II. POTENTIAL REVISITED

George W. Bush, again, was the potential President of the United States by mid-November of 2000, before being inaugurated, as he had already won the 2000 Presidential election. But presumably no one would have thought that Bush deserved to live in the White House by virtue of his being a potential President of the United States. One has to be the actual President to live in the White House. And this fact – that in such cases we believe that people should be treated according to who they actually are, rather than according to their potential – has been used to argue that at least early abortions are permissible. For a fetus is not actually a person at certain stages of its development, even if it is a potential person at these stages. Moreover, it is argued, an abortion at these stages of pregnancy simply prevents the existence of an actual person of moral worth or value; such an abortion does not terminate the existence of such a person.

The first point worth noting here is that while it is certainly implausible to say that an early abortion kills an actual person, it is questionable and arguably misleading to describe early abortions abstractly as but ‘preventing the existence’ of something of moral worth or value. For while early abortions do prevent an actual person from coming to exist, and while it thus can be said that such abortions do not terminate the existence of an actual person, it is also the case that abortions, even early abortions, deliberately terminate the existence of an already present life which under typical circumstances becomes an actual person. Abortions, in other words, do not presumably terminate one life that just gives rise to, or is loosely associated with, another. Having an abortion is not presumably like terminating someone's income – which, after thirty or sixty days, will result in the termination of one's phone service and electricity. That whose existence is terminated via abortion is presumably, numerically speaking, one and the same thing which at one time is a non-person and later turns into a person.Footnote ¹³

Ultimately, though, we need not pursue the question of whether abortion is best understood as the termination of something which, if allowed to continue existing, would become or simply give rise to something of value. For the fact is that myriad examples suggest that we think it wrong to deliberately terminate the existence of something which lacks value and merely stands to give rise to something else of value. To see this, consider the following scenarios:

1. (1) The Tree and Medicine Case: Imagine that a given tree – call it the Wondera Druga Yucca – produces a delicious fruit which we know to cure cancer. Imagine, further, that only ten of these special Yuccas exist and that their fruit represents our only viable cancer treatment. Eating this fruit, as it were, is like undergoing our real-life radiation and chemotherapy treatments, just tasty and more effective, with a 97 percent cure-rate.

2. (2) The Seed and Food Case. Imagine that we have embarked on a day-hike in the country, and we stumble upon an abandoned farm that is stocked with hundreds of seeds – seeds which, if planted, will produce a variety of vegetables. The farm, let us say, is totally abandoned and has been for a long time; we know this by just looking at the place. Hating to see things wasted, then, we intend to plant these seeds in the soil surrounding this farm – figuring that the resulting crops will grow best there. And we plan to reap a variety of vegetables come harvest season.

3. (3) The Wood and Warmth Case. Imagine that we are camping in the high Sierras and that it is early winter. It is cool out, not deadly cold, but certainly cooler than we care to experience without a campfire. And it turns out that we have thirty-five sticks at our disposal – only thirty-five – any two of which can be rubbed together to start a fire with the remaining thirty-three. Furthermore, we have no other means of starting a fire on our campout. Accordingly, we plan to rub two of our sticks together and to start a fire to keep warm.

What would we think of someone, let us say a man named John, who deliberately, for no good overriding reason, destroyed the ten special Yucca trees mentioned in our first scenario, or the seeds in our second scenario, or the thirty-five sticks in our third scenario? What would we say, in particular, if John argued: ‘Hey, look, I'm not doing anything wrong by destroying these items because they are completely lacking in value – lacking in actual value’? Suppose that John continued thus:

What are we to make of such an argument, and of one who expounds it? Do we not take John to be guilty of a serious wrong-doing, despite what he has said to the contrary?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that John is correct when he says that the above trees, seeds, and sticks are themselves devoid of value. Let us say that these actual Yuccas, seeds, and sticks are completely devoid of value, which means that if we could not get these entities to produce something valuable from which they are distinct, they would be useless and entirely worthless to us, intrinsically and instrumentally. Given these stipulations, would we be inclined to think that John has done nothing wrong by deliberately destroying the above trees, seeds, and sticks? Or would we say that he committed a wrong, in some of the scenarios perhaps a serious wrong, because even though the actual entities which he destroyed were of no value, these entities were well on their way to giving rise to entities of value, whose existence he was thus wrong to deliberately prevent?

