Abortion Is Immoral By Don Marquis Summary

There is always, at least, two sides to an issue. The issue of abortion is a very controversial ethical issue. Abortion is a word that brings up many views and ideas that range from a woman being able to do what she wants with her body to simply just committing murder. Abortion is defined as the destruction or termination of a fetus while it’s still in the mother’s womb. However, abortion has more than just a meaning to it. Abortion comes with consequences. There are two sides to this issue: pro-life and pro-choice. Here is where the controversy of the issue arises because we don’t know which one is the correct way to go. The people who argue that abortion is wrong are considered pro-life and the people who argue that it should be up to the

His pro-life position is established without using personhood and religious premises. Marquis looks for a solid argument as to why abortion is immoral. Whether or not abortion is wrong we determine it based on what we identify the fetus as, Marquis says “whether a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end” (pg317) Pro-life people compare a fetus to a human, while pro-choice people argue that a fetus lacks any of the features that make the fetus a person that would support the argument that killing a person is wrong. He believes a fetus is a human being. Since, the arguments of whether or not a fetus is a human being go back and forth, he says, “in order to develop such an account we can start from the following unproblematic assumption concerning our own case: it is wrong to kill us.”(pg321) To be able to comprehend the wrongness in killing us we must understand what killing us actually does to us. Marquis states that killing us “imposes on us the misfortune of premature death. This misfortune underlies the wrongness.” Marquis argues that because the fetus has a human-like future it is immoral to abort the fetus. A human-like future suggests that the fetus has a future and has the potential to do things in its future life. To abort the fetus would be to deprive the person it would had eventually become from any future experiences,

The first objection states that if an adult has the right to live than potential adults also have the right. So this means that early term abortions are immoral. The second argument against marquis is the argument with interests. This argument argues that to have valuable future, the person must have an interest in their future. Early fetuses’ don’t have awareness, therefore, they can’t take an interest in the future. The third objection is the problem of equality. It says that the young are deprived more than the elderly. The fourth argument is the contraception one. This says that if the future-like-ours theory is right than contraception is immoral because it results in one less human being