The Ethics of Abortion

First published Wed May 14, 2025

Abortion is the intentional termination of a pregnancy, either viasurgery or via the taking of medication. Ordinary people disagreeabout abortion: many people think abortion is deeply morally wrong,while many others think abortion is morally permissible. Philosophyhas much to contribute to this discussion, by distinguishing andclarifying different arguments against abortion, distinguishing andclarifying different responses to those arguments, offering novelarguments against abortion, offering novel defenses of abortion, andoffering novel views about the relevant issues at stake.

This entry’s central question is: is abortion morally wrong?This question has important legal and political implications. Ifabortion is morally wrong, it is nevertheless an open and furtherquestion whether abortion should be outlawed or legally restricted insome way. It is also a substantive question how a society shoulddecide whether to outlaw or restrict abortion. This entry focuses onthe moral question and does not delve into these important legal andpolitical questions.

The first six parts of this entry present six arguments againstabortion. Subsections of those parts present responses to thesearguments – that is, defenses of abortion. The seventh partdiscusses why the ethics of abortion matters.

1. The argument from a right to life

Let’s start by considering the following argument:

1.: The fetus is a person.
2.: All persons have a right to life.
3.: Therefore, the fetus has a right to life.
4.: It is morally wrong to kill something that has a right tolife.
5.: Abortion kills the fetus.

Therefore, abortion is morally wrong.

This argument has some real intuitive appeal. Abortion is the killingof a human being, so it does seem to be the killing of a person. Ingeneral, it is wrong to kill persons; it does seem that all personshave a right to life.

We’ll consider five lines of objection to this argument.

1.1 The equivocation objection

We might object to the argument from a right to life by arguing thatthe argument equivocates. The word “person” could have twodifferent meanings for the purposes of the argument. Suppose that“person” means any animal that is ahuman being;on this reading, saying a being is a person tells us what species thebeing is. It is on this reading that claim 1 is obviously true: itsays that the fetus is human. But suppose that “person”means “moral person” or something with full moral status– something that counts fully for moral purposes, the way thatan ordinary adult human being counts. It is on this reading that claim2 is obviously true: it says that all moral persons have a right tolife. The objection is that the argument is only plausible if claim 1is interpreted with one meaning of “person” and claim 2 isinterpreted with another meaning of “person”.

What this objection shows is that the argument from a right to life,as we have presented it, has two different versions. One version ofthe argument uses “person” to mean “humanbeing” throughout. For this version of the argument, premise 2is a controversial assumption: it says that all human beings, evenearly human fetuses, have a right to life. Another version of theargument uses “person” to mean “moral person”or “being with full moral status.” For this version of theargument, premise 1 is a controversial assumption: it says that allfetuses, even the early human fetuses that die in first-trimesterabortions, have full moral status.

This objection shows that the argument from a right to life has (atleast) one controversial assumption: either premise 1 or premise 2 iscontroversial.

1.2 The violinist case objection

Suppose that a famous violinist is very sick with a serious kidneydisease. All medical records have been searched, and you are contactedwith the following surprising request: would you please come stay inthe hospital for nine months, lying in a bed next to the violinist, sothat your kidneys can cycle his blood? You are the only person who isthe right match to help him, and after nine months he will have made afull recovery. You think it over, and reluctantly decline. While youwould love to help another person, spending nine months in thehospital is a huge sacrifice that you are not prepared to make. Thenext day after you decline, you wake up in the hospital, attached tothe violinist. It turns out that the Society of Music Lovers kidnappedyou. The doctor tells you that, while it was wrong to kidnap you, itwould also be wrong for you to unplug yourself: the violinist needs tostay attached to you for nine months, or he will die. If you unplughim, you would be killing him, and he has a right to life. While youhave a right to control what happens in and to your body, his right tolife is surely stronger.

What may you do in this case? Surely you may unplug yourself. (Soclaims Thomson 1971, which introduced this famous case.) But thisshows that the argument we have been considering, the argument from aright to life, does not succeed. The violinist does have a right tolife; yet it is permissible to kill him. Thus, it is not always truethat one may not kill another human, just because that human has aright to life. The violinist case appears to show that claim 4 of theargument from a right to life is false. (The violinist case alsoundermines another claim, the claim that it’s not okay toviolate one person’s right to life for the sake of a weakerright; this is the claim that Thomson aims to undermine, when sheoffers the case.)

