Is abortion permissible? In what circumstances?

 Liberals say that abor3on is permissible because all and only actual persons have a serious right to life • Note: 1) This is not to say that non-persons have no rights; or that they have no claim to life, merely a less serious one 2) This is compa3ble with gradualism: the view that, as the foetus develops psychologically, it acquires greater intrinsic moral standing; and abor3on becomes a more morally serious maLer The liberal argument Premise 1. Only beings that are actually persons have a serious right to life Premise 2: A being is a person only if it is self-conscious —“only if it possesses the concept of a self as a con3nuing subject of experiences and other mental states and believes that it is itself such a con3nuing en3ty.” (Tooley, ‘Abor3on and Infan3cide’ p. 44.) Premise 3. No foetus is actually a person Conclusion. Therefore, no foetus has a serious right to life An unpalatable consequence of the liberal view • If self-consciousness is the criterion for personhood, then newborn infants do not have a serious right to life since they are not self-conscious • If abor3on is morally acceptable, then so too is infan3cide Intrinsic versus “all things considered” wrongness • What follows from the liberal account of personhood is that abor3on and infan3cide are on a moral par as regards the intrinsic wrongness of killing (i.e. ignoring side-effects) • It does not follow that they are necessarily morally equivalent all things considered, for side effects may differ crucially But… • This s3ll seems somewhat unpalatable: It follows that it would be worse to kill someone’s beloved pet cat than secretly to kill an unloved newborn infant that nobody would miss The dilemma • Is there any way of avoiding this unpalatable conclusion? Is there a point, somewhere between concep;on and birth, where we can plausibly say that a developing being acquires a serious right to life? •
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