One could argue that John cannot be faulted for preventing the existence of the above entities of value because if we take deliberately preventing the existence of something of value to render one guilty of a wrongdoing, then we would have to see any way in which one might deliberately prevent the existence of something of value as a wrongdoing. Accordingly, in our second scenario, we would have to see John as having done wrong, not only by deliberately destroying the seeds that we found at the above farm, but by not helping us find these seeds had we needed his assistance locating them. One could even argue that John's not joining us on our day-hike would have constituted a wrongdoing had he known that we needed his help finding the above seeds. And one could similarly argue that in our third scenario, we would have to see John's skipping our campout as a wrongdoing if he knew that we needed his help finding the above sticks.

Now, admittedly, these last three claims are absurd: John should not be faulted for skipping a hike or campout on which we happened to need his help locating the aforementioned seeds and sticks, regardless of whether he knew that we would happen to need his help locating them. Given this, moreover, one could argue that the above scenarios are implausible because they have absurd implications. And this objection is important. For as we saw in Section I of this article, it is often argued that if abortion amounts to preventing the existence of persons of moral worth, rather than terminating the existence of such persons, then abortion should not be considered wrong, as abstinence and contraception prevent the existence of persons but are not considered wrong. Similarly, then, one could argue that if John should not be faulted for skipping the above hike and campout, thus preventing us from obtaining the food and warmth which the concomitant seeds and sticks stood to engender, then we should not fault John for preventing us from obtaining the said food or warmth by destroying the otherwise worthless seeds and sticks.

Upon inspection, though, this objection seems less serious than one might suppose. For if, all things being equal, the more valuable something is, the more we tend to condemn deliberately preventing its existence, it is also natural to think that only when something is of tremendous value would we condemn just any manner in which one might deliberately prevent its existence – i.e., that we would condemn, not only deliberately causing there not to be one object or state of affairs, X, which itself directly stood to engender another of value, Y, but also deliberately causing there not to be one object or state of affairs, X′, which stood to engender another, Y′, which in turn, stood to engender a third one of value, Z. In addition, if all things being equal, the more valuable something is, the more we tend to condemn deliberately preventing its existence, it is also natural to think that when something is of but slight or modest value, we would not condemn just any deliberate act that ends up preventing its existence. It is plausible to think that, in such an instance, we would only condemn a deliberate act that results in there not being something which itself stood to engender the relevant object of value.

Given these provisos, the scenarios that we have considered need not be thought to entail that every deliberate act which prevents the existence of something valuable is wrong. In our third scenario, for example, we do not have to fault John had he deliberately skipped our campout, even if his doing so resulted in our being less than ideally warm, because our being less than ideally warm is not a tremendously bad state of affairs; nor is our failing to harvest the potential vegetables in the second scenario above. Regarding our first scenario, however, it must be granted that John would be guilty of a wrongdoing had he deliberately prevented us, in virtually any manner, from obtaining the tremendously valuable fruit of the aforementioned Yucca trees. And, yes, to address a difficult objection head on, it would seem similarly wrong to abstain from procreating if, to take an extreme example, we knew that humanity would likely die out unless as much procreating took place as possible.

Assuming that the survival of humans is of tremendous value, which seems plausible, our treatment of the above scenarios, particularly of our first scenario, suggests that even abstinence and the use of contraceptives would be wrong in the event that the survival of humans is sufficiently threatened. And while one may see this implication as absurd, I for one do not take it to be. Under such extreme circumstances, it does seem wrong to deliberately prevent the existence of persons, be it via abortion, abstinence, or contraception. But two points must be made at this juncture.

First, one must be careful not to infer that our argument shows abortion to be generally wrong – let alone that it shows abstinence or contraception to be generally wrong. On the one hand, Section III of this article will present several grounds for thinking that our argument in this section does not imply that abortion is generally wrong, despite perhaps suspicions to the contrary. On the other hand, even if our argument above did show abortion to be generally wrong, our argument would be consistent with the idea that abstinence and contraception are generally acceptable. One would simply have to argue that while persons or human lives are valuable enough to deem abortion wrong in general, it would only be under the sort of extreme circumstances sketched above that persons or human lives would be so tremendously valuable as to render it wrong to deliberately prevent their existence in virtually any manner (no matter how indirect).

