Exploring the Moral Implications of Abortion

“Thou shalt not kill” – one of the more seemingly obvious commandments found in the Bible. As humans, our moral intuitions tell us without much difficulty that killing is wrong. When the act of taking a life is framed in such a way, it is difficult to imagine anyone who would disagree – but this presentation is deceptively simple. “Thou shalt not kill”, as helpfully prescriptive as it may be, misses a crucial parameter. Thou shalt not kill – what? Or whom? It is evident that navigating one’s way through the moral implications of killing becomes incredibly difficult when examining more specific cases of taking a life. Abortion, which refers to the act of terminating a pregnancy through artificial means, is particularly guilty of muddying the

In consideration of Singer’s argument above, a deontologist might reply by highlighting the wrongness of applying the same reasoning to a small child. One would not treat the termination of this life as equivalent to the termination of that of an animal, even if that animal is capable of the same amounts of rationality, self-awareness, etc. as the child in question – so, there must be some other factor to consider. Don Marquis argues that this factor is the deprivation of the victim’s future. In doing so, he avoids the objections that Singer raised against the personhood case; the fetus is given a right to live purely because it is likely to have a valuable future, but it is irrelevant that this future happens to include human experiences. Furthermore, we see that our hypothetical chicken obviously does not have a future of much value – hence, killing the chicken is much less morally wrong than killing a human fetus. Marquis thus exposes a point that is unaddressed in the consequentialist account; furthermore, he presents us with an important distinction that can be made between the rights to life of different living beings that are, albeit, cognitively