By Matthew John Minehan. 2021 marks 50 years since the publication of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal paper, ‘A defense of abortion’, in which she introduced the world to a very famous and very unconscious violinist. It also marks mere months since Thomson’s passing in November 2020. For both these reasons, a fresh look at her […]
Category: Abortion
The first-year anniversary of the application of telemedicine to early medical abortions in UK
By Ilaria Bertini The 30th of March 2021 marks an year since the UK Government implemented the new guidelines on medical abortion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the use of telemedicine women’s homes have been approved as a class of place for both stages of early medical abortion (EMA up to 10 […]
Are prolifers hypocritical?
By Bruce P. Blackshaw. There has been a swathe of academic papers in recent years accusing opponents of abortion (described as ‘prolife’) of hypocrisy. It’s a popular theme outside academia as well. The argument goes along the lines of ‘if prolifers care so much about fetuses, why don’t they do something about X’, where X […]
Is it okay to abort just one of the twin fetuses?
By Joona Räsänen Many people believe abortion is morally permissible. Yet many of the same people also believe that if the woman is pregnant with healthy twins, it is morally wrong for her to abort only one of the fetuses. But since we should choose morally permissible acts instead of impermissible ones, it implies that […]
Fine-tuning the impairment argument against abortion
By Bruce Blackshaw and Perry Hendricks Why is it immoral to deliberately give a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)? In our paper Strengthening the Impairment Argument Against Abortion, we provided one possible answer: it is wrong because it deprives the fetus of a future of value. In other words, the future of an unimpaired fetus […]
Answering the critics of the impairment argument against abortion
By Bruce P. Blackshaw When Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument was first published in 2018, I was impressed that someone had come up with what seemed to be a novel argument for the immorality of abortion. Importantly, it wasn’t based on the moral status of the fetus. Instead, it used an uncontroversial moral claim—that deliberately inflicting […]
New UK Government guidelines on medical abortion during the COVID-19 emergency
By Ilaria Bertini The entire world is facing one of the greatest challenges of our time: the COVID-19 pandemic. Less than two weeks ago, the UK Government announced some of the strictest measures in its history to limit the rising number of infections in the population. The National Health Service (NHS) has been forced to […]
Why a relational account cannot rule out infanticide if abortion is permissible
By Bruce Blackshaw and Daniel Rodger It is widely recognised that late-term fetuses and infants differ little in features that are thought to be morally relevant such as consciousness and rationality. This poses a problem for ethicists who argue for the permissibility of abortion but wish to rule out infanticide. Some just bite the bullet—Alberto […]
Fetal pain and abortion
By Stuart WG Derbyshire and John C Bockmann. In the early 1990s new techniques for fetal surgery emerged and a group working at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital were posed a question by their pregnant patients that they had not previously considered: will it hurt the fetus when you inject it? Obviously the surgeons could not ask […]
Birth and “Birth”: Why Human Subjects in Artificial Wombs Should be Treated as Neonates
By Nick Colgrove. Recently, I argued that human subjects in artificial wombs are newborns (or, at least, should be treated as newborns). This is because the subject of partial ectogenesis—which has been extracted from a pregnant woman’s body and placed in an artificial womb—is a newborn, full stop. The subject of complete ectogenesis—which is created […]