Background

• Abortion is the induced termination of a pregnancy to destroy the foetus.
• Ensoulment at Conception

  As soon as conception takes place, what is created has a soul, and genetically it can only be a human. Thus, from conception, the zygote should be protected as a person.
• Delayed Ensoulment

  Aquinas developed Aristotle’s view that the foetus only acquires an intellectual soul at 40 days for boys and 90 days for girls. As odd as that is, it might be reasonable to claim that it must take more than a few cells to support a person’s self or soul.
• Primitive Streak

  This is the part of an embryo which later forms the spinal cord. It develops at about 14 days. Some argue that this is the point at which a pre-embryo becomes a person.
• Brain Activity

  Brain activity can be seen as early as 54 days but becomes continuous at about 32 weeks. It is appealing because the end of brain activity constitutes the end of life.
• Viability

  This refers to the ability of the foetus or baby to be self-sufficient outside the womb. Medical science at present sets this in the region of 23-24 weeks and the legal limit for abortions is 24 weeks in the UK.
• At Birth

  Perhaps the foetus doesn’t become a person until it is born as a baby and is capable of survival on its own. However, some babies are capable of survival even when they are removed from the womb by caesarean section many weeks early. On the other hand, no baby is capable of survival on its own: it needs someone else to feed it, keep it warm, etc.
• Mary Anne Warren

  Warren suggests the following criteria for being a person

  · Sentience

  · Capacity to communicate

  · Reason

  · Emotionality

  · Self-awareness

  · Moral agency
• Judith Jarvis Thomson

  You wake to find yourself lying next to an unconscious violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. You’ve been kidnapped the violinist’s circulatory system has been plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. To unplug him would be to kill him but it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered and can safely be unplugged from you.
• Thomson concludes from the violinist example that it's not morally incumbent of you to accede to the situation - we are not required to be extremely good Samaritans.
• Christine Overall

  Argued it is morally wrong to not respect the wishes of the mother

  • patriarchal society
  • genetic relationship makes her best to decide