[Photo credit Patricia Prudente from Unsplash] Personhood and Artificial Womb Technology In 2017, artificial womb technology was successfully used to support lamb fetuses that had been transferred from their mothers, and there’s hope that this technology will soon be used on very premature human infants. This makes it important to think about the moral status […]
Photo credit NeONBRAND with Unsplash Today’s guest blog post is by Kristina Artuković Anyone who is in any way involved in the debate on prenatal justice knows that it usually involves tiring discussions about the meaning of terms like human, person, personhood or potentiality. More versed pro-choice advocates insist that the meaning of human is […]
Nathan Nobis and Kristina Grob recently published a book called Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should Be Legal. The book was designed to teach people on both sides of the aisle, pro-life and pro-choice, how to have better conversations on the topic by pointing out bad arguments, […]
My friend and pro-life mentor Steve Wagner introduced me to an article by Lee F. Kerckhove and Sara Waller (hereafter, K&W) called “Fetal Personhood and the Sorites Paradox.” [1] It’s not an argument I’ve seen very often but it was recently expounded by Kate Greasley in her book Arguments About Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and the […]
Baruch Brody, in an essay titled “Against an Absolute Right to Abortion”, [1] defends what he calls the brain, heart, and lung theory of death, adapted from a theory put forth by ethicist Paul Ramsey. Brody is, himself, pro-life, but only after the first trimester. The view he supports essentially states in order to determine […]
Today, Dennis Prager released an excellent video presenting five non-religious moral arguments against abortion. Please give it a watch. I’d like to focus on the first of Prager’s five arguments, which is that even if the unborn are not persons, it doesn’t mean, ipso facto, that abortion is moral. Now, I’ve argued elsewhere that the unborn certainly […]
Bodily autonomy. It’s a term that has essentially lost all meaning in our culture today. Not because it doesn’t have an objective meaning, but because the cry for “bodily autonomy” (e.g. “my body, my choice”) has been accepted uncritically as a modern slogan, despite most pro-choice people being unable to defend the proposition that bodily […]
I came across a question over the internet. I’m not a user on Tumblr, but this came up on Google. Someone had asked this question: What’s the main reason you think abortion is ok? The answer, which is indicated as the best one, is: “Because forcing someone to continue with a pregnancy against their will […]
If a pro-choice person you’re talking to understands the distinction between the question of biological humanity and philosophical personhood, he/she will undoubtedly attempt to find some property/properties that persons must possess in order to be a person. Some common ones are consciousness, self-awareness, sentience (meaning the ability to sense and feel pain), and desires. While the […]
I’ve had a few Christian pro-life friends of mine (kindly) tell me they don’t really understand how a secularist can defend the pro-life position. Sure, they get that we don’t need religion to understand fetal development, and we don’t need to believe in a god to recognize that abortion is violence. But they trip over […]