Note that the violinist case objection defends abortion while grantingthe claim that the fetus has a right to life. The objector claims thateven if the fetus has a right to life, it simply does notfollow that abortion is morally wrong.

Consideration of this case may adjust our moral framing of the choicewhether to abort a fetus. While it is natural to see this simply as achoice whether to kill a living being, reflection on the violinistcase may lead us to see it rather as a choice whether to providelife-sustaining aid to a living being – with the further factthat one must kill that being to avoid providing the aid.

1.2.1 Response from consensual sex

The violinist case might appear to defend abortion only in the case ofrape. It may seem to be important to the case that you were taken intothe hospital against your will.

Thus, one might respond to the violinist case by offering a differentargument against the permissibility of abortion:

1.: A pregnant woman who has consensual sex is responsible for thefetus’s dependence on her body.
2.: If you are responsible for someone’s dependence on somethingof yours, then it is morally wrong to deprive him of that thing.

Therefore, abortion is morally wrong.

To respond to this new argument, we might consider the followingvariant of the violinist case. Suppose that after you declined to helpthe violinist, you heard that the Society of Music Lovers was planningto kidnap you. You could stay home, in which case you would be safe.Or you could go about your normal life, with some hired bodyguards,hoping that any kidnapping attempt would fail. You choose to go aboutyour normal life, with the bodyguards, and yet you are kidnapped andhooked up to the violinist. Surely in this case (the argument goes),you may still detach from the violinist, thereby killing him. This istrue even though your choice to go about your normal life was acause of your kidnapping, and in that sense you areresponsible for the situation in which the violinist isdependent on you. Thus, claim 2 is shown to be false: although you areresponsible for his dependence, you may deprive him of your aid.Surely a woman who has sex with contraception is no moreresponsible for the fetus’s dependence on her than youare in this variant of the violinist case; thus, claim 2 is false asapplied to her case as well. (For further discussion of theresponsibility objection, see Kamm 1992 and Boonin 2003.)

Perhaps surprisingly, one thing that emerges from considering thisworry is that it may matter whether having sex is a central andimportant life activity, such that abstaining from sex would be asignificant burden. In the variant of the violinist case, it may beimportant that staying at home to avoid kidnappers would be onerous.Would refraining from sex similarly be onerous?

(A different argument regarding responsibility holds that a pregnantwoman is amother to the fetus and has the role-based dutiesassociated with that relationship. But that assumes that there isalready, and will be in the future, a meaningful relationship betweenthe woman and the fetus. See Little 1999.)

1.2.2 Does the violinist case provide its own positive argument?

So far we’ve discussed the way that the violinist case can beused to defend the permissibility of abortion in the face of theargument from a right to life. We might also consider using theviolinist case in an argument to establish that abortion is morallypermissible:

1.: If abortion is morally wrong, then it’s morally wrong todetach oneself from the violinist.
2.: It’s not morally wrong to detach oneself from theviolinist.

Therefore, abortion is not morally wrong.

This argument isn’t made in Thomson 1971, but it is worthconsidering. Much of the discussion about whether the violinist caseprovides an effective response to the argument from a right to lifewill also shed light on whether this is a sound argument. What are thedifferences between the abortion case and the violinist case? Do theymake a moral difference?

1.3 What is a right to life?

One might object to the argument from a right to life by probing thequestion of what a right to life is, and what kinds of duties itcreates in others. This probing may provide another way of rejectingpremise 4.

We can begin by noting that a right to life is not a right to be givenwhatever is necessary to sustain one’s life. If a person isdying, and all that she needs to save her life is the touch of (famousactor) George Clooney’s hand on her forehead, then neverthelessshe has no right that he come to her bedside to cure her with histouch. (See Thomson 1971, page 55.) Similarly, the famous violinistmentioned above has no right to the use of your kidneys to cycle hisblood. And he has no right that you remain attached to him –even though detaching yourself deprives him of what is necessary tosustain his life.

