abortion right or wrong essay

Ethics and Morality

Ethics and abortion, two opposing arguments on the morality of abortion..

Posted June 7, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Abortion is, once again, center stage in our political debates. According to the Guttmacher Institute, over 350 pieces of legislation restricting abortion have been introduced. Ten states have signed bans of some sort, but these are all being challenged. None of these, including "heartbeat" laws, are currently in effect. 1

Much has been written about abortion from a philosophical perspective. Here, I'd like to summarize what I believe to be the best argument on each side of the abortion debate. To be clear, I'm not advocating either position here; I'm simply trying to bring some clarity to the issues. The focus of these arguments is on the morality of abortion, not its constitutional or legal status. This is important. One might believe, as many do, that at least some abortions are immoral but that the law should not restrict choice in this realm of life. Others, of course, argue that abortion is immoral and should be illegal in most or all cases.

"Personhood"

Personhood refers to the moral status of an entity. If an entity is a person , in this particular sense, it has full moral status . A person, then, has rights , and we have obligations to that person. This includes the right to life. Both of the arguments I summarize here focus on the question of whether or not the fetus is a person, or whether or not it is the type of entity that has the right to life. This is an important aspect to focus on, because what a thing is determines how we should treat it, morally speaking. For example, if I break a leg off of a table, I haven't done anything wrong. But if I break a puppy's leg, I surely have done something wrong. I have obligations to the puppy, given what kind of creature it is, that I don't have to a table, or any other inanimate object. The issue, then, is what kind of thing a fetus is, and what that entails for how we ought to treat it.

A Pro-Choice Argument

I believe that the best type of pro-choice argument focuses on the personhood of the fetus. Mary Ann Warren has argued that fetuses are not persons; they do not have the right to life. 2 Therefore, abortion is morally permissible throughout the entire pregnancy . To see why, Warren argues that persons have the following traits:

• Consciousness: awareness of oneself, the external world, the ability to feel pain.
• Reasoning: a developed ability to solve fairly complex problems.
• Ability to communicate: on a variety of topics, with some depth.
• Self-motivated activity: ability to choose what to do (or not to do) in a way that is not determined by genetics or the environment .
• Self-concept : see themselves as _____; e.g. Kenyan, female, athlete , Muslim, Christian, atheist, etc.

The key point for Warren is that fetuses do not have any of these traits. Therefore, they are not persons. They do not have a right to life, and abortion is morally permissible. You and I do have these traits, therefore we are persons. We do have rights, including the right to life.

One problem with this argument is that we now know that fetuses are conscious at roughly the midpoint of a pregnancy, given the development timeline of fetal brain activity. Given this, some have modified Warren's argument so that it only applies to the first half of a pregnancy. This still covers the vast majority of abortions that occur in the United States, however.

A Pro-Life Argument

The following pro-life argument shares the same approach, focusing on the personhood of the fetus. However, this argument contends that fetuses are persons because in an important sense they possess all of the traits Warren lists. 3

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous. At 12 weeks, for example, fetuses are not able to engage in reasoning, they don't have a self-concept, nor are they conscious. In fact, they don't possess any of these traits.

Or do they?

In one sense, they do. To see how, consider an important distinction, the distinction between latent capacities vs. actualized capacities. Right now, I have the actualized capacity to communicate in English about the ethics of abortion. I'm demonstrating that capacity right now. I do not, however, have the actualized capacity to communicate in Spanish on this issue. I do, however, have the latent capacity to do so. If I studied Spanish, practiced it with others, or even lived in a Spanish-speaking nation for a while, I would likely be able to do so. The latent capacity I have now to communicate in Spanish would become actualized.

Here is the key point for this argument: Given the type of entities that human fetuses are, they have all of the traits of persons laid out by Mary Anne Warren. They do not possess these traits in their actualized form. But they have them in their latent form, because of their human nature. Proponents of this argument claim that possessing the traits of personhood, in their latent form, is sufficient for being a person, for having full moral status, including the right to life. They say that fetuses are not potential persons, but persons with potential. In contrast to this, Warren and others maintain that the capacities must be actualized before one is person.

The Abortion Debate

There is much confusion in the abortion debate. The existence of a heartbeat is not enough, on its own, to confer a right to life. On this, I believe many pro-lifers are mistaken. But on the pro-choice side, is it ethical to abort fetuses as a way to select the gender of one's child, for instance?

We should not focus solely on the fetus, of course, but also on the interests of the mother, father, and society as a whole. Many believe that in order to achieve this goal, we need to provide much greater support to women who may want to give birth and raise their children, but choose not to for financial, psychological, health, or relationship reasons; that adoption should be much less expensive, so that it is a live option for more qualified parents; and that quality health care should be accessible to all.

I fear , however, that one thing that gets lost in all of the dialogue, debate, and rhetoric surrounding the abortion issue is the nature of the human fetus. This is certainly not the only issue. But it is crucial to determining the morality of abortion, one way or the other. People on both sides of the debate would do well to build their views with this in mind.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/state-abortion-bans-2019-signed-effect/story?id=63172532

Mary Ann Warren, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," originally in Monist 57:1 (1973), pp. 43-61. Widely anthologized.

This is a synthesis of several pro-life arguments. For more, see the work of Robert George and Francis Beckwith on these issues.

Michael W. Austin, Ph.D. , is a professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University.

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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

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By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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• v.79(1); 2012 Feb

Book Review: The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice

William e. may.

Emeritus Pontifical John Paul II Institute For Studies on Marriage and Family Washington, D.C.

The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice by  Christopher Kaczor. New York:. Routledge,  2011.  x+246. pp. 

Christopher Kaczor's thorough study of “the ethics of abortion” is logically organized as follows: 1) introduction (1–12); 2) “Does Personhood Begin after Birth?” (14–37); 3) “Does Personhood Begin at Birth?” (38–55); 4) “Does Personhood Begin During Pregnancy?” (56–90); 5) “Does Personhood Begin at Conception?” (91–120); 6) “Does the Human Embryo Have Rights?” (121–144); 7) “Is It Wrong to Abort a Person?” (145–176); 8) “Is Abortion Permissible in Hard Cases?” (177–214); 9) “Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate?” (215–230). He answers “no” to numbers 2, 3, and 4, and “yes” to number 5. His own answer to numbers 6, 7, and 9 is “yes,” but his strategy is to consider and reject arguments answering “no” to these questions; his own answer to number 8 is “no,” but again his strategy is to consider and rebut arguments for a “yes” answer.

Kaczor asks whether “personhood,” not “human life,” begins at different points. He does so because today many claim that not all living members of the human species are persons with rights; only “persons” have rights, and killing human beings who are not persons does not violate any “right” to life.

First let us examine the rich contents of Kaczor's book. I will then close with an evaluative critique.

1. The Introduction

Kaczor believes that sound philosophical reasoning informed by a careful examination of the evidence can show that the vast majority of abortions are morally unjust (12). But he is convinced that meaningful and respectful dialogue between defenders and critics of abortion is possible if two key truths are honored. The first is the difference between the subjective culpability of the agent and the objective morality of the act as determined by relevant moral principles and norms. We must not, indeed cannot, judge those who choose to have or defend abortions. “Whatever one's view of abortion itself, refraining from making judgments about the character of those touched by abortion (in whatever way) is helpful in treating the topic properly, and more importantly, I believe (but won't defend here), that it is an essential part of being a decent human being” (5). The second is to avoid loaded language such as anti-life, anti-choice , etc. and use instead terms such as defenders of abortion, critics of abortion (6).

2. Does Personhood Begin after Birth?

Defenders of the claim that personhood begins after birth include Michael Tooley and others who accept the definition (or varieties and nuances thereof) of person given by Peter Singer: namely, “a being is a person if and only if the being has 1) an awareness of his or her own existence, 2) over time and in different places with 3) the capacity to have wants, and 4) plans for the future” (17–18). Kaczor provides an exhaustive critique of this definition and the four “person-making” criteria it stipulates, along with a critique of the efforts of many (Julian Savulescu, Galen Strawson, David Boonin, a “later” Tooley and his colleague Laura Purdy, and others) to “nuance” this definition and offer more sophisticated versions of it in order to answer objections, among them the criticism that, if strictly interpreted, Singer's definition would include among non-persons those who are sleeping or anesthetized, and if more loosely interpreted would include those in deep coma or severely mentally disabled (24–32).

A common claim is that the unborn and newly born are not actual persons but only “potential persons.” Responding to this claim, Kaczor distinguishes between a “passive potency” and an “active potency.” The former requires the intervention of an agent extrinsic to the being to effect the change from potential to actual (e.g., a sapling has a passive potency to become the leg of a chair) whereas the sapling has the active potency to become a mature tree (24). In defending this distinction Kaczor shows the absurdity of scenarios invented by writers like Nicole Hassoun and Uriah Kriegel to show how an oyster could develop its own rational powers if it were transported to Mars and if living on Mars made oysters capable of this (24–25).

Kaczor counters Jeff McMahan's argument that neonates and young children are not “persons” by a reductio ad absurdum. McMahan argued that since rational functioning determines moral worth, then there are degrees of personhood, and some persons are of greater value not only than non-rational humans but also than some rational ones. He further argued that there is no logical reason why rational entities with rational capacities might not be manufactured. In fact, McMahan himself had to admit that his idea that those persons whose rational capacities are greater than others have more rights than other persons is “dangerously invidious” (23).

Kaczor also shows that the acceptance of the Dutch “Gronigen Protocol” by Hilde Lindemann and Marian Verkerk is rooted in the a priori and falsifiable presupposition that the most humane way to treat severely handicapped newborns is to kill them to save them from a life of “hopeless and unbearable suffering.” This view presupposes that there is such a thing as a life not worth living and that one can judge that another human being is better off dead than alive. But empirical studies show that individuals who have suffered a lifetime because of a genetically-caused serious handicap or accident do not want to be so killed (33–34).

3. Does Personhood Begin at Birth?

Kaczor's procedure in showing that the answer to this question is “no” is to summarize and criticize the specific views of different authors (e.g., Mary Ann Warren, David Boonin, H. Tristam Englehardt, Ronald Green, Lawrence Tribe), playing them off against each other and showing their inconsistencies and in particular the inconsistencies in the changing views of Warren; he likewise briefly examines the nature of partial-birth abortion, and the Supreme Court's ruling affirming a constitutional right to this procedure and by that ruling reaffirming the conventional pro-choice view that abortion ought to be legally permissible throughout the nine months of pregnancy until the human being has been entirely removed from the woman's body (38–55).

4. Does Personhood Begin during Pregnancy?

Kaczor examines the following stages during pregnancy when different authors think the living human being becomes a “person” with a serious right to life: conscious desires/interests (Bonnie Steinbock); viability ( Roe v. Wade ); quickening/fetal movement (Kaczor names no one who holds this but simply proposes and then disposes of arguments claiming this); sentience (Ronald Green, David Overberg, et al.); human appearance (Roger Wertheimer; Jane English); brain development (Baruch Brody who, however, completely repudiates abortion after the brain appears, although Kaczor fails to note this); implantation (Bernard Nathanson prior to his conversion; Stephan Coleman). Kaczor rebuts these proposals by appealing to relevant scientific studies and to the infighting among defenders of abortion over these criteria for determining the beginning of personhood. In criticizing the claim that the human organism becomes a person when the brain is developed, Kaczor appeals to D. Alan Shewmon's refutation of the rationale used to claim that the brain is the central organizing element in the human person (79–81).

