PHIL 140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Henry Fonda, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Abortion-Rights Movements
11 May 2016
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Document Summary
Pro-life - life is present at the moment of conception; fetuses are human beings; killing a human being is wrong, so abortion must also be wrong. Pro-choice - fetuses are not persons/rational agents/social beings/ not human person, and is morally permissible beings; thus killing a fetus is not the same as killing a. Pro-choice: too narrow; if it is only morally wrong to kill only rational agents, then it is morally permissible to kill children and the mentally. While it is clear that a fetus is both human and alive, there is no proof that is a human being. A pro-choice strategy that extends the definition of a person to infants or even to young children seems just as arbitrary as an anti-abortion strategy that extends the definition of human beings to fetuses. Further, human being is such an ambiguous term that there is no agreed interpretation of the definition.
