Abortion Is Neither Right Nor Wrong
- PDF / 649,320 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 53 Downloads / 189 Views
Abortion Is Neither Right Nor Wrong Martin Peterson1 Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction When Ana got pregnant at the age of seventeen, she decided to have an abortion. In an interview six years later, she described the circumstances that influenced her decision as follows: New York, 2007 Unlike many Latinos, we’re not religious. My parents are progressive and always said I needed an education. It was my senior year of high school. My boyfriend was homeless. I bought a pregnancy test at Duane Reade and went to the bathroom in the middle of class. I sort of panicked but also thought, Let me get back to this tomorrow. On the train going home, I saw a sign. In my daze, all I saw was -abortion. It was one of those places where they convince you to keep the baby. They showed me the ultrasound, but I wasn’t falling for that. Later, I went to see a counselor, and she made an appointment at Planned Parenthood. I had it on a Friday so I could recover for school. On Monday, I found a note on my bed—my boyfriend had left for California. When I got pregnant later that year, I was in Argentina. Abortion’s illegal there. I drove around with a doctor looking for someone who would do it. I can’t even say why I decided to keep the baby. I didn’t want an illegal abortion. And I was in love, I guess. I didn’t think I could go to college with a kid, but I’m graduating this year.1 Did Ana act wrongly? The discussion over the ethics of abortion is deeply polarized. For decades, Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers have debated (sometimes in a very combative manner) whether abortion can ever be morally right, and if so, under what circumstances. This essay seeks to depolarize the abortion debate by articulating an alternative, more nuanced view, which I call the Middle Ground Position. 1
Winter, M. (2013) “My Abortion”, The New York Magazine, Nov. 8, 2013.
* Martin Peterson [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843‑4237, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Peterson
The core claim of the Middle Ground Position is that a pregnant woman’s decision to abort her fetus is sometimes neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. Moral rightness and wrongness literally come in degrees and a fair number of abortions fall somewhere between acts that are completely right and completely wrong. If right and wrong are used as binary terms, then abortion is neither right nor wrong. In this essay I use the terms “wrong” and “impermissible”, as well as “right” and “permissible”, interchangeably. To assert that abortion is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong is equivalent to saying that abortion is neither completely permissible nor completely impermissible. Another way of putting it is to say that abortion is somewhat permissible (right to some degree) and somewhat impermissible (wrong to some degree). To depolarize the debate over abortion is desirable for obvious instrumental reasons, which I shall not dwell on here, but first and foremost because the Middle
Data Loading...
