Ethics article argues for forced abortions on minors
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Pretty wild article out of one of the top ethics journals in philosophy, “Justice for Girls: On the Provision of Abortion as Adequate Care.” They’re arguing for forced abortion of girls under age 18 who get pregnant just as a baseline response.
They say her caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it. Doctors should provide abortion care to a girl who has contrary preferences or an aversion to the procedure: “she might resist the treatment. Providing care might then require sedation or physical restraint.” And they say compelling abortion care for an unwilling girl might seem to compound the harm she has already endured, but they argue if you think about it, the use of restraint, chemical or physical, is something we do for children who need surgeries or cancer treatment and don’t want to get it: “their resistance is not taken to be a decisive reason to fail to provide them with adequate care,” and since abortion is simply “adequate care,” it should be the same thing.
They say, “the unpleasantness of the abortion or the use of restraint … does not justify leaving … a child to endure further harm through continued pregnancy.” They assume that continuing pregnancy is just as a standard thing more harm than an abortion, even an abortion that a teenage girl specifically doesn’t want. Elsewhere in the paper, they acknowledge that she might view abortion as killing a baby, but they gloss over that very briefly and treat it as just sort of a silly thing a child might think and not something to be taken seriously by her adult caregivers who know better.
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