Abortion
Don Marquis and Judith Thomson: Abortion, permissible or not.
In order to start talking about abortion first we need to clarify the meaning of this term and distinguish between the other meanings of this word. The term abortion most commonly refers to the induced abortion of a human pregnancy by removing the fetus from pregnant woman 's body. An abortion also can happen naturally without intention, in which case it is called a miscarriage. In this text we will talk about the purposely induced abortion and whether it is moral thing to do. This debate focuses on two main issues, where the first one is whether the human fetus has the right to life, and, if so, are the rights of the mother stronger than the rights of the fetus. There are many articles and books on this topic, where different people are trying to explain their opinion about the abortion and also they are trying to persuade other people to think the same. For my paper I chose two ethicists who present their arguments for the position they stand for, Don Marquis and Judith Thomson. Both of them have different method of persuading and we can clearly see that Marquis in his essay "An Argument that Abortion Is Wrong " mainly uses FLO (Future Like Ours) theory to present his viewpoint while on the other side we have Thomson using more examples similar to the abortion case in her paper " In defense of abortion " in order to influence the reader of her point of view. Both authors give argument that have good and bad sides, and what I am going to try in this paper is to show that Thomson presents more reliable and trustful arguments than Marquis. To begin with, Thomson in her paper made up powerful thought experiments designed as analogies to different situations where a woman is pregnant but she wants to terminate her pregnancy. The purpose of those experiments is to prove her ideas that abortion in most of the cases is morally permissible. She also states that “First, while I do argue that abortion is
In order to start talking about abortion first we need to clarify the meaning of this term and distinguish between the other meanings of this word. The term abortion most commonly refers to the induced abortion of a human pregnancy by removing the fetus from pregnant woman 's body. An abortion also can happen naturally without intention, in which case it is called a miscarriage. In this text we will talk about the purposely induced abortion and whether it is moral thing to do. This debate focuses on two main issues, where the first one is whether the human fetus has the right to life, and, if so, are the rights of the mother stronger than the rights of the fetus. There are many articles and books on this topic, where different people are trying to explain their opinion about the abortion and also they are trying to persuade other people to think the same. For my paper I chose two ethicists who present their arguments for the position they stand for, Don Marquis and Judith Thomson. Both of them have different method of persuading and we can clearly see that Marquis in his essay "An Argument that Abortion Is Wrong " mainly uses FLO (Future Like Ours) theory to present his viewpoint while on the other side we have Thomson using more examples similar to the abortion case in her paper " In defense of abortion " in order to influence the reader of her point of view. Both authors give argument that have good and bad sides, and what I am going to try in this paper is to show that Thomson presents more reliable and trustful arguments than Marquis. To begin with, Thomson in her paper made up powerful thought experiments designed as analogies to different situations where a woman is pregnant but she wants to terminate her pregnancy. The purpose of those experiments is to prove her ideas that abortion in most of the cases is morally permissible. She also states that “First, while I do argue that abortion is
Bibliography: Cahn, Steven, and Peter Markie. Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.