Of special interest in this chapter is Kaczor's presentation of and refutation of the developmental view or the multicriterial approach of Mary Anne Warren in her later writings, which is endorsed by Green and others. According to this approach, each of the criteria noted earlier fails as a sufficient criterion for determining personhood if taken individually. However, if they are taken together they lead to the conclusion that the right to life (a right of “persons”) gradually gains strength as pregnancy progresses, and the more similar the human being in utero is to “full-fledged” persons like those of us who are born, the greater the protection it deserves. Nonetheless before birth this being is not , Warren claims, a full-fledged person with a serious right to life (83–85).

Her claim ignores the vast difference in the right to life and other rights. There are age restrictions on voting, driving, and being elected to public office because these rights imply abilities to discharge specific responsibilities. But the right to life does not imply any corresponding responsibilities and so can be enjoyed regardless of age or mental capacities. And Warren's view has other problems as well.

Since Kaczor had shown in the earlier chapter that personhood does not begin after birth , he ends this chapter by saying that inconsistencies and inner contradictions of the most important arguments that personhood arises during pregnancy point to the logical conclusion that personhood begins at conception, the issue of the following chapter (90).

5. Does Personhood Begin at Conception?

Kaczor begins his yes answer to the question by saying that he will address not one but two questions. The first is “a moral question that inquires as to who is a member of the moral community; the second is a biological question that seeks to know when human life begins” (91). The first question is extremely important, not only for the abortion issue and other ethical issues but also because its answer presupposes or reinforces at least implicitly a general theory of personhood. Kaczor draws on Robert Spitzer's Healing the Culture: A Commonsense Philosophy of Happiness, Freedom, and Life Issues and John Kavanaugh's Who Count as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing to contrast the endowment account of personhood and the performance account of personhood (93). After criticizing efforts (e.g., by Jeff McMahan, S. Matthew Liao) to defend the performance account of personhood and efforts to discredit the endowment account (e.g., by Martha Nussbaum), Kaczor argues that every human being is a rational animal (Aristotle's definition centuries ago; man is the zoon logikon , animal rationale ). Moreover every human being is not potentially a rational being, but a currently existing actual rational being. Kaczor illustrates this by using examples from pathology—for instance, some men are sterile and cannot therefore reproduce when united in the bodily act of genital intercourse with a woman. But this is a pathological condition, and these men's generative organs remain generative even if they cannot be exercised. Thus human beings from conception on are the kind of beings who are actual existing rational beings even if these rational powers, rooted in their being, must be developed in order to be exercised, but they could not be developed if they were not there to begin with, etc. (98–102).

The second question, when does a human being begin to exist, is a biological or scientific question and Kaczor, making his own the scientific studies cited by Patrick Lee, 1 shows that this evidence leaves no doubt about the beginning of human beings; they come to be at conception, when the sperm from the man fuses with the oocyte of the woman and a new organism, distinct from mother and father, begins to be, with the active potency to develop into an embryo, fetus, newborn … senile old person. Kaczor then offers another argument, which he calls the “constitutive property” argument, to support this conclusion (105–120). (Kaczor notes that David Boonin had articulated this argument. He does not, however, point out that Boonin's articulation of the argument is in essence a misreading of the argument proposed by Paul Ramsey years ago; Boonin discusses this argument in his widely ac-claimed A Defense of Abortion 2 ). The “constitutive property” is that all human beings from conception on are rational animals , i.e., bodily beings with the active potency to develop and exercise the rational acts of forming concepts, judgments, and arguments, and of making free choices.

6. Does the Human Embryo Have Rights?

In answering “yes” to this question, Kaczor does not give arguments to show that embryos have rights. His strategy is to consider and answer “several major objections to the view that the human embryo is a person, a being due fundamental respect” (121). He had examined those objections and rejected them in chapters 2, 3, and 4. This chapter is thus somewhat repetitious. It focuses on twelve arguments proposed by defenders of abortion to deny personal rights to human embryos: the acorn analogy; the size of the embryo; twinning; embryo fusion; the high embryo mortality rate; hylomorphism (the “delayed hominization theory”); the anti-abortion, anti-contraception argument; the argument that cells are not persons; the embryo rescue case; the bag of marbles analogy; cost-benefit analysis; the uncertainty argument.

I will not consider these objections and Kaczor's replies to them in any detail, but I will illustrate his strategy in his replies to the arguments based on monozygotic twinning and on fusion, as well as the high embryo mortality rate, or “wastage,” argument.

Some (Mary Warnock, Jeff McMahan) argue that the phenomenon of monozygotic twinning proves that an individual human being cannot exist in the early stages of pregnancy. Kaczor's basic reply is that even if one being can be divided into two, this does not mean that it was never an individual being, something demonstrated by cloning, an artificial kind of twinning. He stresses the difference between individuation and indivisibility : the fact that one being can be divided into two does not mean that it was never an individual being. It is also possible that the original human zygote died and in doing so gave rise to two or more individual human beings (127–129).

It may be possible that two human zygotes can fuse into one. The argument (Harris, Green) is that two human beings cannot fuse into one; therefore two human zygotes cannot so fuse but rather become “humanized” with the appearance of the primitive streak fourteen days after conception. All this case shows is that two human beings were in existence prior to fusion (and no instances of the fusing of human embryos have been recorded so far as I know, although Kaczor does not note this), and now the two human beings cease to exist and a new human being takes their place (129–130).

Embryo wastage or high embryo mortality

The argument (Green, McMahan) is that if embryos were truly human beings and especially if they were persons, parents would grieve over miscarriages as they do over the death of a toddler or aunt or beloved friend, whereas they do not. But most women do grieve over miscarriages. Far more important, however, is that grieving a death is itself irrelevant to whether an entity is a human being or person. There seems to be a relatively high rate of “embryo” wastage. But, Kaczor argues, experts think that this is the result of gross abnormalities and serious deficiencies in the reproductive process because of incomplete fertilization. In a majority of cases, it is likely that no human being or person was “wasted” or lost but rather some non-human organism. In addition, all human beings die, some during pregnancy, others at birth, others at different stages of their lives, but their deaths in no way show that they were not human beings or persons when they died (131–133).

7. Is it Wrong to Abort a Person?

Kaczor begins this chapter by declaring: “If every human fetus is a person, is abortion always wrong? It would seem so. Since having others respect one's right to life is a necessary condition for the possibility of enjoying all other rights (including the right to privacy and bodily integrity), it has a necessary priority over all other rights [with a reference to Spitzer's Healing the Culture ]” (145). But Kaczor does not show precisely why intentionally aborting a person, including unborn persons, is always morally wrong. Rather he criticizes some major arguments proposed by defenders of abortion justifying the killing of the unborn. The arguments are the following: the violinist analogy (of Judith Thomson), the burglar analogy (Thomson's), the “no worse off” analogy (Francis Kamm), the “special duties to children but not to fetuses” argument (Thomson), the comparative burdens objection (Thomson, Martha Nussbaum), the “does killing make the fetus worse off” argument (Kamm). Kaczor analyzes and criticizes these arguments from page 150 through page 176, giving special attention to Thomson's different “arguments/analogies” (150–167); in analyzing Thomson's thought he shows the significant moral distinction between foreseeing an evil effect and intending that effect, a distinction Thomson rejects.

I will not consider Kaczor's critique of all these arguments but rather show his procedure by briefly summing up his critique of Thomson's violinist analogy and his treatment of the key difference between foreseeing and intending. Most readers are familiar with the violinist analogy that Thomson used in her famous article “The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion,” published in the inaugural issue of Princeton University's Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade. Just as a person does not have a moral obligation to allow the violinist plugged into her body while she is sleeping so that his blood can be purified by her kidneys to use her body for this purpose for nine months, so a woman who gets pregnant, perhaps after taking precautions (e.g., contraceptives) not to, has no obligation to allow the unborn child to continue to use her body for nurture for nine months; rather she has a right to have the child removed from her body even if its death is foreseen as an effect of its removal.

Thomson tries to buttress this analogy by referring to the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan. She thinks that if the woman were a “good” or “very good” Samaritan she would permit the violinist to remain plugged into her and the fetus to remain in her body for nurture until birth. But she says we are not obliged to be “good” or “very good” Samaritans, only “decent” Samaritans, and that a decent Samaritan would not be obliged to sustain the life of either violinist or fetus at such a severe cost to his own life.

Kaczor's criticism focuses on the Good Samaritan story. He says that the strength (or initial plausibility) of the analogy rests on the intuition that one may unplug oneself from the violinist, but he argues that Thomson's reference to the Good Samaritan considerably weakens her analogy. He stresses that the point of the story is moral and not legal . Thomson appeals to it as offering us moral wisdom (not religious faith). “Using the Good Samaritan story to justify not helping someone in need is,” Kaczor writes, “rather like using the race between the tortoise and the hare to justify a lack of perseverance” (150–151). He goes on to argue that the violinist analogy can be attacked on other grounds, for instance, on the right of the violinist and fetus to bodily integrity. Unplugging yourself from the violinist suggests that you are not violating his bodily integrity. But what if you could unplug yourself from him only by chopping him up or tearing him limb from limb or suctioning him away by a machine that grinds him to pieces? If one does this, is not one violating his right to bodily integrity, the same right the one to whom he is attached possesses? And to separate herself from the fetus, does not the woman have to have it ripped apart by a curette, or sucked out by a machine that grinds it into pieces, and in so doing she violates its right to bodily integrity? (151–152).

Kaczor emphasizes that Thomson's analogies proceed on the assumption that there is no moral difference between foreseeing and intending the evil effects of our actions, e.g., the death of a human person, say the violinist, the fetus, or an innocent non-combatant in war. But Kaczor goes on to show the centrality of this distinction for morality. We are in some way responsible for the unintended evil effects of our actions, for they would not take place if we did not choose to do the deeds that cause those effects (e.g., the deaths of innocent non-combatants caused by dropping bombs on a military target—what is now called “collateral damage”). However, we have a much greater moral responsibility for the actions we freely choose—i.e., intend—to do, as examples clarify, and here I offer some of my own. For instance, if I drive a car to go to the store, my chosen deed here and now is to drive the car to the store; in driving it I foresee that I will use up gasoline, wear out my tires, and pollute the atmosphere. But I do not intend these evil effects; indeed I would prefer that they not occur. Similarly, a dentist may foresee that he will cause me pain in doing some procedure on my teeth, but he is not intending that I experience the pain; if he does I will go to a different dentist. Many abortion defenders (e.g., Boonin, Thomson) reject this key distinction, and Kaczor takes up their objections in detail and answers them (157–162).

