The Abortion Debate

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The Abortion Debate According to Dean Stretton, “The most plausible pro-life argument claims that abortion is seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of something valuable. This paper examines two recent versions of this argument. Don Marquis’s version takes the valuable thing to be a ‘future like ours’, a future containing valuable experiences and activities. Jim Stone’s version takes the valuable thing to be a future containing conscious goods which it is the foetus’s biological nature to make itself have. I give three grounds for rejecting these arguments. First, they lead to unacceptable inequalities in the wrongness of killing. Second, they lead to counterintuitive results in a range of imaginary cases. Third, they ignore the role of psychological connectedness in determining the magnitude or seriousness of deprivation-based harms: because the foetus is only weakly psychologically connected to its own future, it cannot be seriously harmed by being deprived of that future”. Everyday there are pregnant mothers who abuse drugs and alcohol totally ignoring the living, growing person inside them. Then, when these children are born, they are usually born with a drug addiction or birth defects which sometimes leads to death. One thing's for sure, these children's lives are greatly complexed before they even reach the light of day. Which leads to my position that the rights o... ... middle of paper ... ...reements, certainly the weight of evidence indicated that a Western culture founded on Judeo-Christian values held abortion to be morally wrong. People with widely divergent theological perspectives (Jewish, Catholic, evangelical and fundamental Protestants) shared a common agreement about the humanity of the unborn. The same could be said about the international legal community. Physicians around the world subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath ("I will not give a woman a pessary to produce abortion"). The unborn were protected by various international documents like the Declaration of Geneva and the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Just as there are solid medical arguments against abortion, so also there are legal arguments against abortion. Roe vs. Wade was a bad decision that needs to be overturned.

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