"There are differences between a child and a fetus insofar as a child has a mind and therefore “rational nature has already begun its development."
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"If a woman does choose to abort, it is a decision that should be reached with care, judiciousness, and ideally in situations where the woman has other moral obligations that parenthood would render it difficult or impossible to fulfill."
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"When I suggest that the woman should not be compelled to subordinate her interests to those of the fetus, I sometimes meet with the response: “But if she is allowed to have an abortion, the fetus is subordinated. It is just a question of who shall be subordinated to whom.” In a sense, of course, this is correct. There is a conflict of interest between the woman and the fetus, and someone is going to lose. But that is true in every Samaritan situation. There is a conflict between the distressed party’s need for aid and the potential rescuer’s desire not to give it. The point is that our law generally resolves this conflict in favor of the potential Samaritan."
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"Burgeoning human life, we might put it, is respect-worthy. Abortion involves loss. Not just loss of the hope that various parties might have invested, but loss of something valuable in its own right. To respect something is to appreciate fully the value it has and the claims it presents to us; someone who aborts and never gives it a second thought hasn’t exhibited genuine appreciation of the value and moral status of that which is now gone."
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"It is impossible to attribute moral status to a [human embryo] on grounds of its physical characteristics alone – even when its potential is considered – because there is no point in the process of ontogeny at which a scientific finding can be made, as it were, that a glob of protoplasm is now sufficiently endowed with moral freedom that it has become a responsible agent or sufficiently endowed with cultural, aesthetic, and ethical capacities that it has become a human being."
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"Even if we fully grant fetuses the status of persons, akin to that of any other person, this alone does not necessitate the moral impermissibility of abortion. This is because no one person’s right to life entails that another person must forcibly submit to unwanted bodily intrusion with the goal of sustaining the former’s life."
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"Imagine that an ailing violinist needs to stay hooked up to your kidneys for a certain amount of time in order to survive a rare affliction. If you choose to unplug yourself, the violinist will surely die. According to Thomson, if you have not consented to this dependency relation, you are free to terminate it, even if doing so results in the violinist’s death. Thomson does not deny that the violinist is a person with rights, including the right to life. Rather, she questions what obligations such a right imposes upon other human beings. It is not the case, she argues, that the violinist’s right to life necessitates that another person has an obligation to provide him with whatever he needs to survive. Analogously, even if the human fetus were considered a person from conception, it does not follow from this alone that others, particularly a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially when this entails the unwilling use of someone’s body."
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"I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life... I am arguing only that a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body – even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would."
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"Even granting that embryos and fetuses are persons, however, this alone would not entail the moral impermissibility of abortion rights, mainly because prohibiting abortion, and compelling women to gestate, violates the formula of humanity against them."
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"People who oppose abortion choice would have to argue that, unlike any other person, a human fetus has a moral right to instrumentalize a person for sustenance even against the latter’s wishes."
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"In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly defines “person” as a moral agent; as a being with certain cognitive capacities, “a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws.”
In his Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant argues that the human capacity of “personality” is the source of our dignity as rational creatures, and he defines it as “the susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive of the power of choice.”
And, once again in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant specifically defines the term “humanity” as “the capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever.”
It is clear from these passages that Kant correlated the capacity for free choice and moral agency with humanity and personhood. The problem for Kantian pro-life philosophers who argue that conception is the moment when a new human person first comes into existence is not just that embryos and fetuses lack moral agency and free will, but that Kant was clear that it was impossible to correlate the acquisition of freedom, and therefore humanity, to a physical or biological event."
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"We do not, as a society, compel individuals to donate blood or bone marrow, even if this means people will die as a result of not getting these vital bodily fluids, and certainly nine months of pregnancy is a greater bodily sacrifice than donating blood or bone marrow… As a society, we recognize the moral imperative to treat all persons as ends in themselves and that all persons are worthy of intrinsic respect. And we recognize that this imperative applies even if respecting it in one person entails the death of another... I can grieve the lives lost as a result of bone marrow or blood shortage and get still maintain that donations must be voluntary - that no one can be strapped down and have their marrow or blood forcibly extracted."
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"Viewing fetuses as patients independently of the women who carry them correlates with the increased dehumanization of those same women by transforming them into environments or containers for the unborn patient...More concerning is that “nowhere does the [federal guidelines] section on fetal research cite maternal safety as a consideration."
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"Given the correlation between single motherhood and poverty, it is quite understandable that this is a lifestyle to which women would choose to not be tethered, especially since it presents a formidable obstacle to growth and self--improvement."
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