8. Is Abortion Permissible in Hard Cases?

Kaczor answers “no” to this question. He divides the chapter into two lengthy sections separated by a shorter one. The first major section discusses “Hard Cases for Critics of Abortion” (178–191), and these include the following: difficult circumstances, fetal deformity, abortion for the child's good, cases of rape and incest, abortion to save the mother's life. The second major section takes up “Hard Cases for Defenders of Abortion” (193–214), and these include the following: murder of pregnant women; sex selection abortion; abortion for frivolous reasons; safe and legal, but why rare? why parental opposition? prenatal bonding with “our baby”; morally permissible vs. morally objectionable; intermediate moral worth of the human fetus. The third and shorter section concerns “Cases of Conscience” (191–193). It will be useful to consider all of these.

Hard Cases for Critics of Abortion

Difficult circumstances.

The most common reason for abortion is that the circumstances of the pregnancy are not felt to be right either for the mother or for the child to be born. Typical circumstances of formidable difficulties are broken homes, drug abuse, crushing poverty, abusive relationships, fear of public humiliation, inability to complete education or do one's work. It would be arrogant and wrong to judge women seeking abortion because of these circumstances; what they need is support, not condemnation. But these circumstances can and do exist after a child is born and can even be worse. But even defenders of abortion would not use these circumstances to justify the intentional killing of a six-year-old child. Commonly accepted morality holds that such killing of innocent persons or helping others to do so is not ethically permissible even in the worst circumstances. Doing the right thing may be difficult and even heroic, but one is obliged not to do or facilitate such intentional killing (178–179).

Fetal deformity

Kaczor uses the same kind of reasoning to answer this difficulty. He notes the exceptional difficult case when prenatal testing shows that the unborn child has a disease or malady known to be fatal shortly after birth. Even if abortion is not chosen, the unborn child is doomed to death. Abortion will spare the mother the burden of continuing the pregnancy, the burden of giving birth, and the agony of waiting for the child to die after birth. Abortion seems justified by the principle that in such circumstances we should salvage the best out of a difficult situation. But Kaczor notes that abortion itself imposes serious burdens on the woman; more important ethically is that the expected lifespan of a person does not affect the permissibility of killing him. Thus if the human being in utero is a person, then intentionally killing him or her is impermissible even if he or she will shortly die (180–181).

Abortion for the child's good

This difficulty, similar to the previous one, appeals to the emotions and shows that the motives of those who abort unborn children for this reason are used to justify the intentional killing of innocent unborn persons. But good motives are not sufficient to justify freely chosen human acts. They cannot justify the intentional killing of innocent human persons whose lives are integral to their being (181–183).

Cases of rape and incest

In such cases (Kaczor treats incest as often the same as rape, since it usually occurs against the free consent of the woman) abortion is justified as the necessary means to protect the good of the mother. Kaczor first points out that if conception can be prevented, this is morally acceptable because the means chosen is not contraceptive (to impede the beginning of new life through a freely chosen genital act) but is rather to protect the woman from suffering further bodily violence from the rapist. (Kaczor does not himself spell this out in his text, but his footnote reference is to John Finnis's treatment of the matter in his Moral Absolutes of 1991, and Finnis clearly sets forth the reasons why this is true.) Kaczor emphasizes that most women who conceive a child after rape do not abort the child but bring it to birth and either place the child for adoption or raise him or her themselves.

But if the woman wants the abortion so that she will not be reminded of the suffering she endured by being raped, nonetheless the truth remains that the unborn child is an innocent human person with the same inviolable right to life as the pregnant woman. Like all other human persons, the mother has the corresponding duty to refuse to intentionally kill that person, which is what she does if she consents to abortion. Some (e.g., Thomson) object that this would require heroic virtue on the part of the woman. Kaczor acknowledges this, but he then affirms a most important truth, writing: “[S]ome circumstances, including those created by the evil choices of others, can sometimes remove the category of the merely permissible, leaving us with a choice between the morally wrong and the morally heroic. If a dictator orders you to torture your mother to death or face a firing squad, you will be faced with a choice between the morally wrong and the morally heroic” (184–185). And this, one will correctly infer, is the same situation for the woman made pregnant by being raped.

Abortion to save a mother's life

Kaczor addresses these cases by using what he calls “DER,” double effect reasoning, and he then briefly summarizes the requirements of this reasoning as summed up in the principle of double effect by Thomas Cavanaugh. 3 According to this summary of the principle of double effect and of double effect reasoning, performing an act with two morally significant effects is justified if “(1) the evil effect is not intended as a means or as an end; and (2) there is a proportionately serious reason allowing for the evil effect” (186).

Kaczor says that if we apply double effect reasoning to abortion, its first condition shows us the moral difference between “direct” and “indirect” abortion, and it is crucially important to distinguish abortions where fetal death is intentionally brought about (frequently called “direct” abortion) and procedures in which the death of the human being in utero is not intentionally brought about but is the side effect of what a person brings about intentionally (frequently called “indirect” abortion). Direct abortion is not justifiable because it is the intentional killing of an unborn human person. The second condition of double effect reasoning is fulfilled if the mother's life is at risk, because saving her life is a proportionately serious reason for allowing or tolerating the death of the unborn child. Kaczor then examines three cases in which the mother's life it at risk: ectopic pregnancy, cancer of the uterus, and the case when the baby has trouble exiting the birth canal.

He judges that abortion in the first two cases is “indirect” and the death of the unborn child a foreseen but not intended effect, and that therefore abortion in such cases is morally justifiable. He notes some debate among reputable writers who reject all intentional killing of innocent persons over different methods of coping with ectopic pregnancies, especially by use of the drug methotrexate. But he says that the majority of contemporary writers now accept salpingostomy: splitting of the fallopian tube in which the fetus has implanted, removing the unborn child, and sewing the tube up in order to increase the woman's chances of conceiving in the future. This method had been repudiated many years ago by J. Lincoln Bouscaren, a Jesuit canon lawyer who first developed an argument justifying salpingectomy as a morally permissible way to save the life of a mother if endangered by an ectopic pregnancy—a salpingectomy is the excision of the fallopian tube where the fetus had implanted rather than in the womb.

Kaczor also judges morally right radiation therapy or a hysterectomy, that is, removal of the uterus, to save the life of a pregnant woman suffering from cancer of the uterus and for whom life-saving treatment of the cancer cannot be postponed until the baby is born. In such a case, use of radiation therapy that would have as a side effect the death of the unborn baby, or a hysterectomy that would also result in its death, is justifiable insofar as the death of the unborn child is not intended but only the life-preserving therapy done to the mother (186–189).

The third case, when the unborn child cannot exit the birth canal because it is stuck in it and the pressure it exerts can cause the mother to die, is also called the craniotomy case because the unborn child can exit the birth canal if a craniotomy is performed on it, and this requires that the baby's skull be crushed. If the craniotomy is not done then both mother and baby will die; if it is done, the mother's life can be saved. Kaczor identifies four possible outcomes, the first three resulting if the doctor does nothing and the fourth resulting from his intervention: 1) both mother and child will die; 2) the baby will die, and then removing its corpse by crushing its head is not immoral; 3) the mother will die and then the child can be removed safely; and 4) the mother will be saved if a craniotomy is performed on the baby.

Kaczor notes that Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph A. Boyle have argued that in both the hysterectomy and craniotomy cases the death of the unborn child is neither the means nor the end intended and that there is no moral obstacle to engaging in these performances to save the life of the mother. 4 Kaczor thinks that one could argue that “even if the crushing of the baby's skull is not killing as a means to save the mother's life it may involve another evil means, namely the mutilation or violation of the physical integrity of the child,” and one could thus distinguish the craniotomy case from the hysterectomy case. But he then goes on to consider arguments for and against the claim that crushing the baby's skull is an unjustifiable mutilation because it results in the baby's death and the questions these arguments raise. He judges these questions to be of great importance and difficulty and leaves them as open questions (190–191).

Cases of Conscience

This brief section concerns the debate between critics of abortion and defenders of abortion about the place of conscience. Kaczor criticizes the 2007 paper “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine” issued by the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). This document shows that ACOG considers conscience not as one's best judgment concluding a process of moral deliberation from basic moral principles to practical conclusions about what one is obliged to do or not to do here and now. Rather, it regards conscience as someone's own private opinion about what he personally ought to do without any appeal to basic principles to justify that opinion. Conscience is more of a belief that must not be imposed on others. The ACOG document also requires doctors and other health-care personnel to refer patients to others if they feel that they cannot personally provide the standard reproductive services—these include artificially making children in the laboratory, providing contraceptives, and abortion. The ACOG document not only unfairly limits a doctor's liberty in action but also infringes on his right of free speech. For these and other reasons this position regarding the role of conscience must be repudiated (191–193).

Hard Cases for Defenders of Abortion

Murder of pregnant women.

Most people find the raping of women morally abhorrent and particularly odious if the woman is pregnant and even more so if it causes her to have a miscarriage. So true is this that even proponents of capital punishment balk at executing a pregnant woman. At times the male who has caused a woman to become pregnant assaults her in order to cause a miscarriage if she refuses to abort the child. A notorious example occurred when Scott Peterson killed his wife Luci, eight months pregnant with their son Connor. Missing from Christmas Eve, 2002, their bodies, separately, washed to shore on April 14, 2003, and Connor's umbilical cord was still attached. Despite protests by abortion rights advocates, the husband was legally charged by the California Court with two counts of murder, with “special circumstances” calling for tougher penalties. Laws similar to the one in California charging the murderer with two homicides are in effect in many states (193–194).

Sex-selection abortion

If abortion is done because a child of unwanted sex is known to be in the womb, another serious problem for defenders of abortion is posed. Sex-selection abortion almost always means the elimination of females and in some countries/cultures extends to their infanticide should they survive until birth. In the U.S., for instance, eighty-five percent of women and ninety-five percent of men want a male child for the first baby and the first baby may well be the last wanted. If abortion is not the killing of a person, it poses no problem different from the killing of a guppy (as Warren holds), but this kind of abortion troubles female defenders of abortion. But how could they criticize such abortions without implying that abortion itself is problematic? In fact, the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (ACOG) opposes sex-selection abortion. Kaczor gives other good reasons for opposing sex-selection abortion (e.g., it leads to further violence against women) and concludes, “It is not a simple matter to condemn SSA [sex-selection abortion] while upholding abortion for other reasons” (194–200).

Abortion for frivolous reasons

Abortions are frequently done for very frivolous reasons—parents want a child conceived during a certain astrological sign, a Leo, say, rather than an Aries; or they want a child of a certain hair color. Kaczor cites Naomi Wolf, who identified some frivolous reasons used by classmates in her high school during the 1970s (for instance, a girl would try to get pregnant just to find out if she could; and if she did, she would abort the pregnancy). This is enough to illustrate the problem (200).

Safe and legal, but rare?