For a yet more fanciful example, suppose you are trapped in a tinyhouse with a rapidly growing child. The house is very small, and thechild is extremely large – if his growth continues unchecked, hewill crush you to death. The child himself will be unscathed;eventually he will grow big enough that the house will burst apart andhe will walk free. Does the child’s right to life mean that youcannot defend yourself from the threat he poses to you? Must yousimply submit to die in this way? Surely not, Thomson 1971 argues.

It might seem that a right to life is at least always a right not tobe killed. But it is not always wrong to kill another person, eventhough that person has a right to life. If someone attacks you, andthe only way to defend yourself is to kill him, then you may kill him.And consider again the violinist: detaching yourself kills him, yet itis permissible to detach yourself. These observations might seem toshow that if someone has a right to life, it is not simply wrong tokill them, but rather it is wrong to kill themunjustly.Perhaps a right to life is merely a right against being unjustlykilled (Thomson 1971). But if that is correct, then the argument froma right to life needs a different premise:

5*.: Abortion kills the fetus unjustly.

This premise is much more controversial than the original premise.

Can self-defense justify abortion?

Some of the cases we have just been considering involveinnocentthreats and the idea that a being with full moral status canbecome liable to be killed in self-defense even when they are morallyinnocent. For example, the growing gigantic child who will crush youin your house unless you kill him first is not blameworthy for posinga threat to you; but he poses a threat nonetheless.

The idea that the fetus has full moral status from the moment ofconception can actually be used to argue for the permissibility ofabortion, as follows. Pregnancy itself is caused by the embryo, whichimplants into the woman’s uterus. If the fetus is an independentperson, then it is like a mentally incompetent agent who perpetuatesan illicit bodily intrusion against a woman, and then startsredirecting vital resources and nutrition away from her. Understood inthis way, ending pregnancy is simply defending oneself against attackfrom another independent being. (See McDonough 1996.)

But one might deny that morally innocent threats can be treated in theway that morally guilty threats can be treated – at least whenit comes to what third parties may do. Consider the following view: aperson who is threatened by an innocent threat may kill to save herown life, but a third party may not choose sides between the innocentthreat and the innocent potential victim. On this view, the threatenedperson has a mere “agent-relative permission” to defendherself: while she can defend herself, that does not mean that a thirdparty can also act to defend her. (By contrast, it is of course truethat a third party can act to defend someone against a culpableassailant.) If this view is right, then we cannot use the idea ofself-defense to defend ordinary surgical abortion in the faceof the argument from a right to life. While granting that women wouldbe morally permitted to perform abortions on themselves, it would notfollow that doctors are permitted to perform abortions. (See Davis1984. For the view that doctors can act as the pregnant woman’sagent in her self-defense, see English 1975.)

What should we think about this worry?

First of all, it is important to note that the reframing of abortionthat the violinist case suggests need not be understood in terms of“self-defense”; rather, abortion is reframed asfundamentally about the withdrawal of aid.

Second, it is implausible that meremoral innocence renders athreat immune to attack from third parties. It does seem that atemporarily insane person who rushes at an innocent person can bekilled by anyone, not just by the attacked person; this seems true nomatter how blameless the attacker is. (For more on innocent threats,see Frowe and Parry 2024.)

1.4 Potentiality

The objections we considered in sections 1.2 and 1.3 granted theclaims that fetuses are persons, and that persons have a right tolife: these objections granted claims 1, 2, and 3 of the argument froma right to life. Let’s turn now to considering a challenge toclaim 3, which holds that fetuses have a right to life. The objectorholds that having thepotential to become a being with aright to life (or with full moral status) is not sufficient tocurrently have a right to life (or to currently have full moralstatus).

(Note that this objector will also deny either claim 1 or claim 2.They will deny claim 1 if it is read as the claim that fetuses havefull moral status, or they will deny claim 2 if it is read as theclaim that all human beings have a right to life. See section1.1.)

We’ll consider two different challenges to the idea thatpotentiality is sufficient for a right to life.

