Many women who have abortions do so because they realize they won't be able to give the child a decent upbringing. Many anti-abortionists are Catholic and are opposed to birth control (and sex for enjoyment unless it coincides with the possibility of conception - go figure!) which may lead to the very problem they get so exercised about. Don't anti-abortion advocates then have a moral obligation to adopt the offspring mentioned in the first paragraph so as to assure them an affluent upbringing if it is within their means? Crack babies, for example, are not simply a matter of debate about abstract religious dogma. Am I right in detecting massive hypocrisy here? As a rule they don't seem to give a damn, just so long as the foetus survives. The hardship and misery probably awaiting it is conveniently ignored. Also, is it only in religions that we find sexual desire a source of guilt and shame? Surely not. The ancient Greeks had none of our hang ups. Thanks for an edifying site.

There are obviously profound moral issues in the abortion debate, and I for one, while respectfully disagreeing with the Catholic Church's position on the legality of abortion, can't even begin to understand its opposition to birth control. And perhaps it is worth emphasizing, for the record, that it is with this aspect of the Church's position that I disagree. Like most who would defend its legality, I am not a fan of abortion. That said, however, it is unfair to accuse opponents of abortion of the sort of hypocrisy you do. While they may or may not be right in their desire to see abortion criminalized, many of those who hold this view do actively assist pregnant women in placing their children for adoption. The Catholic Church, for example, has long actively supported adoption. That is not to say there have not been controversies in this area, too: Some adoption agencies, especially in Latin America, have been accused of discouraging women from placing their children for adoption. But that is a...

I have been reading about abortion recently and came across a ‘thought experiment’ used by Judis Jarvis Thomson about an expanding baby. The scenario is that you're in your house when your baby starts expanding rapidly. You realise that you have no chance of getting out and the only way to survive is to pop and kill the baby. The idea is that this is an analogy for mothers who will die if an abortion is not performed i.e. is it ok to kill in this form of self-defence? These thought experiments are designed to provoke a moral attitude which can then be applied to discover your true feelings on a particular issue. My instant reaction was that yes, it was ok to pop the baby in order to survive and therefore I believe abortion is ok if it saves the life of the mother. However, imagine that the baby is now an analogy not for abortion but for a virus like AIDS, by the same thought experiment it could be argued that saying yes would justify killing everyone who had AIDS in order to save everyone else in...

The short answer is that one has to ask whether the analogy is a good one, and my immediate intuition is that it is not a good one in the case of AIDS, at least not as you are using it. To what, in that case, is the expanding baby supposed to be analogous? The AIDS virus? If so, then what the thought experiment suggests is that one woudl be justified in killing the AIDS virus. But of course we already knew that. If the thought experiment is supposed to "justify killing everyone who had AIDS", then, the expanding baby would have to be analogous to a person who had contracted the AIDS virus. But it isn't: People who have the AIDS virus do not pose an imminent risk of death to those who do not, and killing all such people is (fortunately!) not the only way to save oneself, if one has not contracted the virus. Whether the analogy is a good one in the other case is a different question, and one's answer to that question will turn upon one's understanding of the relationship between a woman and the...

How many cells does a 6-week-old human fetus have? And how many cells does a fully developed human adult have? Comparatively, how many cells does a 6-week-old chimpanzee fetus have? And how many cells does a fully developed chimpanzee have? I am interested because I want to see if the abortion debate could be drawn along the lines of personhood relative to number of cells. Do you think this is a plausible way to think about the debate? Also, where could I find more information about this topic? Thank you, Alexander

These are obviously questions about biology, not philosophy. I'd try a good biology text. That said, it isn't plausible that personhood has to do with number of cells. Number of cells is roughly proportional to size. One would therefore expect that the number of cells in a large tree would dwarf the number of cells in a mature human being. Same for elephants and whales, let alone the strange fungus that is reported to be the world's largest living creature.

If a person claims to be both pro-life and pro-choice regarding the abortion controversy, is that person necessarily practicing relativistic moralism? The person in question claims to believe that abortion is morally wrong. However, he also claims that despite his personal beliefs he believes it is a choice each woman should be allowed to make.

There need be nothing inconsistent about this position. The first view, that abortion is morally impermissible, is a moral or ethical view. The second view, that each woman should be permitted to choose for herself whether to have an abortion, is a political view, one about what laws a state ought to have. The combination istherefore consistent so long as one denies that, if it is morallyimpermissible to do A, then it ought to be illegal to do A. Whymight one deny that claim? One might well ask why one should endorseit, but there is a better answer. Suppose one believed the following: Alaw must be justifiable on the basis of principles that cannotreasonably be rejected by any citizen, where a rejection is"unreasonable" if it is flatly irrational or, more interestingly, basedupon too many particulars of one's actual situation. Inparticular, religious doctrine cannot figure in the justification ofany law, since one's finding the appeal to any religious doctrineconvincing depends...

I have read many philosophic essays pertaining to applied ethics in the abstract, and many political essays dealing with specific ethical questions. There always seems to be a gap between the level at which the former leaves the problem and the latter takes it up. Why is this? How can this gap be bridged? For example, I (like most rational people I think) am bothered about the ethical issues involved in the question of abortion. Yet I have never seen a systematic treatment of the question beginning with philosophical principles? Does such a treatment exist? If not, why not? If so, why does it not enter more into the public debate? Thanks.

There are many excellent philosophical discussions of abortion, andmany of these do tie the question to general moral issues. One classicarticle is Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion", Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), pp. 47--66. Thomson's argument begins, contrary to what public political discussion might lead one to expect, by granting that the fetus has all the rights of a person. She argues that abortionis nonetheless justified because it involves a conflict of rights. Her central example goes like this. Suppose you were kidnapped by music lovers and connected via tubes and wires to a famous violinist whose life now depends upon your remaining connected to him. If you remove the tubes, he dies; if you remain connected for nine months, you both live. Do you have a moral duty not to remove the tubes? Thomson grants that it would be very nice of you not to do so, but, intuitively, you have no such moral duty. The example is meant to be analogous to cases of rape. Here's a...

Pages