Abortion defenders frequently claim that they want to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare. “ But if there is nothing wrong with abortion and if it is a woman's right, what difference does it make how often a woman has one? Some sexually active women simply do not want to use contraceptives (and some begin their sexually active lives during their teens), and such women may want to have abortions rather frequently before they reach menopause. Some may say that abortion is bad for their health, physical and psychological, and that they therefore ought to practice birth control to avoid abortions. Certainly abortion is much more invasive and expensive than using contraceptives. But does this championing of contraception over abortion for health reasons not show that the emotional trauma frequently caused by abortion is perhaps due to the recognition that birth control prevents a new human life from coming into existence whereas abortion destroys one that has already come to be (200–202)?

Why personal opposition?

Many abortion advocates say that they are personally opposed to abortion but do not want to impose their views on others and want to keep abortion legal and safe. But presumably one is personally opposed because abortion is the unjust taking of a human life. A rebuttal of this argument is suggested by some defenders of abortion (e.g., McMahan). According to this rebuttal the critic of abortion is inconsistent if he says he is “personally opposed” to killing abortionists. If abortion really is a gravely unjust killing of the innocent, then violence to stop that killing seems morally required. To condemn this violence shows the inconistency of opposition to abortion. Kaczor answers this objection by noting, for instance, that many people think that the war against Iraq initiated by President Bush in 2003 was unjust and led to the unjust killing of many innocent persons. They did not, however, seek to assassinate him, and they have not been accused of inconsistency. So why make this charge against critics of abortion if they do not choose to kill abortionists? Kaczor offers other arguments of a similar kind to answer this problem (202–206).

Prenatal bonding with “our baby.”

Many parents immediately begin to love the unborn human being in the woman's womb as a person. But if this entity is not a person or has no moral worth, as abortion defenders claim, it is difficult to explain why these parents can be so terribly mistaken; in fact, many parents like this grieve deeply over a miscarriage, and if the unborn is not a person, their behavior seems silly or stupid, but it does not seem right to accuse them of this.

Elizabeth Harman offers a sophisticated argument to reply to this objection; her argument is based on what she terms the “Actual Future Principle.” According to this principle, if an early fetus has an actual future in which he or she will be conscious, then this human fetus has moral worth; but if an early fetus does not have an actual future of which he or she will be conscious, then the fetus has no moral worth. Parents who immediately love the unborn human being are acting reasonably since it is likely that this fetus will have an actual future of which it will be conscious, but obviously fetuses to be aborted will not have such an actual future. Kaczor rebuts this argument with four cogent considerations, and there is no need to set them forth here (206–209).

Morally permissible vs. morally objectionable

On this view abortion is legally permissible but morally objectionable. This distinction might help defenders of abortion respond to many of the hard cases and could even be extended to all abortions. Kaczor doubts that this distinction is a real one. There is a real distinction between the morally permissible and the morally heroic, between the obligatory and the supererogatory. Earlier (150–158, pages to which Kaczor now refers), he had shown that at times circumstances so shape a situation that one must choose between a heroic act and seriously violating an innocent person's inviolable right to life, and he suggests that this is the situation here (209–210).

Intermediate moral worth of the human fetus

Kaczor begins this section by writing: “[T]he defender of abortion can respond to all these [previous] cases with one rejoinder. The murder of pregnant women, a condemnation of sex-selection abortion, the moral impermissibility of abortion for insignificant reasons, personal opposition, the desire to see the practice of abortion become rare, and parental love for their prenatal children do not presuppose the personhood of the fetus, but rather that the human fetus has some value” (210). But if the human fetus has some value, so does a puppy, but we do not respect puppies as we do persons, so there is no reason to respect human fetuses as persons.

There are many objections to this claim and Kaczor neatly summarizes them, but in essence this claim was shown to be arbitrary in the chapters of his book showing that personhood does not begin after birth or at some time during gestation (211–214).

9. Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate?

Kaczor gives a “yes” answer to this question, but examines the issue first from the perspective of ardent defenders of abortion and then from that of ardent critics of abortion, answering objections to a yes answer.

From the Perspective of Ardent Defenders of Abortion

Kaczor asks what is meant by a “right to abortion.” It could mean a right to terminate the human embryo/fetus or a right to extricate it from the woman's body. They seem to be linked at present because methods used to extricate the fetus from the womb invariably kill it. But if an artificial womb becomes available, the distinction would be meaningful. Kaczor's reading of the literature convinced him that many ardent defenders of abortion in fact advocate only a right to evacuate the embryo/fetus and not to kill it, and he refers to many well-known defenders of abortion to show this (the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Warren, Thomson, Boonin). Even some ardent defenders of abortion who also defend infanticide (Singer) think that if someone wants to adopt a healthy fetus brought to term in such an artificial womb it is difficult to see why it should die. Kaczor concludes that if ardent supporters of abortion like those named are willing to let live a fetus brought to term in this way, then artificial wombs could surely end the abortion debate for them (214–219).

From the Perspective of Ardent Critics of Abortion

Kaczor identifies some major objections to the use of artificial wombs by ardent critics of abortion: the artificiality objection, the IVF objection, the deprivation of maternal shelter objection, the birth within marriage objection, the integrative parenthood objection, the surrogate motherhood objection, the wrongful experimentation objection, the objection from the right of the child to develop within the womb of the mother.

The artificiality objection

Kaczor answers this by noting that neonatal intensive care units are highly artificial and are not ethically impermissible, and an artificial womb seems simply to be a further development along the same lines. Moreover, in the case of a pregnant woman about to have a hysterectomy because of cancer to protect her life, she would prefer to have her baby moved to such a womb than die as the foreseen but not intended effect of her cancer treatment.

The IVF objection

This objection fails to distinguish between complete ectogenesis, required by IVF, and partial ectogenesis when an unborn child is already in his mother's womb and is transferred to an artificial womb rather than being killed by direct abortion or as the unintended effect of a legitimate therapy (radiation therapy or hysterectomy for uterine cancer) on the mother.

The deprivation of the mother's sheltering womb objection

This is more serious and difficult to answer. However, unborn children whose lives are at risk in utero (e.g., if the mother is poisoned) are sometimes removed by doctors and cared for outside the maternal womb and there is no objection to this; some cases may become complicated but there is no reason in principle , to exclude use of an artificial womb to preserve the life of an unborn child whose life is in grave danger if he remains in his mother's womb.

The birth within marriage objection

Some critics of abortion emphasize that Donum vitae judges immoral birth outside of marriage as achieved by IVF and warns that IVF techniques can open the way to other forms of biological and genetic manipulation. Critics argue that use of artificial wombs is such manipulation. In fact, the document explicitly mentions the possibility of making such wombs and seems to condemn ectogenesis. But this passage does not condemn partial ectogenesis that in many ways simply extends the value of NICUs (newborn intensive care units) to protecting lives of unborn babies if those lives are in imminent danger of being lost.

The integrative parenthood objection

This objection is based on this passage of Donum vitae in particular: “a child has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb , brought into the world and brought up within marriage.” 5 This text and some others seem to exclude partial ectogenesis as undermining gestational parenthood. But this interpretation does not stand scrutiny. Were it to be understood as absolutely unexceptionable, it would follow that all women who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest ought to marry the unborn baby's father. But marriage after any pregnancy out of wedlock is not a good solution. It would be far better for the child if its mother gave it up for adoption after birth, and this requires heroic action on the mother's part and on that of the adopting parents.

The surrogate motherhood objection

This is based on the truth that surrogate motherhood is clearly wrong and strongly condemned by Donum vitae. But none of that document's definitions of surrogate motherhood include partial ectogenesis as a form of surrogacy.

The wrongful experimentation objection

Kaczor thinks that this is the most powerful objection against use of an artificial womb by women seeking abortion. One ought never subject unborn human persons to risky experiments that are not undertaken for their good but rather for the sake of their mothers, who want to rid themselves of their unborn children. Kaczor argues that basic bioethical principles justifying experimental procedures intended to save the lives of individuals in imminent danger of death could be applied to use of artificial wombs to protect the lives of unborn human persons who would otherwise be killed by abortion. If such experimentation led to the improvement of these techniques, use of an artificial womb would no longer be experimental but a common procedure subjecting a person to no unacceptable risks.

The objection of the right of the child to develop in his mother's womb

This seems a good one in the light of a passage from Pope John Paul II's Centessimus annus : “Among the most important of these [basic human rights] mention must be made of the right to life, an integral part of which is the right of the child to develop in the mother's womb from the moment of conception.” 6 “But,” Kaczor writes, “it is not evident from this or from other passages from John Paul II that he even considered the possibility of an artificial womb as a way of overcoming the impasse over abortion, let alone that he had considered and rejected this possibility” (227). He thus concludes that using this passage as a definitive magisterial judgment against use of an artificial womb for partial ectogenesis is not licit.

Kaczor's conclusion, after sorting through objections and offering responses to them, is that use of artificial wombs might well be a way to end the abortion debate (215–231).

10. Evaluative Conclusion

Kaczor's book gives good arguments to show that individual personal life begins at conception. He likewise shows, by a host of arguments, many of them playing defenders of abortion off against each other, that the distinction between being a living human being and being a “person” is based on erecting arbitrary criteria for personhood, criteria constantly subject to change. He also considers in some depth and with fairness specific arguments by a wide variety of scholars attempting to justify the practice of abortion and the right of women to abort the unborn at any time during their pregnancy. His work, moreover, is based on a comprehensive study of the literature; the bibliography is twelve pages long and references more than 250 items. His bibliography, however, does ignore some older and still important studies, including Germain Grisez's massive 1970 work Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments . 7

A good, strong point of this work, I think, is Kaczor's commentary and conclusion regarding the current dispute among Catholic scholars on the moral licitness of craniotomy as a means of saving the mother's life if the baby is stuck in the birth canal and pressure exerted on her can kill her.

There are some serious weaknesses in Kaczor's study, however. The chapters on the rights of the human embryo and on whether it is wrong to abort a person (chs. 6 and 7) are in my judgment very weak. In chapter 6, Kaczor defends the rights of the human embryo negatively by offering criticisms, many of them good in their own way, of arguments claiming that the human embryo is not a person and hence does not enjoy rights, as we have seen in the earlier presentation of the contents of that chapter. I think he could and should have offered a stronger positive defense of the rights enjoyed by human embryos, in particular the right not to be killed intentionally by others, if he had summarized or briefly mentioned with references, the brilliant work of Wesley Hohfeld, professor of legal ethics at Harvard University in the first half of the twentieth century, which is central to John Finnis's analysis of rights in his Natural Law and Natural Rights . 8 Hohfeld sharply distinguished between a “claim right,” or right in the strict sense, and a “liberty,” or “liberty right.” To distinguish these rights from each other, it is necessary to speak of a three-term relationship between two persons (or groups of persons) and an act of a specific type. If we do, we can speak of a claim-right as follows: A (=a person or group of persons, or all persons if we are speaking of basic human and inalienable rights of human persons) has a right (a “claim right”) that B (=another person, group of persons, or all persons) should x (=some specifiable act), if and only if B has a duty to A to x.

Thus innocent human persons (=A) have a right in the sense of a claim right to life if and only if innocent human persons (=A) have a right that all other persons (=B) have a duty to innocent human persons (=A) to forbear intentionally killing them (=x). In other words, the right of innocent human persons to life, if genuine, means that all other persons have an obligation or duty not to kill them intentionally. Applying this argument to unborn children, we can say: unborn children have a strict right or claim right to life if and only if unborn children (=A) have a right that their mothers and other persons (=B) have a duty to unborn children to forbear aborting them, i.e., intentionally killing them (=x). This right is genuine because all persons, including mothers, have a strict obligation or duty to forbear intentionally killing innocent human persons, and abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human person.

What of the alleged “right” of a woman to an abortion? Expressed as a three-term relationship between two persons and a specifiable action, we see that the alleged right is really a “liberty” claimed by women. It can be put generally as follows: B (=a person, group of persons, etc.) has a liberty relative to A (=a person, a group of persons, etc.) to x (=some specifiable act), if and only if A has no claim right that B should not x.

Translating a woman's alleged “right” to an abortion into this language we have the following: a woman (= B ) has a liberty relative to the unborn baby (= A ) intentionally to abort it (= x ) if and only if the unborn baby (= A ) has no claim right that the woman (= B ) should not abort it (= x ). But the unborn has the claim right that his or her mother (and others) forbear from aborting it. Consequently, the liberty (and not right) claimed by women to abort is spurious.

Chapter 7 on the wrongness of abortion goes into a minute analysis of many arguments proposed by defenders of abortion to show how specious they are; Kaczor in particular devotes great attention to two analogies used by Judith Jarvis Thomson in her celebrated 1971 article on the rights and wrongs of abortion. But his critique of her reasoning in my judgment is far inferior to the majestic rebuttal of Thomson's entire article by John Finnis in his “Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Reply to Judith Jarvis Thomson,” published in 1972 in the same journal in which Thomson's ludicrous essay appeared. Moreover, Kaczor makes no reference whatsoever, either in his text or bibliography, to this masterful article. Kaczor's analyses of some bad arguments to justify abortion are interesting, but they do not develop in any way the great arguments that show why abortion is always wrong.

Other weaknesses are present but not too serious. Moreover, despite the serious weaknesses noted, Kaczor's book is exceptionally valuable and makes a great contribution to the abortion debate.

1 Lee refers to Leslie Arey, Developmental Anatomy , 7th ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1974); William Larsen, Human Embryology (UK: Churchill, Livingstone, 1993); and Keith Moore, Before We Are Born (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1998).

2 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

3 Thomas Cavanaugh, “The Intended/Foreseen Distinction's Ethical Relevance,” Philosophical Papers 25:3 (1996): 179–188.

4 Kaczor refers to their article, “‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’: A Reply to Critics of Our Action Theory,” Thomist 65 (2001): 1–44.

5 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum vitae (Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation, Replies to Certain Questions of the Day) (1987), n. II.A.1, emphasis added, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html .

6 Pope John Paul II, Centesimus annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum ) (1991), n. 47, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html .

7 Cleveland/New York: Corpus Books, 1972.

8 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, at the Clarendon Press, 1980), 199–205.

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Reproductive rights in America

7 persistent claims about abortion, fact-checked.

Jaclyn Diaz

Koko Nakajima

Nick Underwood

Anti-abortion demonstrators watch as abortion rights protestors chant in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 5. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Anti-abortion demonstrators watch as abortion rights protestors chant in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 5.

Since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision ruled that women have a constitutional right to end their pregnancies, proponents and opponents of abortion rights have worked to own the conversation over the issue.

In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 629,898 legal induced abortions were reported across the United States.

Lingering claims circulate about abortion, including about the safety of it, who gets abortions and even who supports or opposes access to abortion.

Below, seven popular claims surrounding abortion get fact-checked.

According to the Pew Research Center's polls , 37% of Americans want abortion illegal in all or most cases.

But an even bigger fraction — around 6 in 10 Americans — think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Current abortion rates are lower than what they were in 1973 and are now less than half what they were at their peak in the early 1980s, according to the Guttmacher Institute , a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights.

In 2017, pregnancy rates for females age 24 or below hit their lowest recorded levels, reflecting a long-term decline in pregnancy rates among females 24 or below.

Overall, in 2017, pregnancy rates for females of reproductive age hit their lowest recorded levels, with 87 pregnancies per 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The annual number of deaths related to legal induced abortion has fluctuated from year to year since 1973, according to the CDC.

An analysis of data from 2013 to 2018 showed the national case-fatality rate for legal induced abortion was 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions, lower than in the previous five years.

The World Health Organization said people obtaining unsafe abortions are at a higher risk of death. Annually, 4.7% to 13.2% "of maternal deaths can be attributed to unsafe abortion," the WHO said. In developing regions of the world, there are 220 deaths per 100,000 unsafe abortions.

Trans and nonbinary people have undergone abortions as well.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates in 2017 an estimated 462 to 530 transgender or nonbinary individuals in the U.S. had abortions. That same year, the CDC said, 609,095 total abortions were carried out in the country.

The Abortion Out Loud campaign has collected stories from thousands of people who have had an abortion. Included are stories from trans and nonbinary people who have had an abortion — such as Jae, who spoke their experience.

"Most abortions in 2019 took place early in gestation," according to the CDC . Nearly 93% of abortions were performed at less than 13 weeks' gestation.

Abortion pills, which can typically be used up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy, made up 54% of abortions in 2020. These pills were the primary choice in the U.S. for the first time since the Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion drug mifepristone more than 20 years ago.

State legislatures have been moving to adopt 20-week abortion bans, with abortion opponents claiming fetuses can feel pain at that point. Roughly a third of states have implemented an abortion ban around 20 weeks .

But this contradicts widely accepted medical research from 2005. This study , published in the Journal of the American Medical Association , concluded that a fetus is not capable of experiencing pain until somewhere between 29 or 30 weeks.

Researchers wrote that fetal awareness of pain requires "functional thalamocortical connections." Those thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 and 30 weeks' gestational age, but the capacity for pain perception comes later.

The argument against abortion has frequently been based on religion.

Data shows that the majority of people who get an abortion have some sort of religious affiliation, according to the most recent Guttmacher Institute data , from 2014.

The Pew Research Center also shows that attitudes on whether abortion should be legal vary among evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics.

Roe v. Wade and the future of reproductive rights in America

Here's what could happen now that roe v. wade is overturned.

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5.1: Arguments Against Abortion

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• Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob
• Morehouse College & University of South Carolina Sumter via Open Philosophy Press

We will begin with arguments for the conclusion that abortion is generally wrong , perhaps nearly always wrong . These can be seen as reasons to believe fetuses have the “right to life” or are otherwise seriously wrong to kill.

5.1.1 Fetuses are human

First, there is the claim that fetuses are “human” and so abortion is wrong. People sometimes debate whether fetuses are human , but fetuses found in (human) women clearly are biologically human : they aren’t cats or dogs. And so we have this argument, with a clearly true first premise:

Fetuses are biologically human.

All things that are biologically human are wrong to kill.

Therefore, fetuses are wrong to kill.

The second premise, however, is false, as easy counterexamples show. Consider some random living biologically human cells or tissues in a petri dish. It wouldn’t be wrong at all to wash those cells or tissues down the drain, killing them; scratching yourself or shaving might kill some biologically human skin cells, but that’s not wrong; a tumor might be biologically human, but not wrong to kill. So just because something is biologically human, that does not at all mean it’s wrong to kill that thing. We saw this same point about what’s merely biologically alive.

This suggests a deficiency in some common understandings of the important idea of “human rights.” “Human rights” are sometimes described as rights someone has just because they are human or simply in virtue of being human .

But the human cells in the petri dish above don’t have “human rights” and a human heart wouldn’t have “human rights” either. Many examples would make it clear that merely being biologically human doesn’t give something human rights. And many human rights advocates do not think that abortion is wrong, despite recognizing that (human) fetuses are biologically human.

The problem about what is often said about human rights is that people often do not think about what makes human beings have rights or why we have them, when we have them. The common explanation, that we have (human) rights just because we are (biologically) human , is incorrect, as the above discussion makes clear. This misunderstanding of the basis or foundation of human rights is problematic because it leads to a widespread, misplaced fixation on whether fetuses are merely biologically “human” and the mistaken thought that if they are, they have “human rights.” To address this problem, we need to identify better, more fundamental, explanations why we have rights, or why killing us is generally wrong, and see how those explanations might apply to fetuses, as we are doing here.

It might be that when people appeal to the importance and value of being “human,” the concern isn’t our biology itself, but the psychological characteristics that many human beings have: consciousness, awareness, feelings and so on. We will discuss this different meaning of “human” below. This meaning of “human” might be better expressed as conscious being , or “person,” or human person. This might be what people have in mind when they argue that fetuses aren’t even “human.”

Human rights are vitally important, and we would do better if we spoke in terms of “conscious-being rights” or “person-rights,” not “human rights.” This more accurate and informed understanding and terminology would help address human rights issues in general, and help us better think through ethical questions about biologically human embryos and fetuses.

5.1.2 Fetuses are human beings

Some respond to the arguments above—against the significance of being merely biologically human—by observing that fetuses aren’t just mere human cells, but are organized in ways that make them beings or organisms . (A kidney is part of a “being,” but the “being” is the whole organism.) That suggests this argument:

Fetuses are human beings or organisms .

All human beings or organisms are wrong to kill.

Therefore, fetuses are wrong to kill, so abortion is wrong.

The first premise is true: fetuses are dependent beings, but dependent beings are still beings.

The second premise, however, is the challenge, in terms of providing good reasons to accept it. Clearly many human beings or organisms are wrong to kill, or wrong to kill unless there’s a good reason that would justify that killing, e.g., self-defense. (This is often described by philosophers as us being prima facie wrong to kill, in contrast to absolutely or necessarily wrong to kill.) Why is this though? What makes us wrong to kill? And do these answers suggest that all human beings or organisms are wrong to kill?

Above it was argued that we are wrong to kill because we are conscious and feeling: we are aware of the world, have feelings and our perspectives can go better or worse for us —we can be harmed— and that’s what makes killing us wrong. It may also sometimes be not wrong to let us die, and perhaps even kill us, if we come to completely and permanently lacking consciousness, say from major brain damage or a coma, since we can’t be harmed by death anymore: we might even be described as dead in the sense of being “brain dead.” 10

So, on this explanation, human beings are wrong to kill, when they are wrong to kill, not because they are human beings (a circular explanation), but because we have psychological, mental or emotional characteristics like these. This explains why we have rights in a simple, common-sense way: it also simply explains why rocks, microorganisms and plants don’t have rights. The challenge then is explaining why fetuses that have never been conscious or had any feeling or awareness would be wrong to kill. How then can the second premise above, general to all human organisms, be supported, especially when applied to early fetuses?

One common attempt is to argue that early fetuses are wrong to kill because there is continuous development from fetuses to us, and since we are wrong to kill now , fetuses are also wrong to kill, since we’ve been the “same being” all along. 11 But this can’t be good reasoning, since we have many physical, cognitive, emotional and moral characteristics now that we lacked as fetuses (and as children). So even if we are the “same being” over time, even if we were once early fetuses, that doesn’t show that fetuses have the moral rights that babies, children and adults have: we, our bodies and our rights sometimes change.

