Abortion Is Impermissible

Why Abortion is Impermissible

In my own view, I believe that abortion is immoral except in certain situations that the fetus puts both the mother’s and its life in a serious danger.

I am going to assume “the human fetus has a right to life and if the human fetus has a right to life, then abortion is impermissible”, even though it can be challenged. I believe that Don Marquis has presented a strong argument in favor of the view that abortion is immoral. In fact, Marquis’ states in his premise one that “any being that can be deprived of a future like ours has a right to life”, the second premise is that “the human fetus has a future like ours”. Thus, Marquis’ conclusion is “the human fetus has a right to life”(Lecture Slides 14). I believe that a third premise to this argument would be if the human fetus has a right to life, abortion is impermissible, except in certain situations that the life of both mother and the fetus is in danger. Thus, I conclude that abortion is impermissible except in certain situations that the life of both mother and the fetus is in danger. I want to break down Marquis’ argument and analyze his first premise to understand what was the underlying rationale for each point that he made. He compares the human fetus to a person and abortion to killing. Then he attacks the questions of killing and what makes it morally wrong to kill someone.

What’s the underlying rationale for maintaining in premise one that humans have a right to life? In this argument, right to life is closely connected with the future- a future like ours concept. We might be tempted to ask what is so unique about our future?! What does the future hold for us?! Our future consists of unique experiences- either good or bad, different activities, pleasures and accumulation of knowledge and etc. All of these experiences have value to us. Sometimes we might not value things that are going to happen in our future because we might think that our future is unknown. For...