The second point to be made here is that even if the three scenarios presented above impugn the general idea that deliberately preventing the existence of something valuable is more acceptable than is deliberately terminating the existence of such an entity, one could take these scenarios to establish nothing about abortion specifically. For the fetus whose existence is at stake in the case of abortion can be seen as inhibiting women from doing as they wish with their bodies, thus distinguishing abortion cases from the three scenarios above.

The idea here would be that a woman's body should be seen as her property, which she has the right to control. John, however, was not the rightful owner of the trees, seeds, or sticks in our original scenarios. And one could add that while we did entertain the idea that John was first to ‘stumble upon’ the seeds and sticks in our second and third scenarios, and while we said that it seemed wrong for John to deliberately destroy these entities for no good reason even if he had stumbled upon them first, one could argue that we would likely see it as John's prerogative to deliberately destroy these seeds and sticks for no good reason if they had been in his private garage prior to our hike and campout, with John simply bringing them on our excursions in order to destroy them when we most needed them.

Such behavior would be odd and mean for sure, but we would likely see it as John's prerogative to do as he wishes with the above seeds and sticks had they clearly existed as his private property prior to our hike and campout – the possibility of which we did not entertain above. Similarly, one could argue that deliberately preventing and terminating the existence of a fetus is a woman's prerogative in the event that its existence is inhibiting her from doing as she wishes with her body – i.e., her personal or ‘private’ body.

This objection is important because it is often argued that abortion is justified by virtue of its being a woman's right to do as she wishes with her body. Of course, as stated, this argument is far from definitive because it begs the question of whether women should have the right to control their bodies in a way that deliberately prevents or terminates the existence of a fetus. We, however, need not pursue this question because even if one sees it as John's prerogative to do as he wishes with the above seeds and sticks had they been his private property prior to our hike and campout, this just seems to reveal another way in which our first scenario differs from our second and third scenarios. Specifically, this shows our first scenario to have the most purchase against abortion – with the other scenarios simply helping to establish the extent to which our evaluation of something tends to be inversely proportionate to our evaluation of deliberately preventing and terminating its existence. For even if one is not inclined to condemn John's deliberately destroying the above seeds and sticks had he owned them all along, we would presumably condemn John's deliberately destroying the trees in our first scenario even had he owned them all along – e.g., had they been growing in his backyard. In point of fact, after all, we do not allow one to kill endangered and thus particularly valued species, such as California's Morro Bay kangaroo rat, even when they are on one's private property.Footnote ¹⁴

Minimally, then, our first scenario above provides an account of how one could take abortion to be wrong on the condition that what results from a pregnancy is deemed valuable. And Section III below will have much more to say about this condition. Before pursuing this matter, though, a clear statement of the present section's upshot is in order.

So what follows from our argument in this section? One thing seems clear: In our three scenarios above, one's deliberately destroying an object of value and one's deliberately preventing an object of value from existing in the first place have the same consequences. Whether one destroys the Wondera Druga Yuccas or the medicine to which they can give rise, cancer victims will have to forego their treatment and to suffer from incurable disease. And so, too, with the other scenarios. Whether one destroys the seeds in our second scenario or the food to which they can give rise, we will be deprived of valuable food. Finally, whether one destroys the thirty-five sticks in our third scenario or the campfire to which they can give rise, we will have to forego warmth on our campout.

The above scenarios also imply that when we see something as valuable, we believe that deliberately terminating its actual existence and deliberately preventing its coming to exist can both constitute serious wrongdoings. Whether or not they are equally serious, the fact is that in some cases at least, we are inclined to think that it is wrong to deliberately terminate the actual existence of something valuable and to deliberately prevent it from coming to exist in the first place. In addition, it makes sense that we would see both the deliberate termination and deliberate prevention of something valuable as wrong. For seeing something as valuable (i.e., as meriting a positive evaluation) seems to commit one to seeing its deprivation as bad (i.e., as meriting a negative evaluation), and it is natural to see one who is responsible for the existence of a bad (or negative) state of affairs as guilty of a wrongdoing (i.e., given that one deliberately brought the said state of affairs about, etc.).

