Abstract
There are a number of objections which have been or might be raised against the views I have adopted and in favor of extending personhood to humans from the moment of conception. I shall discuss a number of these.
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Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey discuss the effects on children who, from early infancy, are shunted from one foster home to another [High Risk: Children Without a Conscience (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1987), see esp. 51–69]. An alarmingly large number of these children are ‘unattached,’ incapable of forming caring relationships with others, and frequently become psychopaths and criminals.
Francis C. Wade, ‘Potentiality in the Abortion Discussion,’ Review of Metaphysics, 29 (1975): 239–255, for example.
Roger Wertheimer, ‘Understanding the Abortion Argument,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1971): 67–95.
Clifford Grobstein, Science and the Unborn: Choosing Human Futures (New York: Basic Books, 1988), Chapter 2.
Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin?, Cambridge University Press, 1988),175–177.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), Chapter 13.
Joel Feinberg has made this suggestion [‘Abortion,’ in Matters of Life and Death, Tom Regan, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 193–194].
Philip E. Divine [‘Abortion,’ in Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, Tom Beauchamp & LeRoy Walters, eds. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), 266–268] has denied that the sperm or ovum could have a right to life because there is no specific individual that could bear that right. Yet there seems to be nothing about the gametes which makes them less capable of bearing a right than a zygote. All are spatiotemporally continuous individuals; none have any of the characteristics which entitle individuals to rights, but all have the potential to become such individuals under appropriate circumstances.
In ‘Abortion and Infanticide,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2 (1972): 37–65.
Mary Ann Warren, ‘On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,’ Monist, 57 (1973): 43–61.
See also Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981), 4–6, and Feinberg, ‘Abortion,’ 185–186.
Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), especially Chapter 2.
As an example of the sort of thinking required, see Mary Warnock’s A Question of Life: the Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 80–86. She suggests lines of responsibility for and the rights of children resulting from artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization.
This is the solution advocated by Robert C. Cefalo and H. Tristram Engelhardt in ‘Anencephalic Tissue for Transplantation,’ Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 14 (1) (1989): 25–43. They also suggest that anencephalics, having never had a functioning brain, have never become persons in the first place. Granted, anencephalic infants have not achieved the first and most fundamental characteristic of personhood: i.e., sentience. But the personhood of no infant is based on its present characteristics, but rather on our decision to grant personhood to infants.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Forrester, M.G. (1996). Abortion: Objections and Policies. In: Persons, Animals, and Fetuses. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1633-3_16
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