Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” evaluates Judith Thomson’s and John Noonan’s arguments for and against the permissibility of abortion and draws its own conclusions based on the arguments provided. Warren defines the act of abortion as, “the act that a woman performs in voluntarily terminating, or allowing another person to terminate, her pregnancy, and the legal status that is appropriate for this act.” Warren’s goal is to evaluate two of the main points of debate in the abortion argument — whether a fetus can be deemed a person of moral standing with a right to life, and if the moral permissibility of abortion can be deemed equivalent to that of murder given a fetus’s moral rights. Warren argues early on that the former cannot be established to a standard high enough for the determination of moral rights, though she presents arguments for and against this notion and their implication for the morality of abortion. Additionally, she presents and assesses the threshold for determination of personhood beyond a biological standard. Her conclusion is that fetuses are genetically human and possess the potential to become human but fail to realize the necessary conditions of rationality and consciousness to be considered members of the moral community — the implication being that the mother’s right outweighs the fetus’s and justifies the act of abortion defined above. Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, in “The Wrong of Abortion,” provide many objections to the arguments presented by Warren, particularly pertaining to the establishment of a fetus’s right to life and the inability to use self-consciousness as a factor in the determination process. It is their view that a fetus is inherently a person from the time of conception, and that no “accidental attribute” of consciousness is earned by humans in the way that someone who learns to play music obtains the accidental attribute of being a musician. Warren responds in kind to such objections by providing a list of criteria of which only one must be satisfied to establish a claim to consciousness, and of which a fetus possesses none. Warren ultimately argues that — while morally distressing to some — abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide are morally justified.
Warren begins “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” by addressing Thomson’s violinist argument: that an unwanted pregnancy is equivalent to a scenario in which a person is kidnapped and her body is hooked to a machine which circulates blood to a dying violinist. The person’s cooperation results in the recovery of the violinist, but her refusal means his certain death, as she is the only viable candidate. Warren argues that the anti-abortionist position would require her to stay attached to the violinist until he is recovered — which, she states, is absurd, on account that no person can stake claim to another’s body unwillingly. The analogy, according to Warren, initially appears quite plausible, but only in the instance of rape, where the mother has no responsibility for her pregnancy and therefore no obligation to continue to carry the fetus to term. In the case of a mother who willingly enters into the situation that resulted in her pregnancy, additional justification is needed to argue that she is morally permitted to end her pregnancy. Warren turns to the antiabortion argument that the mother has assumed responsibility to the fetus by engaging in action that brought the fetus into existence; she believes this reasoning is flawed — that the responsibility of the mother plays no role in the permissibility of abortion — but grants them this argument for the sake of supposition. Warren considers a new violinist analogy, in which this violinist’s disease is not so uncommon, and you have agreed to join a society whose members will be chosen at random in the event a violinist is stricken with the disease. In this scenario, you now hold some responsibility if you are kidnapped and attached to a violinist. Warren considers this a better argument for the more common cases of abortion, but comments that it brings us no closer to understanding the obligations of a mother seeking an abortion for an unwanted child, because the analogy provides no new context to the debate. She states that it does provide a distinction between an adult human and a fetus dying as a result of a woman’s refusal to let it use her body: the violinist is independent of the woman and has its own right to existence, whereas the fetus is created by the mother’s actions and, for that reason, has less of a claim to use the woman’s body. It is this distinction that Warren uses as justification for her claim that a fetus should not be considered a person, and the catalyst for why the moral rights of personhood must be examined.
