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It’s Complicated: What Our Attitudes toward Pregnancy, Abortion, and Miscarriage Tell Us about the Moral Status of Early Fetuses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2020

K. Lindsey Chambers Open the ORCID record for K. Lindsey Chambers [Opens in a new window]
K. Lindsey Chambers*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
*
Email: klchambers@uky.edu
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Abstract

Many accounts of the morality of abortion assume that early fetuses must all have or lack moral status in virtue of developmental features that they share. Our actual attitudes toward early fetuses don’t reflect this all-or-nothing assumption. If we start with the assumption that our attitudes toward fetuses are accurately tracking their value, then we need an account of fetal moral status that can explain why it is appropriate to love some fetuses but not others. I argue that a fetus can come to have moral claims on persons who have taken up the activity of person-creation.

Keywords

Abortionfetusmoral statusprocreative ethicspregnancymiscarriageparental obligations
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 8 , November 2020 , pp. 950 - 965
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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