A second attempt proposes that rights are essential to human organisms: they have them whenever they exist. This perspective sees having rights, or the characteristics that make someone have rights, as essential to living human organisms. The claim is that “having rights” is an essential property of human beings or organisms, and so whenever there’s a living human organism, there’s someone with rights, even if that organism totally lacks consciousness, like an early fetus. (In contrast, the proposal we advocate for about what makes us have rights understands rights as “accidental” to our bodies but “essential” to our minds or awareness, since our bodies haven’t always “contained” a conscious being, so to speak.)

Such a view supports the premise above; maybe it just is that premise above. But why believe that rights are essential to human organisms? Some argue this is because of what “kind” of beings we are, which is often presumed to be “rational beings.” The reasoning seems to be this: first, that rights come from being a rational being: this is part of our “nature.” Second, that all human organisms, including fetuses, are the “kind” of being that is a “rational being,” so every being of the “kind” rational being has rights. 12

In response, this explanation might seem question-begging: it might amount to just asserting that all human beings have rights. This explanation is, at least, abstract. It seems to involve some categorization and a claim that everyone who is in a certain category has some of the same moral characteristics that others in that category have, but because of a characteristic (actual rationality) that only these others have: so, these others profoundly define what everyone else is . If this makes sense, why not also categorize us all as not rational beings , if we are the same kind of beings as fetuses that are actually not rational?

This explanation might seem to involve thinking that rights somehow “trickle down” from later rationality to our embryonic origins, and so what we have later we also have earlier , because we are the same being or the same “kind” of being. But this idea is, in general, doubtful: we are now responsible beings, in part because we are rational beings, but fetuses aren’t responsible for anything. And we are now able to engage in moral reasoning since we are rational beings, but fetuses don’t have the “rights” that uniquely depend on moral reasoning abilities. So that an individual is a member of some general group or kind doesn’t tell us much about their rights: that depends on the actual details about that individual, beyond their being members of a group or kind.

To make this more concrete, return to the permanently comatose individuals mentioned above: are we the same kind of beings, of the same “essence,” as these human beings? If so, then it seems that some human beings can be not wrong to let die or kill, when they have lost consciousness. Therefore, perhaps some other human beings, like early fetuses, are also not wrong to kill before they have gained consciousness . And if we are not the same “kind” of beings, or have different essences, then perhaps we also aren’t the same kind of beings as fetuses either.

Similar questions arise concerning anencephalic babies, tragically born without most of their brains: are they the same “kind” of beings as “regular” babies or us? If so, then—since such babies are arguably morally permissible to let die, even when they could be kept alive, since being alive does them no good—then being of our “kind” doesn’t mean the individual has the same rights as us, since letting us die would be wrong. But if such babies are a different “kind” of beings than us, then pre-conscious fetuses might be of a relevantly different kind also.

So, in general, this proposal that early fetuses essentially have rights is suspect, if we evaluate the reasons given in its support. Even if fetuses and us are the same “kind” of beings (which perhaps we are not!) that doesn’t immediately tell us what rights fetuses would have, if any. And we might even reasonably think that, despite our being the same kind of beings as fetuses (e.g., the same kind of biology), we are also importantly different kinds of beings (e.g., one kind with a mental life and another kind which has never had it). This photograph of a 6-week old fetus might help bring out the ambiguity in what kinds of beings we all are:

In sum, the abstract view that all human organisms have rights essentially needs to be plausibly explained and defended. We need to understand how it really works. We need to be shown why it’s a better explanation, all things considered, than a consciousness and feelings-based theory of rights that simply explains why we, and babies, have rights, why racism, sexism and other forms of clearly wrongful discrimination are wrong, and , importantly, how we might lose rights in irreversible coma cases (if people always retained the right to life in these circumstances, presumably, it would be wrong to let anyone die), and more.

5.1.3 Fetuses are persons

Finally, we get to what some see as the core issue here, namely whether fetuses are persons , and an argument like this:

Fetuses are persons, perhaps from conception.

Persons have the right to life and are wrong to kill.

So, abortion is wrong, as it involves killing persons.

The second premise seems very plausible, but there are some important complications about it that will be discussed later. So let’s focus on the idea of personhood and whether any fetuses are persons. What is it to be a person ? One answer that everyone can agree on is that persons are beings with rights and value . That’s a fine answer, but it takes us back to the initial question: OK, who or what has the rights and value of persons? What makes someone or something a person?

Answers here are often merely asserted , but these answers need to be tested: definitions can be judged in terms of whether they fit how a word is used. We might begin by thinking about what makes us persons. Consider this:

We are persons now. Either we will always be persons or we will cease being persons. If we will cease to be persons, what can end our personhood? If we will always be persons, how could that be?

Both options yield insight into personhood. Many people think that their personhood ends at death or if they were to go into a permanent coma: their body is (biologically) alive but the person is gone: that is why other people are sad. And if we continue to exist after the death of our bodies, as some religions maintain, what continues to exist? The person , perhaps even without a body, some think! Both responses suggest that personhood is defined by a rough and vague set of psychological or mental, rational and emotional characteristics: consciousness, knowledge, memories, and ways of communicating, all psychologically unified by a unique personality.

A second activity supports this understanding:

Make a list of things that are definitely not persons . Make a list of individuals who definitely are persons . Make a list of imaginary or fictional personified beings which, if existed, would be persons: these beings that fit or display the concept of person, even if they don’t exist. What explains the patterns of the lists?

Rocks, carrots, cups and dead gnats are clearly not persons. We are persons. Science fiction gives us ideas of personified beings: to give something the traits of a person is to indicate what the traits of persons are, so personified beings give insights into what it is to be a person. Even though the non-human characters from, say, Star Wars don’t exist, they fit the concept of person: we could befriend them, work with them, and so on, and we could only do that with persons. A common idea of God is that of an immaterial person who has exceptional power, knowledge, and goodness: you couldn’t pray to a rock and hope that rock would respond: you could only pray to a person. Are conscious and feeling animals, like chimpanzees, dolphins, cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, and cows more relevantly like us, as persons, or are they more like rocks and cabbages, non-persons? Conscious and feeling animals seem to be closer to persons than not. 13 So, this classificatory and explanatory activity further supports a psychological understanding of personhood: persons are, at root, conscious, aware and feeling beings.

Concerning abortion, early fetuses would not be persons on this account: they are not yet conscious or aware since their brains and nervous systems are either non-existent or insufficiently developed. Consciousness emerges in fetuses much later in pregnancy, likely after the first trimester or a bit beyond. This is after when most abortions occur. Most abortions, then, do not involve killing a person , since the fetus has not developed the characteristics for personhood. We will briefly discuss later abortions, that potentially affect fetuses who are persons or close to it, below.

It is perhaps worthwhile to notice though that if someone believed that fetuses are persons and thought this makes abortion wrong, it’s unclear how they could coherently believe that a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest could permissibly be ended by an abortion. Some who oppose abortion argue that, since you are a person, it would be wrong to kill you now even if you were conceived because of a rape, and so it’s wrong to kill any fetus who is a person, even if they exist because of a rape: whether someone is a person or not doesn’t depend on their origins: it would make no sense to think that, for two otherwise identical fetuses, one is a person but the other isn’t, because that one was conceived by rape. Therefore, those who accept a “personhood argument” against abortion, yet think that abortions in cases of rape are acceptable, seem to have an inconsistent view.

5.1.4 Fetuses are potential persons

If fetuses aren’t persons, they are at least potential persons, meaning they could and would become persons. This is true. This, however, doesn’t mean that they currently have the rights of persons because, in general, potential things of a kind don’t have the rights of actual things of that kind : potential doctors, lawyers, judges, presidents, voters, veterans, adults, parents, spouses, graduates, moral reasoners and more don’t have the rights of actual individuals of those kinds.

Some respond that potential gives the right to at least try to become something. But that trying sometimes involves the cooperation of others: if your friend is a potential medical student, but only if you tutor her for many hours a day, are you obligated to tutor her? If my child is a potential NASCAR champion, am I obligated to buy her a race car to practice? ‘No’ to both and so it is unclear that a pregnant woman would be obligated to provide what’s necessary to bring about a fetus’s potential. (More on that below, concerning the what obligations the right to life imposes on others, in terms of obligations to assist other people.)

5.1.5 Abortion prevents fetuses from experiencing their valuable futures

The argument against abortion that is likely most-discussed by philosophers comes from philosopher Don Marquis. 14 He argues that it is wrong to kill us, typical adults and children, because it deprives us from experiencing our (expected to be) valuable futures, which is a great loss to us . He argues that since fetuses also have valuable futures (“futures like ours” he calls them), they are also wrong to kill. His argument has much to recommend it, but there are reasons to doubt it as well.

First, fetuses don’t seem to have futures like our futures , since—as they are pre-conscious—they are entirely psychologically disconnected from any future experiences: there is no (even broken) chain of experiences from the fetus to that future person’s experiences. Babies are, at least, aware of the current moment, which leads to the next moment; children and adults think about and plan for their futures, but fetuses cannot do these things, being completely unconscious and without a mind.

Second, this fact might even mean that the early fetus doesn’t literally have a future: if your future couldn’t include you being a merely physical, non-conscious object (e.g., you couldn’t be a corpse: if there’s a corpse, you are gone), then non-conscious physical objects, like a fetus, couldn’t literally be a future person. 15 If this is correct, early fetuses don’t even have futures, much less futures like ours. Something would have a future, like ours, only when there is someone there to be psychologically connected to that future: that someone arrives later in pregnancy, after when most abortions occur.

A third objection is more abstract and depends on the “metaphysics” of objects. It begins with the observation that there are single objects with parts with space between them . Indeed almost every object is like this, if you could look close enough: it’s not just single dinette sets, since there is literally some space between the parts of most physical objects. From this, it follows that there seem to be single objects such as an-egg-and-the-sperm-that-would-fertilize-it . And these would also seem to have a future of value, given how Marquis describes this concept. (It should be made clear that sperm and eggs alone do not have futures of value, and Marquis does not claim they do: this is not the objection here). The problem is that contraception, even by abstinence , prevents that thing’s future of value from materializing, and so seems to be wrong when we use Marquis’s reasoning. Since contraception is not wrong, but his general premise suggests that it is , it seems that preventing something from experiencing its valuable future isn’t always wrong and so Marquis’s argument appears to be unsound. 16

In sum, these are some of the most influential arguments against abortion. Our discussion was brief, but these arguments do not appear to be successful: they do not show that abortion is wrong, much less make it clear and obvious that abortion is wrong.

At stake in mifepristone case: abortion, FDA’s authority and return to 1873 obscenity law

Lawyers from the conservative Christian group that won the case to overturn  Roe v. Wade  returned to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday in pursuit of an urgent priority: shutting down access to abortion pills for women across the country.

The case challenges the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, a prescription-only drug approved in 2000 with a  stellar safety record  that is used in  63% of all U.S. abortions .

Viewed across decades of anti-abortion activism, the case brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom represents a "moonshot" couched in technical arguments about pharmaceutical oversight and the resuscitation of an 1873 anti-obscenity law. A victory would lay the groundwork for a de facto nationwide abortion ban.

