Is Abortion Wrong?
Definitely there is not any moral judgment to condemn a woman getting miscarriage unintentionally by reason of it being accident and nothing to accuse. But, what if a woman deliberately aborts her fetus without any social, psychological, economical, and health reason? She deliberately does not want to continue her pregnancy by reason of nothing. Is it still true even if viewed in a context of purely human rights, on behalf of woman’s reproductive rights?
It has been the most emotive, politicised, and socially divisive disputation of our time that the polemical issue abortion still fares in front of our moral judgment. The question whether fetuses have a right to life is the core issue to allow whether or not a woman is morally permitted to use her reproductive rights to abort. Here are two sharply opposite points of view in scrutinising the issue. Firstly, it is truly problematic to abort because of moral imperative saying that every human being must keep other’s lives. This standpoint problematises the reproductive rights themselves. While, secondly, it is not a problem.
How can abortion in other words to murder — in spite of — only a fetus, be morally true. We have seriously known that to murder is wrong morally — irrespective of some emergency conditions urging by force. The pro-choice, in addition to accentuating free choice to every one — underscore the problem of the fact that there is perspicuous difference between “human being” and “person”. According to them, a fetus has not been a person, even if we have recognised and regarded it as a being, a human being. Regarding the term of being person, we should ponder on what personhood is.
Several thinkers classify some points to determine when a being has been able to be called a person, because it pertains to right issue in which every human being has started having a moral standing to defend herself or himself. To identify a human being as a person, we give a concrete indicator, that is a capacity. The capacity, precisely, constitutes our personhood, subsequently it will uphold us to be a moral being to have a right to our life.
That capacity is cognitive work. We must be agreeing each other that each fetus has not had such a complex capacity, cognition. The characteristics of the cognitive capacity are that (s)he can think of, ponder on, reflect on her or his future, have self-awareness, all of which are not owned by those fetuses. From here, the pro-choice explicate that every woman has her reproductive rights to abort her fetus because of no capacity which makes it have personhood. The moral judgment entails the personhood of the fetus to put it as a moral being who can be standing up by its personhood.
Here, as a matter of fact we have found the answer that a woman is permitted to abort because the standpoint is founded on the personhood in which each fetus has not had personhood to bring right to life. Although the controversies pertaining to it are still happening, it has been one standpoint to justify abortion itself. Besides, Judith Jarvis Thomson adds a thought-provoking analogy relevant to moral thought experiment on a violinist, that we are permitted to unplug, in other word to murder, because there are not any moral imperative and any necessary obligation to keep plugging to transfuse our blood to him. Nonetheless, phenomenological approach, about which we can scarcely hear, says vice versa.
What does it say?