Abstract
This paper articulates a careful and detailed objection to the moral permissibility of postnatal abortion. Giubilini and Minerva (2012) claim that if being unable to nurture one’s newborn child without significant burdens to oneself, family or society, is a proper moral ground for the demand that the life of a fetus be terminated, then ‘after-birth abortion should be considered a permissible option for women who would be damaged by [rearing the child or] giving up their newborns for adoption.’ It will be shown that the permissibility of postnatal abortion does not follow from the argument’s premises, in particular, the premise that the newborn is not a person in the morally relevant sense.
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Bolsa FCT referenda SFRH / BDP /8703/2012
I wish to thank Alberto Giubilini, Francesca Minerva, Maurizio Mori, Massimo Reichlin and other participants to the seminar on postnatal abortion organized by San Raffaele University in Milan on 15 January 2003, participants to the Reading Group in Political Philosophy of the University of Milan, as well as Justin Oakley and two anonymous referees for Monash Bioethics Review for many objections and suggestions which greatly helped me improving this paper.
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, ‘After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?’ Journal of Medical Ethics 28, no. 3, 2012. doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100411.
Michael Tooley, ‘Abortion and Infanticide,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 1, 1972, 37–65.
Jeff McMahan, ‘The Right to Choose an Abortion,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 22, no. 4, 1993, 1.
Mary Anne Warren, ‘On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,’ In Biomedical Ethics, edited by T. A. Mappes and D. De Grazia, 4th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, 434–440.
Tooley, ‘Abortion and infanticide’; Peter Singer, Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Warren, ‘On the Moral and Legal Status’; H. Tristram Engelhardt, ‘The Ontology of Abortion,’ Ethics 84, no. 3, 1974, 217-34.
As Peter Singer writes: ‘[i]nfants are sentient beings who are neither rational nor self-conscious. So if we turn to consider the infants in themselves, independently of the attitudes of their parents, since their species is not relevant to their moral status, the principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here too,’ Singer, Practical Ethics, 183.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1, 1971, 47–66. Cf: John Finnis, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: a Reply to Judith Thomson,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 2, 1973, 117–45; Frances Myrna Kamm, Creation and Abortion: a Study in Moral and Legal Philosophy, New York etc.: Oxford University Press, 1992; David Boonin-vail, ‘A Defense of’ A Defense of Abortion’: On the Responsibility Objection to Thomson’s Argument,’ Ethics 107, no. 2, 1997, 286–313.
Giubilini and Minerva, ‘After-birth Abortion,’ 3.
Helga Kuhse, ‘Symposium on ‘after-birth Abortion’: Some Comments on the Paper “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”’ Monash Bioethics Review 30, no. 1, 2012, 46.
Ibid, 47; Paul Biegler, ‘Symposium on ‘after-birth Abortion’: Public Distress as a Moral Consideration in After-birth Abortion,’ Monash Bioethics Review 30, no. 1, 2012, 48–51.
See the already quoted passage of their article, p.3.
Giubilini and Minerva, ‘After-birth Abortion,’ 2.
Ibid, 3.
B. Major, C. Cozzarelli, M. Cooper, et al., ‘Psychological Responses of Women after First-trimester Abortion,’ Archives of General Psychiatry 57, no. 8, 2000, 783. See, for instance, Michael P. Sobol, and Kerry J. Daly, ‘The Adoption Alternative for Pregnant Adolescents: Decision Making, Consequences, and Policy Implications,’ Journal of Social Issues 48, no. 3, 1992, 143–161; Nancy F. Russo and Kristin L. Zierk, ‘Abortion, Childbearing, and Women’s Well-being,’ Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 23, no. 4, 1992, 269–280; A. C. Gilchrist, P. C. Hannaford, P. Frank and C. R. Kay, ‘Termination of Pregnancy and Psychiatric Morbidity,’ The British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science 167, no. 2, 1995, 243–248; Major, ‘Psychological Implications of Abortion — Highly Charged and Rife with Misleading Research,’ CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal 168, no. 10, 2003, 1257-1258; Sarah Schmiege and Nancy Felipe Russo, ‘Depression and Unwanted First Pregnancy: Longitudinal Cohort Study,’ BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.) 331, no. 7528, 2005, 1303. For the opposite view, see David Fergusson, L. John Horwood and Elizabeth M. Ridder, ‘Abortion in Young Women and Subsequent Mental Health,’ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines 47, no. 1, 2006, 16–24 (cf. Judith M Dwyer and Terri Jackson, ‘Unwanted Pregnancy, Mental Health and Abortion: Untangling the Evidence,’ Australia and New Zealand Health Policy 5, 2008, 2).
Guibilini and Minerva, ‘After-birth Abortion,’ 3.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point to me.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1977; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, London: Penguin Books, 1982.
John Stuart Mill, ‘Utilitarianism,’ in Utilitarianism and Other Essays, London: Penguin Books, 1987, 326–8.
Notice that my thought experiment differs from Thomson’s original one, in that Thomson imagines a person being dependent for her existence of another person’s body, while I imagine a non person in the same type of relation with another person, where the life of the non person contributes to the welfare of many other persons. This characterizes a significant different between the two arguments: Thomson assumes (for the sake of the argument) that the fetus is a person and argues that abortion is nonetheless permissible (because the rights of the mother are stronger than the right to life of the other person involved); I assume (for the sake of the argument) that the fetus and the newborn are not persons, and argue that abortion is permissible (because the rights of the mother are at stake), but postnatal abortion is not (because the rights of the mother are not at stake). Hence, my argument is immune from Finnis’ (1973) criticism of Thomson (cf. Boonin-Vail 2013).
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point to me.
Mill, ‘Utilitarianism,’ 321.
This rule utilitarian view is not necessarily incompatible with rights, since the moral rules prescribing respect for rights ‘are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs,’ Mill, ‘Utilitarianism,’ 333.
I owe this point to an anonymous referee.
Mill, On Liberty.
Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, ‘Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family,’ Ethics 117, no. 1, 2006, 80–108.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point to me.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point to me.
Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point to me.
Giubilini and Minerva, ‘After-birth Abortion/ 3.
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Loi, M. Why Postnatal Abortion Throws the Baby out with the Bath Water. Monash Bioethics Review 31, 60–82 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03351548
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03351548