<< Put another way, if there is an expectant mother,
mustn't there be an expectant child?
Begs question. You can call a woman so is exoectant an expectant woman oe a pregnant woman. She';s not a mother unless she has a baby, so you can't argue from the fact that we call her a mother, if we do, that therefpre the fetus is a baby.
>I've always been "pro-choice," but the air has
been slowly going out of that balloon for a while
now. I've yet to hear a logically coherent argument
for it.
The issue is tough, but there is a large literature on the subject. You can geta good sample in anlmost any good intro ethics texts.
(1) Judith Jarvis Thompson has a famous article in which she argues that even if a fetus is a human and has as much a right to life as you or me, it does not follow that abortion is wrong. The argument turens on the idea that I do not have a right to the use of your body to keep me alive, even for a minute. So if I would have to be hooked up to you to live, you would be justified in saying, Solly Chollie, it's inconvenient, even if that would kill me. The analogy is obvious.
(2) Them there are the arguments that turn on whether fetuses are people. These generally operate by remarking that people have features--rationality, linguistic capacity, etc., that fetuses don't have. The argument hasa lot of force against people who are carnivores--surely we think it's OK to eat cows, but a grown cow is a lot more rational, etc. thana fetus. If we found something as dumb asa fetus on Mars, we certainly would not conclude there's intelligfent life there.
The problem with this line of argument is the line-drawing issue. Newborns aren't smarter than fetuses, so it must be OK to kill them if it's OK to kill a fetus. Thus Singer and Michael Tooley.
Various philosophers have wrestled with the issue. My own solution is characteristically pragmatic. Line drawing is arbitrary, so we can draw the line at birth in part because that respecxts the strong feelings lots of people have about infanticide and in part because we think it would be bad for _us_ if we casually killed newborns. That doesn't get rid of thye artbitrariness, but it provfides a reason for drawing the line where most people think it should be drawn.
> Any defense of womanhood must, it seems,
grant some standing to the baby in the womb.
Whyzzat?
>And
it seems incontrovertible that at some point in
the third trimester, at the least, there IS a
baby in the womb. >>
Hardly. AT least if "baby" you mean "personw ith moral standing."
--jks