The point here is that if one takes something to be valuable, it stands to reason that one will take its absence to be negative, as Thomas Nagel argues that to the extent that one takes one's life to be good (or bad perhaps due to poor health), one can be expected to see one's death as bad (or good qua relief).Footnote ¹⁵ If, in turn, one sees the absence of something as negative, one will presumably see this absence as such, be it the result of something's being destroyed or of its never being introduced in the first place. For if, in general, one sees something as valuable, one presumably sees it as such, whether or not it already exists. Furthermore, it seems that in general at least, the more valuable one takes something to be, the more negatively one is inclined to view its absence, be it through destruction or deprivation. This seems both true and to follow from the scenarios presented above. For we would presumably see the absence of the Yucca trees in our first scenario as worse than the absence of the thirty-five sticks in our third scenario, and this is presumably because the cancer treatment which the former stood to yield is more valuable than the comfort provided by the potential campfire in our third scenario.

If this discussion is plausible, then, the above scenarios bolster the IPV-Principle presented in Section I of this article, according to which all things being equal, the more that we see something as valuable (i.e., the more that we see something's existing as good or positive), the more wrong (or negative) we tend to think it is both to deliberately terminate its actual existence and to deliberately prevent it from existing in the first place. In addition, if the IPV-Principle is correct, it explains many people's intuition that deliberately terminating the actual existence of something deemed considerably valuable and deliberately preventing the existence of the very same entity can both be seriously wrong – even if it is also intuitive to think that deliberately terminating such an entity's actual existence is more seriously wrong than deliberately preventing the said entity's existence.

We can now see how the IPV-Principle might inform an opposition to abortion. For all things being equal, if one endorses the IPV-Principle, and if one sees that which stands to result from a pregnancy as considerably valuable, then one will presumably see an abortion of the pregnancy as wrong, even if one does not take the abortion to deliberately terminate the actual existence of something of value. The reason is that such an abortion would still deliberately prevent the existence of something that one takes to be of considerable value, thus violating the IPV-Principle. But while this opposition to abortion is understandable, in certain cases perhaps even justified, the IPV-Principle's implications for abortion are more subtle than we have seen in this section. In particular, although the IPV-Principle speaks against attempts to justify abortion on the grounds that it merely ‘prevents the existence’ of something valuable (e.g., a ‘person’), further investigation is required to determine the precise extent to which the IPV-Principle speaks against abortion generally. Before we pursue this investigation, though, one final objection to the above analysis must be addressed.

Just four paragraphs back, it was assumed ‘natural’ to see one who is ‘responsible for the existence of a bad (or negative) state of affairs as guilty of a wrongdoing’, given that one deliberately brought the bad state of affairs about. One could object, however, that it does not follow from the idea that one has done something bad that one has done something wrong. Indeed, one could argue, to do something bad is one thing; to do something wrong, another. On this view, then, our argument in this section is implausible because it assumes a mistaken understanding of the relationship between ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’.

It is surely not the case that ‘doing something bad’ and ‘doing something wrong’ mean the same thing, nor do these notions seem biconditional. It is entirely conceivable, after all, that even deliberately ‘doing something bad’, or bringing about a bad state of affairs, could be the ‘right thing to do’ in certain circumstances – e.g., when a person or nation is already doing something wrong and so deserves to be harmed. It is also conceivable that one be deliberately doing wrong and at least inadvertently bring about a good state of affairs. Imagine, for instance, a klutzy wrongdoer whose deliberate mischief ends up helping those it is intended to harm. But while ‘doing something bad’ and ‘doing something wrong’ are neither identical nor biconditional notions, it is still plausible to think that it is at least generally wrong to deliberately bring about bad states of affairs. To see this, moreover, simply consider the denial of this claim: the proposition that it is not the case that it is generally wrong to deliberately bring about bad states of affairs.

This last proposition seems patently absurd, and it is thus plausible to think that it is at least generally wrong to deliberately bring about bad states of affairs. If, in turn, it is generally wrong to deliberately bring about bad states of affairs, and if one takes the prevention of something good to be itself bad à la the IPV-Principle, we can see how one might see abortion as wrong – given that one sees, as good, that whose existence abortion prevents. As noted, though, more analysis is needed to determine the extent to which abortion is impugned by this article and its IPV-Principle. So let us pursue the matter without further ado.

III. ABORTION

We have seen that the abortion debate frequently focuses on the alleged difference between terminating and preventing the existence of something of moral worth or value. Opponents tend to see abortion as the deliberate killing, if not murder, of something extremely valuable – e.g., of persons, of human life, of a human life, etc. Defenders of abortion, in turn, tend to argue that fetuses are not themselves actual persons or anything of moral significance. At most, they say, a fetus is a potential person; so abortion does not kill a person, but rather prevents one from coming to exist, as happens anytime one abstains from sex or uses contraceptives.

