Response from Richard Heck on September 13, 2007

I'm not sure there's much of a puzzle here. If the woman takes the potion you describe, then at some future point there will be a child who has no arms, and that future child, one could easily argue, will then have a claim against its mother's earlier behavior. If the woman has an abortion, on the other hand, then at no future point will there be a child who has no body and, on that ground, has a complaint against its mother's earlier behavior. The point here is that the wrongness of the behavior, in the former case, can be traced to the fact that there will, at some point, be a person whose rights have been violated, even though that person was not a person at the time the rights were violated. There will be no such person in the latter case, unless of course you assume that the fetus in question is already, in the relevant sense, a person. But then that's an old argument.

Response from Jyl Gentzler on October 18, 2007