Rights and Wrongs of Abortion by Marshall Cohen

Author:Marshall Cohen [Cohen, Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: 1wd2tAEACAAJ
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1974-01-15T05:11:46+00:00

JOHN FINNIS

The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion

Fortunately, none of the arguments for and against abortion need be expressed in terms of "rights.” As we shall see, Judith Thomson virtually admits as much in her “A Defense of Abortion.”1 But since she has chosen to conduct her case by playing off a “right to life” against a “right to decide what happens in and to one’s body,” I shall begin by showing how this way of arguing about the rights and wrongs of abortion needlessly complicates and confuses the issue. It is convenient and appropriate to speak of “rights” for purposes and in contexts which I shall try to identify; it is most inconvenient and inappropriate when one is debating the moral permissibility of types of action —types such as “abortions performed without the desire to kill,” which is the type of action Thomson wishes to defend as morally permissible under most circumstances. So in section I of this essay I shall show how her specification and moral characterization of this type of action are logically independent of her discussion of “rights.” Then in section II I shall outline some principles of moral characterization and of moral permissibility, principles capable of explaining some of the moral condemnations which Thomson expresses but which remain all too vulnerable and obscure in her paper. In section III I shall show how the elaboration of those principles warrants those condemnations of abortion which Thomson thinks mistaken as well as many of those attributions of human rights which she so much takes for granted. In section IV I briefly state the reason (misstated by Thomson and also by Wertheimer)2 why the foetus from conception has human rights, i.e. should be given the same consideration as other human beings.

I

Thomson’s reflections on rights develop in three stages. (A) She indicates a knot of problems about what rights are rights to; she dwells particularly on the problem “what it comes to, to have a right to life” (p. ii). (B) She indicates, rather less clearly, a knot of problems about the source of rights; in particular she suggests that, over a wide range (left unspecified by her) of types of right, a person has a right only to what he has “title” to by reason of some gift, concession, grant or undertaking to him by another person. (C) She cuts both these knots by admitting (but all too quietly) that her whole argument about abortion concerns simply what is “morally required” or “morally permissible”; that what is in question is really the scope and source of the mother’s responsibility (and only derivatively, by entailment, the scope and source of the unborn child’s rights). I shall now examine these three stages a little more closely, and then (D) indicate why I think it useful to have done so.

(A) How do we specify the content of a right? What is a right a right to? Thomson mentions at least nine different rights which a person might rightly or wrongly be said to have.

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