Abortion is illegal  in 14 states , but abortion pills have never been more widely available.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA suspended — and later formally lifted — the requirement that patients be at a health care facility when taking mifepristone, the first of two pills used in medication abortion. Physicians can now prescribe the drug online through telemedicine and pharmacies can dispense it through the mail.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

"You don’t need to be handed the pill in the office," said Linda Prine, a family medicine physician, sitting on a couch in her Manhattan apartment answering texts and calls from patients about abortion care.

"It’s very effective," she said. "I don’t even have medications that are 98 to 99% effective. Our blood pressure medicines aren’t effective like that."

Prine, a co-founder of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, works with other doctors operating under New York state’s shield law to prescribe and send abortion pills to people across the country. A review of Prine’s call log, stripped of personal information, showed hundreds of requests for pills from Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and other states where it is illegal for women to stop a pregnancy.

Anti-abortion groups unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA at least twice before, in  2002  and  2019 , to revoke mifepristone’s approval and curtail its availability. But in November 2022, following its victory in overturning federal abortion rights, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, claiming the FDA’s safety review of mifepristone was flawed.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and openly opposes abortion, ruled  to invalidate the FDA’s approval of mifepristone . An appeals court later said the drug should remain available, but it reinstated restrictions, including prohibitions on telehealth prescriptions and mailing the medication. That ruling was put on hold while the Supreme Court considers the case.

The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone, Danco Laboratories, have argued in legal filings to the Supreme Court that federal judges do not have the scientific and health expertise to evaluate drug safety and that allowing them to do so undermines the FDA’s regulatory authority.

That view is supported by  food and drug legal scholars  who wrote in court filings that the lower courts had replaced the "FDA’s scientific and medical expertise with the courts’ own interpretations of the scientific evidence." In doing so, they wrote, the courts "upend the drug regulatory scheme established by Congress and implemented by FDA."

In his ruling, Kacsmaryk cited two studies purporting to show an increase in emergency room visits and a greater risk of hospitalizations from medication abortion. They were  retracted in February  by medical publisher Sage Perspectives. The journal said the researchers erred in their methodology and analysis of the data and invalidated the papers "in whole or in part."

The research, supported by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion group that filed a brief in the mifepristone case, "made claims that were not supported by the data," said Ushma Upadhyay, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California-San Francisco.

Legal scholars say the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have demonstrated a willingness to accept discredited abortion-related health claims. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion in  Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, cited statements  about harm to maternal health  presented by the state of Mississippi that contradict mainstream medical consensus.

"If this case is successful, it will be because the Supreme Court decided to ignore evidence that demonstrated mifepristone’s safety and said to a federal agency, the expert on drug safety, ‘You were wrong,’" said Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law.

The ‘politicization of science’

The mifepristone case crystallizes "the politicization of science" in abortion regulation, Rebouché said. "But the stakes are getting higher as we have courts willing to strip federal agencies of their ability to make expert decisions."

Rebouché said that if the Supreme Court overrides the FDA’s expertise in regulating a 24-year-old drug like mifepristone, anti-abortion groups, like Students for Life of America, could find judges  receptive to false claims  that birth control pills, intrauterine devices, emergency contraception, and other forms of hormonal birth control cause abortion. They do not, according to reproductive scientists and U.S. and international regulatory agencies.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his  concurring opinion  in  Dobbs  that the Supreme Court should reconsider the 1965 decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to contraception,  Griswold v. Connecticut , and decide whether to return the power to allow or regulate access to birth control to the states.

Tucked into the Alliance Defending Freedom’s filings is what scholars describe as an audacious legal strategy once on the fringes of the conservative Christian movement: an appeal to the Supreme Court’s conservative members to determine that  the Comstock Act , a dormant 1873 anti-vice law, effectively bans medical and procedural abortion nationwide.

Passed at a time when the federal government did not give women the right to vote and the  prevailing medical literature  summed up women’s sexuality by saying that "the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind," the long unenforced law carried a five-year prison sentence for anyone mailing "every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion."

References to the Comstock Act appear throughout anti-abortion legal filings and rulings: Kacsmaryk wrote that the act "plainly forecloses mail-order abortion in the present";  the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote  if Comstock was "strictly understood" then "there is no public interest in the perpetuation of illegality"; Republican attorneys general  threatened legal action against Walgreens and CVS  last year citing Comstock as did anti-abortion cases in New Mexico and  Texas .

" State attorneys general need to go after and prosecute those who are illegally mailing abortion drugs into their state," said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America.

"It’s very simple. If your state has passed a law saying that preborn human beings deserve, at the very minimum, the right not to be starved and killed," she said, "then those who are committing those crimes and violating the federal Comstock Act by shipping chemical abortion pills over state lines, there should be consequences."

Tracking abortion pills by mail is difficult — and that’s the point, Rebouché said.

"These more diffuse and mobile ways to terminate a pregnancy," she said, "really threaten the control that anti-abortion advocates seek to exercise over who and where and how someone can seek an abortion." This story was republished from KFF Health News.

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Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

As recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue.

“The difference in support for the pro-choice position was a mere six percentage points,” Alan Abramowitz , a political scientist at Emory University, told me by email. “40 percent of Democratic identifiers were pro-life, while 39 percent were pro-choice. Among Republican identifiers, 33 percent were pro-choice, 45 percent were pro-life and 22 percent were in the middle.”

By 2020, Abramowitz continued,

73 percent of Democratic identifiers took the pro-choice position, while only 17 percent took the pro-life position, with 10 percent in the middle. Among Republicans, 60 percent took the pro-life position while 25 percent took the pro-choice position and 15 percent were in the middle. The difference in support for the pro-choice position was 48 percentage points.

This split was even wider, 59 points, among “strong partisans, the group most likely to vote in primary elections,” Abramowitz said.

Crucially, Abramowitz pointed out, opinions on abortion are also closely connected with racial attitudes:

Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters.

Some of the scholars and journalists studying the evolving role of abortion in American politics make the case that key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s — among them Richard Viguerie , Paul Weyrich , Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell Sr . — were seeking to expand their base beyond those opposed to the civil rights movement. According to this argument, conservative strategists settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion in part because it dodged the race issue and offered the opportunity to unify conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

“The anti-abortion movement has been remarkably successful at convincing observers that the positions individuals take on the abortion issue always follow in a deductive way from their supposed moral principles. They don’t,” Katherine Stewart , the author of the 2019 book “ The Power Worshipers ,” wrote in an email.

In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools ( “seg academies” for the children of white Southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. As Stewart argues, Viguerie, Weyrich and others on the right were determined to find an issue that could bring together a much larger constituency:

As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned.

After long and contentious debate, conservative strategists came to a consensus, Stewart writes: “They landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’”

In an email, Stewart expanded on her argument. Abortion opponents:

are more likely to be committed to a patriarchal worldview in which the control of reproduction, and female sexuality in particular, is thought to be central in maintaining a gender hierarchy that (as they see it) sustains the family, which they claim is under threat from secular, modern forces.

Abortion is among the most intractable issues dividing the parties, with little or no room for compromise.

On one side, opponents of the procedure argue that “at the moment of fusion of human sperm and egg, a new entity comes into existence which is distinctly human, alive, and an individual organism — a living, and fully human, being,” as the Center for Human Dignity puts it in the pamphlet “ The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular Audiences .”

On the other side, abortion rights proponents contend, in the words of the Center for Reproductive Rights : “Laws that restrict abortion have the effect and purpose of preventing a woman from exercising any of her human rights or fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men.”

It wasn’t always this way.

Fifty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis approved what by the standards of 1971 was a decisively liberal resolution on abortion:

Be it further resolved, that we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.

This year, at a June meeting in Nashville, the convention demonstrated just how much has changed on the religious right when it comes to abortion. Members endorsed a resolution declaring , “We affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law,” pointedly repudiating past equivocation on the issue:

We humbly confess and lament any complicity in recognizing exceptions that legitimize or regulate abortion, and of any apathy, in not laboring with the power and influence we have to abolish abortion.

Randall Balmer , a professor of religion at Dartmouth and the author of a new book, “ Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right ,” looked at conservative strategizing in a recent op-ed in The Guardian. In his essay, Balmer recounted a 1990 meeting of conservatives in Washington at which Weyrich spoke:

Remember, Weyrich said animatedly, that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000.

In an email, Balmer wrote, “Opposition to abortion became a convenient diversion — a godsend, really — to distract from what actually motivated their political activism: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”

The same is true, Ballmer continued, of many politicians who have become adamant foes of abortion:

At a time when open racism was becoming unfashionable, these politicians needed a more high-minded issue, one that would not compel them to surrender their fundamental political orientation. And of course the beauty of defending a fetus is that the fetus demands nothing in return — housing, health care, education — so it’s a fairly low-risk advocacy.

The reality in the 1970s was that the surging rights movements — rights for African Americans, women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, rights for criminal defendants and for the mentally ill — had set the stage for what would become an explosive conservative reaction, a reaction that by the 1980 elections put Ronald Reagan in the White House for eight years, wrested control of the Senate from Democrats and elected a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats that wielded tremendous power in the House.

“There is a persistent association between abortion views and ethnoracial exclusion,” Bart Bonikowski , a professor of sociology at N.Y.U., wrote in an email:

What has happened is that both issue positions have become increasingly sorted by party, so that being anti-choice or holding exclusionary beliefs is a clear marker of Republican affiliation, whereas being pro-choice or defining the nation in inclusive terms signals Democratic identity. The same has happened to a wide range of other issues, from health care and voting rights to mask-wearing and vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic — across all of these domains, policy views increasingly demarcate partisan identity.

David Leege , emeritus professor of political science at Notre Dame, has an additional explanation for the process linking racial animosity and abortion. In an email, he wrote:

For the target populations — evangelical Protestants — whom Viguerie, Weyrich, and Falwell sought to mobilize, racial animosity and abortion attitudes are related but mainly in an indirect way, through aversion toward intellectual elites. The people perceived to be pushing government’s role in equal opportunity and racial integration were now the same as those pushing permissive abortion laws, namely, the highly educated from New England, banking, universities, the Northern cities, and elsewhere.

In short, Leege wrote, “although the policy domain may differ, the hated people are the same.”

Michele Margolis , a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in her 2018 book “ From Politics to the Pews : How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity,” argues that “instead of religiosity driving political attitudes, the shifting political landscape — in which Republicans have become associated with religious values and cultural conservatism to a greater extent than Democrats — could have instead changed partisans’ involvement with their religious communities.”

If, Margolis continues:

Republicans and Democrats select into or out of religious communities in part based on their political outlooks, they will find themselves in more politically homogeneous social networks where they encounter less diverse political information. Rather than churches being places where people with different political viewpoints come together, religious communities may become more like echo chambers populated by like-minded partisans.

The power of partisanship to influence stands on abortion can be seen on the Democratic side by the “host of Democrats who have liberalized their views as they eyed the presidency — Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, and Dennis Kucinich among them” — as John Murdock wrote in “ The Future of the Pro-Life Democrat ” in the journal National Affairs.

