Abortion is prima facie morally wrong.

Abortion is not morally reprehensible and should not be illegal, given the actual qualities that a human fetus possesses. Simply put, all people's realization of the world is actualized at the level of their brain. If any entity - human and non-human alike - is sufficiently young in their cognitive development, they will be incapable of experiencing the world at various levels. As a result, a fetus certainly does not have the same capacity to experience the world the way in which a fully-grown adult can. And unlike a person, a fetus is not self-conscious and is thus incapable of holding any desires to continue living. For this reason, a fetus cannot be said to possess a serious right to life. ============> In Defense of Abortion: Why A Fetus Does Not Have A Serious Right To Life <============= C1: It is not always wrong to kill an innocent human being. Despite what many deeply moral people may believe, there are very strong and reasonable grounds to conclude that abortion is not prima facie morally wrong. Over the years many different versions of anti-abortion arguments have been created. But, they all seem to be unified under the same key premises. More often than not, the premises of such arguments seek to uphold the intrinsic moral status of a human fetus. And if the reasoning behind these arguments were put into a syllogism, they might take the following form: P1: It is wrong to kill an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens. P2: A human fetus is an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens. C: Therefore, it is wrong to kill a human fetus. If anti-abortion arguments are constructed like this, strong objections can be raised against the first premise. For example, a devastating counterexample can be raised against the notion that it is always wrong to kill an innocent member of the species homo sapiens. An adult human with complete upper brain death does not possess a serious right to life; they are, for all cogent legal and moral purposes, already dead at that stage. [1] As Bernard Gert - the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College – points out, simply being alive does not have inherit value in itself. It is, rather, the ability to have a conscious experience of the world that is important. [2] Those who may wish to still believe all humans have a serious right to life should consider how ridiculous the anti-abortion syllogism would appear in light of the counterexample listed above. Clearly, the notion that all innocent members of the species homo sapiens have a serious right to life is deeply erroneous. Unlike a normally developed adult, a human fetus is lacking attributes in several very important areas. The human fetus does not posses the same mental faculties as a full-grown adult and therefore cannot be said to posses the same serious right to life that conscious persons do. As demonstrated earlier, this moral principle can be recognized in the way humans differentiate between fully conscious adults and those that have experienced a permanent loss of consciousness due to disease or some sort of traumatic accident. And it is in this ethical purview that it is possible to recognize that a fetus does not have a serious right to life since, like a brain dead adult, it does not posses a significant mental life with thoughts and desires. This is why murdering grown adults is wrong whereas killing a fetus is not. C2: A fetus is not a person and thus cannot have a serious right to life. As was argued earlier, a fetus is not a rational or conscious agent and therefore does not hold a serious right to life. The fetus may be a human (in the biological sense), but it is not a person. In her book, On The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Mary Anne Warren - an American writer and philosophy professor that taught at San Francisco State University - details five psychological criteria for personhood. According to Warren, these qualities include consciousness and in particular sentience; the capacity to reason; self-motivated activity; the capacity to communicate messages; and lastly, the presence of self-concepts. [3] Since a fetus does not possess any of the above qualities, it can rightfully not be considered a person. Given these criteria, it logically follows that a human fetus cannot possess the same right to life that a grown adult has since it does not qualify as a person. C3: An entity's potentials cannot grant that entity rights. A fetus' potential to acquire characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness is not a sound basis for granting it a right to life. While some may wish to disagree with this, it seems quite clear that potentials cannot justifiably grant something rights. As Peter Singer — the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne — points out, this principle simply cannot be adopted as a rights criterion since masturbation, contraception, and abstinence could all be equally condemned by its own standards. [4] In fact, under this ethical framework, even refusing to be raped could be considered unethical since it denies a potential entity the ability to become a person. These are simply an odious and untenable set of conclusions that could be drawn from the notion that entities can acquire rights through undetermined potentials. Therefore, a fetus' potential to become a self-conscious person should be rejected as the foundation for granting it rights. ::Conclusion:: In summary, the human fetus is a biological member of the human species, but it does not posses the qualities that would grant it a serious right to life. The fetus may be "innocent" in some sense, but this is irrelevant since a fetus does not hold the status of personhood. Consequently, the arguments often raised in objection to abortion simply cannot withstand rigorous scrutiny. They either rely on false premises or principles that cannot withstand sufficiently strong counterexamples. Indeed, many such arguments against abortion amount to little more than the tautological assertion that abortion is murder. But a slogan is no substitute for rational inquiry. Moral philosophy is predicated upon compassion and reason, not bumper stickers. Sources: 1. http://spot.colorado.edu... (7.2 The Counterexample Objection) 2. Gert, Bernard. Common Morality: Deciding What to Do. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. (p. 30) http://books.google.com... 3. Warren, Mary Anne. The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 1973. On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. Vol. 57. La Salle, Illinois: The Monist, 1973. (pp. 97-105) 4. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993. (p. 181) http://www.utilitarian.net...