About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

39 Rutgers L.J. 331 (2007-2008)
Abortion and the Margins of Personhood

handle is hein.journals/rutlj39 and id is 335 raw text is: ABORTION AND THE MARGINS OF PERSONHOOD Margaret Olivia Little* I. INTRODUCTION When a woman is pregnant, how should we understand the moral status of the life within her? How should we understand its status as conceptus, as embryo, when an early or again matured fetus? According to some, human life in all of these forms is inviolable: early human life has a moral status equivalent to a person from the moment of conception.' According to others, such life has no intrinsic status, even late in pregnancy.2 According to still others, moral status emerges when sentience does. Until the fetus is conscious-a point somewhere at the end of the second trimester,3 it has no moral status at all; after it is conscious, it does.4 * Assoc. Prof., Philosophy Dept., Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington DC 20057. She is currently finishing a book, entitled INTIMATE ASSISTANCE: RE-THINKING ABORTION IN LAW AND MORALITY, with Oxford University Press. 1. BARUCH BRODY, ABORTION AND THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE: A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW 116-22 (1975); John Finnis, The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Reply to Judith Thomson, 2 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 117, 144-45 (1973); Patrick Lee & Robert P. George, The Wrong of Abortion, in CONTEMPORARY DEBATES IN APPLIED ETHICS 13 (Andrew I. Cohen & Christopher Health Wellman eds., 2005). 2. PETER SINGER, PRACTICAL ETHICS 96-99, 186-88 (2d ed. 1993); Michael Tooley, A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide, in THE PROBLEM OF ABORTION 51, 51-52 (Joel Feinberg ed., 1973); Mary Anne Warren, On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, 57 MONIST 43, 57-59 (1973). 3. Brain activity arises much earlier, but sentience emerges with the development of organized brain activity of the form EEGs capture. One review of the science puts this development at somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-eight weeks gestational age. See DAVID BOONN, A DEFENSE OF ABORTION 107-09 (2003). 4. BOONIN, supra note 3, at 115-27; JEFF McMAHAN, THE ETHICS OF KILLING: PROBLEMS AT THE MARGINS OF LIFE 267-80 (2002); see generally BONNIE STEINBOCK, LIFE

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most