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The Value of Choice and the Choice to Value: Expanding the Discussion about Fetal Life within Prochoice Advocacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Bertha Alvarez Manninen
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Abstract

In this essay, I provide evidence that a new generation of prochoice advocates wishes to move away from defending abortion rights via the view that fetal life has little or no value (for example, as Mary Anne Warren does in her “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”) and toward a more complex view of abortion rights. This newer view simultaneously grants that fetuses are more than simply “clumps of cells,” that they are, to some extent, entities that possess some degree of value, and also that women still have the right to decide whether they wish to continue a pregnancy (for example, as can be found in the writings of Rosalind Hursthouse, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Margaret Olivia Little). Prima facie, this may sound like an impossible task—an instance of “having your cake and eating it too”—but I will show throughout my paper that, and how, such a task can indeed be accomplished.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 663 - 683
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

Many thanks to Nina Anton, Jackie Gately (Arizona State University), Kate Padgett Walsh (Iowa State University), and Michelle Beer (Florida International University), for their help with earlier drafts and incarnations of this paper. Also, thank you to Ann Cudd, Asia Ferrin, and to the anonymous Hypatia reviewers for all their comments, suggestions, and patience. Finally, as always, thank you to my husband Tuomas Manninen and our daughter Michelle for their support and love.

I would like to dedicate this paper to Professors Jack and Melissa Mulder (Hope College). Although we share differing views on abortion, they have helped me realize the need that exists for prochoice and prolife advocates to dialogue about the difficult issues that are present on both sides of the abortion debate, and the need that exists to take each other's concerns more seriously.

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