Abortion

Suppose that a fetus is at a stage when it is considered permissible to be aborted. Suppose that the woman bearing the fetus decides, for some reason, that she would prefer that the child be born with no arms. To that end, she takes some kind of potion, and the child is later born with no arms. I think that most people would feel that the woman's action was wrong because it was wrong to deprive the child that was born of his or her arms and their use. But if that's true, why is it permissible to deprive the child that would have been born of his or her body and its use?

Comments

I'm not sure there's much of a puzzle here. If the woman takes the potion you describe, then at some future point there will be a child who has no arms, and that future child, one could easily argue, will then have a claim against its mother's earlier behavior. If the woman has an abortion, on the other hand, then at no future point will there be a child who has no body and, on that ground, has a complaint against its mother's earlier behavior. The point here is that the wrongness of the behavior, in the former case, can be traced to the fact that there will, at some point, be a person whose rights have been violated, even though that person was not a person at the time the rights were violated. There will be no such person in the latter case, unless of course you assume that the fetus in question is already, in the relevant sense, a person. But then that's an old argument.

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