Warren’s next goal is to examine what can be defined as human, and who among them shares the rights of the moral community. She claims that antiabortionists, like Noonan, regularly make mistakes in constructing arguments relating to the status of the fetus with regard to whether it is human. They fail to recognize that “human” can be defined in multiple senses, and either construct invalid arguments using two different senses or create begging-the-question fallacies whose premises assume the conclusion. Warren objects to Noonan’s argument that a fetus should be assigned moral rights as a result of its human genetic code; her justification is that Noonan’s argument fails to describe how and why genetic humanity and moral humanity are to be considered equivalent, and Warren believes we have good reason not to believe these are equivalent — that the moral community consists of people rather than human beings. To strengthen this claim, Warren constructs an analogy in which a human space traveler encounters a race of beings on an alien planet and must determine if they are deserving of the same moral consideration as people. He might attempt to look for the cultural artifacts he associates with people, such as religion and art, but these are not traits that can truly determine personhood. Instead, Warren presents her criteria for properly analyzing the personhood of a being: consciousness and reason, and potentially self-motivated activity, are sufficient for our space traveler’s determination — a being necessarily must have one of five traits, the last two being the capacity to communicate and the presence of self-concepts, to be considered deserving of personhood. Using Warren’s logic, a fetus cannot be defined as a person, as it possesses none of these traits; she believes no rational person could disagree that a fetus fails to meet any of these criteria. She also states that while fetuses cannot be defined as people using her definition, they are undoubtedly potential people — that is, given all the proper circumstances, a fetus will develop into a person. Warren’s objection to this argument is, again, by way of analogy. Consider the scenario presented before, where a space traveler encounters an alien race, only this time he is captured. The aliens’ intention is to divide the man into individual cells and, using their advanced technology, create vast numbers of persons equivalent in knowledge and ability to the original man and possessing the criteria of moral personhood. The space traveler, knowing their intention and that each new person will be treated fairly, escapes to save his body from deconstruction, and by doing so deprives all those potential people of their potential lives. Warren suggests that he has done nothing wrong, as the rights of an actual person outweigh the rights of any number of potential people. The consequence of this logic is that anyone sympathetic to this idea is also supportive of euthanasia and infanticide in certain circumstances — infants, though significantly more person-like than a fetus, still possess none of the qualifiers of moral personhood and can be killed in a similarly permissible fashion. Warren believes that any objection to this potential act stems from the stigma that it is murder, rather than from any morally relevant position.
Lee and George present objections to Warren’s claim that abortion is a permissible act in “The Wrong of Abortion,” by presenting arguments establishing a fetus’s personhood. It is their belief that the act of abortion is equivalent to murder, because a fetus is deserving of all the same rights as an adult person. They defend this position by describing how there is no point in a child’s development that one can clearly point to as the moment a child transitions from a potential person to a person; taking this to be the case, they argue that a fetus must be considered a moral person from the time of conception. Lee and George argue that proponents of abortion do not dispute that a person is the same organism that was once an embryo and a fetus, but rather claim that at some point since then it obtained the attribute of consciousness that now gives it the distinction of being a person. Lee and George claim this is akin to someone gaining the status of musician after learning to play music — what they call an accidental attribute, some value or right gained by fulfilling a requirement. They take this not to be the case, and consider personhood not to be a special condition to be attained but the fundamental condition for being given rights in the first place. It is their position that it is not necessary to appeal to consciousness; instead, an investigation into the category or type of object or creature is what can provide the basis of its rights. This is contrary to the arguments previously provided by Warren, who argues that the category of a fetus plays no role in the determination of its rights, such that, in an extreme case, an alien — if it possesses the necessary traits — can be deemed worthy of moral personhood. Lee and George’s objection that consciousness is arbitrary is also easily countered by Warren’s list of criteria: one could evaluate a fetus’s development and determine the exact point at which it surpasses the necessary requirements for personhood.
Warren does well in presenting Thomson’s and Noonan’s arguments and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of both. Her additions and insights successfully provide justification for the permissibility of abortion and the lack of obligation on the mother to carry an unwanted child to term. She provides logical arguments, and justification for them, that work well on their own and in opposition to the arguments provided by Lee and George. Warren addresses critics and establishes her thesis that no wrong is committed when a woman voluntarily terminates her pregnancy.