If this article is correct, though, the abortion debate should not focus on the alleged difference between killing something and preventing it from existing. This whole debate, in fact, seems like a red herring. For given our treatment of the IPV-Principle, the fact is that regardless of whether abortion is seen as a deliberate act of killing or of prevention, to the extent that we deem valuable that which results from a pregnancy, we are inclined to deem abortion wrong. So the real question becomes: How valuable is the entity which abortion either kills or prevents from coming to exist?

One might be tempted to think that given the IPV-Principle, and given that abortion involves either the deliberate killing or deliberate prevention of human life, it is extremely wrong to have an abortion – human life, on this view, being an extremely valuable thing. This, moreover, is a natural inference to draw from the IPV-Principle. But two questionable assumptions are being made by this inference.

First, should we be evaluating abortion simpliciter or particular abortions? That is, should the abortion debate be framed as a debate about the permissibility of the general practice of abortion? Or should the issue of abortion be evaluated on a case-by-case basis? Is it even reasonable to expect that we can obtain a blanket answer to the question of whether abortion is acceptable? Is abortion the kind of issue, like slavery, of which we should someday be able to say that it just is or is not acceptable in a given society? Or is abortion in this sense more akin to lying, which is presumably acceptable in some instances but wrong in others?

Second, and related, should we be discussing the value of human life simpliciter? Or should we be assessing individual human lives and their prospects? Is it the case that human life is itself valuable, that all human lives are in a sense equally valuable, and that they should thus all be equally allowed to realize their potential? Or is it the case – controversial, to be sure, but still perhaps true – that some human lives are not valuable? Is it possible that not all human lives are equally valuable or sufficiently valuable to warrant being brought to fruition?

These are difficult questions which will not be answered definitively in this article. It should, however, be understood that the above issues show it to be hasty to assume that this article entails that all abortions are wrong – or even that any abortion is necessarily wrong. For on the view defended in this article, which is to say according to the IPV-Principle, whether abortions are right or wrong depends on how valuable that which results from a pregnancy is. So again, on the one hand, if this entity is valuable, then an abortion's even deliberately preventing it from coming to exist would be seen as wrong, all things being equal. On the other hand, it must be observed that if that which results from a pregnancy is negative in value, then one would be not merely permitted to have an abortion, as on certain ‘defenses of abortion’. According to the IPV-Principle, one would be doing a good thing by deliberately preventing such an entity from coming to exist.Footnote ¹⁶

Now, granted, one could object at this point: What sort of human being is so ‘negative in value’ that it would be a good thing to deliberately prevent him or her from coming to exist? This is a very tricky issue, and it merits an extended investigation of its own because there is room for intelligent disagreement about where to draw the line between humans who should and should not be deliberately prevented from coming to exist. For a possible example of a human of the former sort, though, imagine an anencephalic human that is not wanted or cared for by its parents, that cannot be used for scientific research or as an organ donor, and that can be maintained only by the state, whose medical resources are finite and scarce. And for another interesting possibility, imagine a context in which our planet is so overpopulated that the addition of virtually any humans decreases the prospects of our planet's sustaining life in the future. Under such (theoretical?) circumstances, would not preventing the existence of most additional humans be a good thing (i.e., save those whose contributions would outweigh the additional stress that their existence would put on the planet)?

Given the IPV-Principle, if human persons in general become too numerous and pose a threat to the sustainability of the environment, then their existence at those levels could be seen as negative, with the deliberate prevention of additional human persons representing something positive. And it was with such possibilities in mind that the issue of context was raised above. For it is entirely conceivable that abortion (qua the deliberate prevention of something's coming to exist) could be wrong in some contexts (e.g., when that which results from a pregnancy is deemed good) but right in other contexts (e.g., when that which results from a pregnancy is deemed bad).

At this point, however, the present discourse faces another objection because according to the IPV-Principle, to the extent that something is of value, deliberately preventing it from existing and deliberately terminating its existence are wrong. Given this, in turn, one could argue that, to the extent that something is negatively valued, deliberately preventing and terminating its existence would both have to be, not merely justified or pardonable, but good. And so one could further argue that, according to the IPV-Principle, if full-blown persons are, in general, deemed a burden on the environment and negative in value, then it would not only be a good thing to deliberately prevent their existence; deliberately killing such persons would have to be good as well. But the thought of deliberately killing persons to relieve the environment of a burden seems absurd – indeed, frightening.

