Paste your essay in here…A common debate in the conversation of abortion is whether or not the fetus has the right to life just as all human beings do, just as you and I. There have been many arguments against abortion and many arguments for why abortion should be a choice and not a denied right. However, the conversation always stems back to this question: “Does the fetus have a right to life?”. Furthermore, if the fetus does indeed have a right to life, when does that right come into action? To me, the question of ‘when’ is more important than ‘if’. It seems relatively simple to conclude that a fetus does, at one point or another have certain rights, but determining when these rights become valid and the extent to which these rights have power and should be upheld is more of a gray area. In this essay I will speak on the views and arguments of two philosophers, Don Marquis and Judith Jarvis Thomson, and then give my own argument to support my beliefs on the topic of abortion and whether or not the fetus has a right to life, when this right becomes apparent, and what the right to life means to me.
Don Marquis, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, claims that “abortion is, except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral”. That statement makes it known that he does not believe that abortion is something that should be granted, even possibly in cases such as rape, but to understand why he believes this we first need to understand his reasoning for why it is immoral. Marquis states, “whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end”. Instead of analyzing the necessary and sufficient conditions for possessing the right to life and the right to live, Marquis supports his argument by asking why it is morally wrong to kill adults like us. Marquis argumentative strategy is formed in three simple steps: first, identify what makes killing adults like us wrong; second, prove that the fetus has the thing that was previously identified; and third, conclude that abortion is morally impermissible.
While forming his argument, Marquis rejected a few notions as to why killing adults like us is immoral. The first idea is that human life is sacred. He rejects this idea because it does not address whether or not it would be wrong to then kill an animal or alien, who, potentially have the same capacities as human beings’. It also implies that euthanasia and “pulling the plug” on a patient in a coma are just as wrong as murder. The second idea that he rejects is that killing an adult takes away their personhood, which he defines as self-consciousness. He discards this idea because it fails to address what is wrong with killing an infant or child who does not yet possess self-consciousness.
Marquis settles on this answer to why killing adults like us is wrong: because it “deprives us of the value contained in our futures”. This answer recognizes that it would in fact be wrong to kill animals or alien life forms, doesn’t imply that euthanasia or unplugging someone would be wrong, and identifies why killing infants would be just as wrong as killing an adult person. Based on Marquis’ theory if depriving a person of their valuable future is wrong, and if abortion deprives a fetus of a valuable future, then abortion is wrong. His argument implies that a fetus has a right to life from conception and that this right to life is measured by the fact that there is a potential for a valuable future. He provides a strong argument, even if it not one that I personally agree with.
Just as there are people like Marquis who believe that the right to life is acquired at conception, there are others who believe that the fetus doesn’t acquire this right until a few months after conception. Both of these theories suggest that abortion depends on whether or not the fetus has a right to life, but Judith Jarvis Thomson, a Philosophy Professor at MIT and author of ‘A Defense of Abortion’, has a different idea. Thomson takes the assumption that the fetus had the right to life and questions whether the right to life then entails the fetus the right to the mother’s body. She asks whether the right to life is more important than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, especially in cases of rape. Thomson states that “in some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life”, but does the bare minimum include the right to use someone else’s body in order to survive? She believes that the right to life does not automatically accord anyone the right to be given the bare minimum that one needs for survival, nor does it accord the right to not be killed by anyone; instead it means having a right not to be killed by anyone unjustifiably. A good example of this is the violinist case; even if someone, in this case the violinist, needs your body for nine months in order to survive, they do not have a right to your body and the decision should be yours to make.
Shifting away from the question of whether or not a fetus has a right to life and focusing more on if the right to life entails a right to another’s body, one might ask when, if ever, the fetus does acquire a right to a woman’s body. Thomson offers an analogy about burglars to respond to a common counter-argument concerning sex without contraception: “If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, ‘Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to use the use of her house-for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars.’” In other words, if a woman is engaging in consensual sex, knowing the possibility of pregnancy occurring, then the fetus automatically acquires the right to the mother’s body. I disagree with this because it implies that every time [heterosexual] sex occurs pregnancy needs to be anticipated, even if only a little bit, regardless of the fact that most [heterosexual] couples have sex purely for pleasure and outside of procreation. Another analogy that Thomson offers responds to a counter-argument that could be made regarding sex with contraception: “[S]uppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root.” This analogy addresses the argument that if a woman wants to avoid pregnancy then she should use contraception. Once again, I disagree because even if the people are using contraception, accidents happen and a woman should not be required to use her body to support another just because birth control or other forms of contraception failed.
Thomson does a great job of shedding light onto something that needs to be given more thought to when talking about abortion. Rather than attempting to argue whether or not a fetus has a right to life, Thomson brings attention to an issue that I do not think can be ignored when debating abortion: even if a fetus acquires a right to life, irrespective of when this right becomes valid, the fetus’ right to life does not take precedence over the mother’s autonomy and rights. When talking about abortion, one cannot merely discuss if the right to life is present before birth; one must also discuss the extent to which this right has importance and when this right becomes legitimate. Therefore, the question still remains: assuming that the right to life extends to a fetus, when does this right become acknowledged?
I believe that a fetus does have a right to life, but that this right is not granted at conception, but rather when the fetus can survive outside of its mother’s womb. Fetal viability, the potential to survive outside of the uterus, begins to present itself around twenty-four weeks. This is an acceptable time to accord the fetus a right to life because it recognizes the fetus as an individual without granting the fetus a right to the mother’s body. To grant a zygote, a fertilized ovum, the same right to life and to a future as we would grant to a child or adult, seems extremely far-fetched. It seems absurd to say that, at conception, a fetus has the same right to life as an adult like you or me, but it also seems immoral to say that a right to life occurs at birth and not at any point before. The right to life means the right to have the potential for survival. The potential of survival prior to fetal viability is slim to none, so if the right to life means the chance to survive then it would only make sense to grant the right to life at a point where there is a likely chance of survival.
There are two counter-arguments that could be made against the idea that a fetus does not develop the right to life until viability; the first is that fetal development begins within the first few weeks of pregnancy, months before viability. At around five weeks old, a heartbeat can be detected. At six weeks basic facial structures start to take shape. By ten weeks the fetus has completed the most critical parts of development and has limbs. Some may, and do, argue that if it looks like a human being and is developing structures that human beings have then it deserves to have a right to life and to a potential and valuable future, but at ten weeks old a fetus has zero possibility of surviving on its own outside of the womb so how can we compare a fetus to a child or adult? Until around twenty-four weeks, when viability first begins to present itself, the fetus must rely on another human for survival. A fetus that cannot survive on its own should not be seen as more valuable than a mother’s choice and body. Another argument that could be made is that maybe the fetus can feel, physically and emotionally, and that if this is true then it will be fully conscious that it is being aborted. Since human consciousness does not develop until around five months after birth I disagree with this argument.
I do not believe that the right to life presents itself at conception, nor do I believe that the right to life grants a fetus the right to another’s body. Yes, the issue of abortion does bring about the question of whether the fetus has a right to life, but I think that what’s more important is to ask when, not if, a fetus should be granted the right to life. This is something that I believe should be addressed more when speaking about abortion, and only by speaking of it can we ever truly understand what the right to life means and when it becomes acknowledged.