Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-2n9c9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T15:15:34.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Soran Reader
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2008, pp. 132 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Butler, Twiss. 1991. Abortion law: “Unique problem for women” or sex discrimination? Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1): 133–46.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol, and Belenky, Mary. 1980. A naturalistic study of abortion decisions. In New directions for child development: Clinical developmental psychology, ed. Selman, Robert and Yando, R.San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1651/1994. Leviathan. London: Dent.Google Scholar
Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1991. Virtue theory and abortion. 32 20: 223–46.Google ScholarPubMed
Koppelman, Andrew. 1990. Forced labor: A Thirteenth Amendment defense of abortion. Northwest University Law Review 84 (2): 480–535.Google ScholarPubMed
Little, Margaret. 1999. Abortion, intimacy, and the duty to gestate. 32 2: 295–312.Google ScholarPubMed
Mackenzie, Catriona. 1992. Abortion and embodiment. Australian Journal of Philosophy 70 (2): 136–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After virtue. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Marquis, Don. 1989. Why abortion is immoral. 32 86: 183–202.Google ScholarPubMed
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Noonan, John. 1970. Morality of abortion: Legal and historical perspectives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Overall, Christine. 1987. Ethics and human reproduction. Boston: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Ross, Steven. 1982. Abortion and the death of the fetus. 32 11: 232–45.Google ScholarPubMed
Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal thinking. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1971. A defense of abortion. 32 1: 47–66.Google Scholar
Warren, Mary Ann. 1973. On the moral and legal status of abortion. The Monist 57 (1): 43–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weiss, Roslyn. 1978. The perils of personhood. Ethics 89 (1): 66–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed