preferred not to be subjected to such a life and with this consideration in life it would be selfish to force an individual to live out such a life when one had the opportunity to prevent it before it even began and thus could not be viewed as the taking of a life. Reference Peter, S. (2005). The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics through Literature.

Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pecorino. P. (2002). Don Marquis: Why Abortion is Immoral. http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/MEDICAL_ETHICS_TEXT/Chapter_8_Abortion/Reading_Marquis_Why_Abortion_Immoral.htm