Two points must be made in response to this objection. First, we have allowed all along that even if it is wrong both to deliberately terminate the actual existence of something of value and to deliberately prevent such an entity from coming to exist, the former is more wrong than the latter. Second, we have said that if something is of value, it would have to be of tremendous value for us to condemn just any deliberate means of preventing its existence. For example, we would have to see a potential person as tremendously valuable to think it wrong to deliberately prevent him or her from existing by using contraceptives. Given these provisos, then, the IPV-Principle would only sanction deliberately killing a full-blown person under the most dire circumstances – much more dire than those which render it good to prevent a person from existing. And it goes without saying that such circumstances would not include something's being just any sort of ‘burden on the environment’.

If we found that, when alive, someone's body harbored a highly contagious life-threatening disease that could not be quarantined, vaccinated against, or cured, deliberately killing him or her, this, while tragic, would presumably be a good thing overall – i.e., for the sake of the ‘greater good’. And to address another difficult objection head on, if the quantity of human persons on our planet stood to destroy the environment and thus humanity itself if not drastically reduced, presumably it would be another tragic but good thing overall to deliberately kill many human persons. For it would be odd, at best, were the prescriptions of morality not in line with the preservation of at least some human persons. After all, barring ‘Divine Command Theory’ and suchlike, morality is a cultural phenomenon that is the product of such persons.

To be perfectly clear, then, the IPV-Principle presented in this article does imply that deliberately killing certain full-blown persons could be good; this theoretical possibility must be granted. It must be underscored, however, that the IPV-Principle, as explicated here, only implies that deliberately killing a person could be good under the most extreme, and thus rare, circumstances – circumstances, moreover, that seem, pre-theoretically, to warrant killing a person. So it should not be inferred that, according to the IPV-Principle, deliberately killing persons is generally good or an easily justified action. This simply does not follow from our argument. Some controversial claims, however, do follow from our argument. This article will therefore conclude by reiterating the central positions which it has and has not defended.

IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Abortion is a difficult topic, and the first point that must be underscored here is that this article in no way purports to resolve the difficulty surrounding abortion. On the contrary, in almost Kierkegaardian fashion, it likely makes the abortion debate more difficult than it already was because this article does not provide an account of how abortion simpliciter is either right or wrong.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather, this article carves out a sort of middle ground on the abortion debate, according to which some abortions would be quite wrong, some abortions would be less so, and some abortions would not be wrong at all, even being a ‘good thing’. Ultimately, though, the aim of this article is simply to illuminate the abortion debate: to shed new light on what continues to be a tough issue, both in theory and in practice. So what light does it purport to shed on abortion?

This article's primary aim was to illuminate our intuitions against abortion, and there are at least two reasons for doing so. First, many people are opposed to abortion outright. And this is true of both educated and uneducated people, philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Second, there are some powerful defenses of abortion in the literature, e.g., in the work of Singer, Boonin, and McMahan. In particular, these thinkers have persuasively criticized what is likely the most common argument against abortion: the ‘argument from potential’. Yet many people who encounter these criticisms, including Grade-A philosophy students and bona fide philosophers, end up endorsing the argument from potential at the end of the day.

For these reasons, then, this article has probed the common intuition that there is something to the argument from potential. And it has attempted to identify the principle which underlies this intuition: the IPV-Principle. Interestingly, though, the IPV-Principle not only seems to underlie much sympathy with the argument from potential and to provide a theoretical basis for condemning certain abortions. The IPV-Principle seems to sanction certain abortions as well. Indeed, as seen, the IPV-Principle seems to provide a basis for seeing certain abortions as, not merely justified or permissible, but good.

These findings, of course, make this article controversial. On the one hand, this article's defense of the argument from potential will cost it fanfare among defenders of abortion. On the other hand, its countenancing the idea that an abortion can be good will outrage opponents of abortion. In the last analysis, then, this article will likely have few, if any, allies in the abortion debate – vexing proponents and opponents alike. Hopefully, however, it will push the debate forward because abortion is a topic that is as important as it is difficult.