Rachel Rebouché , a law professor at Temple, adds nuance to the argument that abortion serves as a roundabout vehicle to appeal to racial conservatives. Instead, she contends that anti-abortion and segregation are “explicit co-travelers, to be sure. But I think they also have different chronological origins and somewhat different original audiences.”

Abortion, she wrote by email, and “sex control, gender identities and patriarchy” are a set of “very strong themes that developed alongside private schools, with their ability to shape views of religion, sex, culture and race, and alongside welfare reform and criminal law enforcement, which always have had race at the center of those systems.”

In addition, Rebouché wrote, “Where I see synergies are conservative politics aligning with ideas about sex, sexuality, religion, family.”

Jefferson Cowie , a historian at Vanderbilt, argued in an email that “there are three dimensions to the question of abortion.”

The first, he notes:

is an obvious and genuine concern for fundamentalist Christian morality among the Southern polity. Some are clearly motivated by the obvious: they think abortion is wrong. Such views are a minority in this country, but they are highly concentrated in the South.

The second, he continued, is:

the politicization of the issue to rile up the electorate. This is less about policy and more about pure and simple voting harvesting. Obviously, there is very little support for neonatal care or curbing the death penalty, so “pro-life” is a ridiculous misnomer. They are less pro-life than they are pro-political power — their own.

The third, in Cowie’s view, is:

The overlooked part: the deep resonance of state and regional sovereignty. Regional politics is still defined by a resistance to federal authority. If the federal government can run any aspect of regional culture or politics, the logic goes, then they can run it all. This has been a concern on just about everything since Reconstruction, including lynch law, fair employment practices, the Brown decision, busing, prayer in schools, and abortion. This issue runs deep — consider the career of George Wallace who liked to say the federal government has put the courts in schools and taken God out. This is the remnants of the Lost Cause still blowing in the political winds.

Darren Dochuk , a professor of history at Notre Dame and the author of “ From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism,” argued in an email that the strength of the opposition to abortion in the South grows out of the unique tensions in the region between notions of manhood and evangelical attempts to control the sins of men:

There has always been a tension in Southern life between the ideals of rugged masculinity and expectations of evangelical propriety. In the early 20th century, preachers and earnest parishioners did their part to rein in the worst excesses of Southern manhood, be they related to drink or sex or violence; waging war on sin was their calling, protecting home and hearth and securing Christian male headship of them, their main concern. This tension was also a dynamic one in that excessive sin also led to heightened evangelistic fervor; the greater the sin, the greater the salvation, meaning masculine indiscretions were in subtle ways allowed, even celebrated, among the churchly crowd as justification for an equally aggressive response.

“Since the late 1970s, however,” Dochuk wrote:

Southern evangelicalism as a whole has become more welcoming of the type of rugged masculinity that the Southern sinners of yesteryear often displayed. For theological as well as cultural and political reasons, the Southern evangelical majority, whose prescripts and sentiments now pervade all corners of Southern rural culture, has increasingly embraced a muscular Christianity that deems protection of home and hearth and all facets of family values and notions of life and liberty associated with them a cause worth waging with all the force and abandon required.

This accommodation is driven, according to Dochuk, by the fact that the enemy is now, in Southern evangelicals’ view, “an effeminate liberalism and its ‘secular humanism,’” which, in turn, means that:

even those leaders who might not display Christ-like temperaments or norms are welcome in the fold. In a sense, Southern evangelicals have jettisoned the New Testament for the Old Testament — revival for societal reconstruction — and carved out plenty of room for the rampaging politician who can impose his will (see Trump as well as lesser lights) in order to remake the nation in their image.

In this milieu, Dochuk observed:

The swashbuckling southern rural politician enjoys more freedom than ever to play hard even as he decries the sins of abortion and feminism; as saint and sinner, he’s been granted the right and freedom to lead the family values charge against Washington and its soft liberal elite.

In milder terms, Rebecca Kreitzer , a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and two colleagues argue in “ The Evolution of Morality Policy Debate: Moralization and Demoralization ” that as an issue becomes both polarized and “moralized,” it become more difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. In contrast, when an issue become “demoralized,” as has been the case with gay marriage over the past two decades, it becomes increasingly likely to reach bipartisan consensus.

For 20 years, Gallup has asked , “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable or morally wrong.” In 2001, 53 percent said morally wrong and 40 percent said morally acceptable. By 2021, however, 69 percent said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable compared with 30 percent who described such relations as morally unacceptable. The issue has been “demoralized” and has effectively disappeared from the national debate.

No such luck in the case of abortion. Over the same 20 years, Gallup asked whether abortion is morally acceptable or unacceptable. In 2001, 42 percent said the procedure is morally acceptable and 45 percent said morally unacceptable. Over those two decades, the numbers varied modestly year to year but effectively changed very little: In 2021, 47 percent said acceptable, 46 percent said unacceptable.

The bottom line: For at least the medium term, the abortion issue is here to stay. If anything, the Supreme Court 5-4 decision on Sept. 1 to refuse to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions demonstrated that the issue will remain on center stage with no resolution in sight.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall

Read our research on: Abortion | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Public opinion on abortion.

For a detailed analysis of Pew Research Center’s latest data on the U.S. public’s abortion attitudes, see “ America’s Abortion Quandary .”

Table of Contents

Views on abortion, 1995-2022.

While public support for legal abortion has fluctuated some in two decades of polling, it has remained relatively stable over the past several years. Currently, 61% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Data from 1995-2005 from ABC News/Washington Post polls; data for 2006 from AP-Ipsos poll.

Views on abortion by religious affiliation, 2022

About three-quarters of White evangelical Protestants (74%) think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

By contrast, 84% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 66% of Black Protestants, 60% of White Protestants who are not evangelical, and 56% of Catholics.

Views on abortion by party identification, 2022

Six-in-ten Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party (60%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. By contrast, 80% of Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Views on abortion by political party and ideology, 2022

Conservative Republicans and Republican leaners are far more likely to say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases than to say that it should be legal (72% vs. 27%). Among moderate and liberal Republicans, 60% say abortion should be legal, while 38% say it should be illegal.

The vast majority of liberal Democrats and Democratic leaners support legal abortion (90%), as do seven-in-ten conservative and moderate Democrats (72%).

Views on abortion by gender, 2022

Majorities of both men and women express support for legal abortion, though women are somewhat more likely than men to hold this view (63% vs. 58%).

Views on abortion by race and ethnicity, 2022

Majorities of adults across racial and ethnic groups express support for legal abortion. About three-quarters of Asian (74%) and two-thirds of Black adults (68%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 60% of Hispanic adults and 59% of White adults.

Views on abortion by age, 2022

Among adults under age 30, 74% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do  62% of adults in their 30s and 40s. Among those in their 50s and early 60s, 55% express support for legal abortion, as do 54% of those ages 65 and older.

Views on abortion by level of education, 2022

Two-thirds of college graduates (66%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 63% of those with some college education. Among those with a high school degree or less education, 54% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 44% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Source: Survey conducted March 7-13, 2022. Trend lines show aggregated data from polls conducted in each year. Data from 2019 and later come from Pew Research Center’s online American Trends Panel; prior data from telephone surveys. See report for more details on changes in survey mode . Question wording can be found here , and information on the Pew Research Center’s polling methodology can be found here . White, Black and Asian adults include those who report being one race and are not Hispanic. Hispanics are of any race. Estimates for Asian adults are representative of English speakers only.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

What Stephen Breyer gets wrong about the Supreme Court’s ‘civility’

The public’s trust in the Supreme Court has plummeted , as the conservative supermajority decisions have already stripped Americans of rights and threaten more of the same. But in a new essay published Wednesday in The New York Times , former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggests a more pressing concern for the high court and the country: Are the justices friends?

For all Breyer’s anecdotes, the core of his essay is still emphasizing the humanity of justices who are more than willing to de-emphasize the humanity of others in their decisions.

Breyer suggests that differences of opinion between the justices, “important as they are,” must “remain professional, not personal.” This was the case while he was a justice, he writes, and “this meant that we could listen to one another, which increased the chances of agreement or compromise.” Such congeniality is a template for a divided nation, Breyer argues — without going into detail about the actual disagreements between the left and the right on matters like race, gun safety and voting rights.

The retired justice’s piece is filled with anecdotes about the various justices he served alongside ribbing each other and finding connection despite their policy differences. It would all be charming — if it weren’t for the obscene amounts of power those nine justices wield, no matter how chummily they do it. Instead, the sentiment of Breyer’s writing manages to combine that of a disgruntled retiree’s sepia-tinged remembrances and an overly earnest Facebook post. For all Breyer’s anecdotes, the core of his essay is still emphasizing the humanity of justices who are more than willing to de-emphasize the humanity of others in their decisions.

In a sense, this is nothing new for the former justice. It hearkens back to his former traveling debate with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a lion of the conservative originalist movement in the courts. It was their way of demonstrating that strenuous debate over the law doesn’t equate to being enemies who use political calculations in their rulings. “Judges make terrible politicians,” Breyer told a Senate hearing back in 2011 alongside Scalia, arguing that there was little room for making political calculations in their rulings. “We have to make decisions based on reason. That’s it.”

It’s a sentiment that was worthy of a side-eye even at the time, and has only gotten less convincing as the court’s composition has shifted away from the center. Placing civility and agreeability over differing views is a hallmark of the centrist line of thought, using the appearance of goodwill to disguise the depth of division between two positions. Politics is the art of being able to determine the law, and the law is the codified result of a society’s politics. That is never more the case than when decisions of vast importance before the Supreme Court are decided based almost entirely on the political considerations of the justices in the majority.

The gulf between Breyer’s hopes and reality was on display in the momentous 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade’s abortion protections.

The gulf between Breyer’s hopes and reality was on display in the momentous 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade’s abortion protections. In a Times article from this past December on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering ahead of that opinion, Breyer is described as someone who “was sometimes dismissed by other liberals as an overly optimistic institutionalist who underestimated the ambitions of the conservative majority.” It emphasized though his “strong ties with justices on the right” that he hoped could be used to find some kind of consensus on the Dobbs case.

He was deeply mistaken. Unlike the Casey decision in 1992 , there was no consensus that could be forged when the end goal — striking down Roe — was predetermined before the court had heard a single word of the oral arguments. It didn’t matter how many hockey games they’d attended together, or rounds of golf had been played among them. The callous disregard from the majority for the people its decisions affect makes it hard for Chief Justice John Roberts’ complaints about criticisms of the court to find much traction. It’s also why the recent joint appearances of Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor to promote civil debate in the face of polarization, which Breyer’s essay praised, are sure to do little to instill greater trust in the court’s decisions.

The most generous explanation is that Breyer’s intended audience isn’t the average reader of The New York Times, but his former colleagues still serving on the bench. Even if that’s the case, I’m skeptical that reminding them of the good times they’ve shared will do much to affect the actual decisions that are made. If those pleasant memories couldn’t sway his conservative colleagues when Breyer was actually voting on opinions, there’s little reason for them to listen to him now.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.