1.4.1 The kitten serum case objection

Suppose that there was a serum we could inject into kittens that wouldmake them into cognitively sophisticated cats; these cats would be asintelligent as human adults, and they would have the emotionalcomplexity that human adults have. One of these cats would surely havefull moral status; it would surely have a right to life. (So claimsTooley 1972, which introduced this famous case and offered thefollowing argument.) While we would have strict moral dutiesconcerning these cats, just as we have strict moral duties regardingother persons, we would not have any duty to turn kittens into thesesophisticated cats: we would not be obligated to inject any kittens.Furthermore, if a kitten were injected, but the serum had not yet hadany effect, it would be morally permissible to inject a neutralizingagent that would prevent the serum from working; this would be just aspermissible as failing to inject. A kitten who had been injected withthe serum plus a neutralizing agent would be just like any ordinarykitten. Kittens have no right to life: there is no moral requirementto refrain from painlessly killing them (so the argument goes). Butnow consider a kitten that has just been injected with the serum. Ithas the potential to have a right to life. But it lacks a right tolife: it is morally permissible to inject the neutralizing agent andthen to painlessly kill it; this would not be morally permissible ifit had a right to life. So the kitten that has just been injected withthe serum is a counterexample to the claim that a being with thepotential to have a right to life must already have a right to life.(This is the argument of Tooley 1972.)

For those who believe we may painlessly kill kittens, this argumentposes a powerful challenge to the idea that fetuses have a right tolife. But the rhetorical effectiveness of this argument may be greatlydiminished by the fact that nowadays, many people think that animalsdo have a right to life, or at least that there are strong moralreasons against killing animals even painlessly.

Perhaps a variant of the argument can nevertheless gain some traction,even with those who believe that kittens do have a right to life.Consider the view that all conscious animals have a right to life, butthat some animals have only a low level of moral status, while otheranimals have a high level of moral status. On such a view, it isnatural to think that kittens have a low level of moral status,compared to the full moral status that adult humans have. If weconsider the kitten serum case, it does seem right that we are notmorally obligated to inject any kittens with the serum, and also thatit would be morally permissible to inject a neutralizing agent afterinjecting the serum. But this does seem to show something aboutpotentiality – it seems to show that having thepotential to have a certain level of moral status does notalready give a being that level of moral status. Consider a kittenthat has just been injected with the serum. It has the potential tobecome a being with full moral status. If it already had full moralstatus, surely it would be wrong to inject the neutralizing agent,thus depriving it of the rich experiences that greater cognitive andemotional sophistication would provide. But it is permissible toinject the neutralizing agent; thus it does not already have fullmoral status.

Thus, even without the assumption that kittens lack a right to life,the kitten serum case can provide something important: an argumentthat the potentiality to have a certain level of moral status is notsufficient for already having that level of moral status. (Thisargument may provide a good response to other arguments againstabortion, even if it does not engage the argument from a right tolife.)

1.4.2. The actual future principle

Another objection denies the significance of the fetus’spotential future by contrasting it with the significance of thefetus’s actual future. Arguments for the claim that potentialityis sufficient for moral status may include claims such as “thefetus is the beginning stage of a person.” But this is not truefor all fetuses. Some fetuses are the beginning stages of persons; thefetus that became you was the beginning stage of a person. But manyfetuses are not; for a fetus that dies early in pregnancy, there is noperson such that they were the beginning stage of that person. On oneview, it is not potential future personhood but actual futurepersonhood that makes for moral status: according to the Actual FuturePrinciple, pre-conscious fetuses that will become persons already havemoral status, while pre-conscious fetuses that will die aspre-conscious fetuses lack moral status. (See Harman 1999, whichintroduces the Actual Future Principle and argues that the ActualFuture Principle makes sense of various commonly-held but apparentlyconflicting claims, such as the following two claims: that earlyabortion requires no moral justification, while nevertheless it isappropriate to love (and wrong to harm) those early fetuses that arebeing carried to term.)

1.5 The self-consciousness objection

Another objection to the argument also targets claim 3, that fetuseshave a right to life. This objection holds that for a being to have aright to something, the being must desire that thing. But to desire tocontinue to live, one must have a conception of oneself as a beingthat persists through time. Fetuses lack any such conception.Therefore, they lack a right to life. (See Tooley 1972, which alsoargues that human infants lack a conception of themselves and thusargues that infanticide is morally permissible.)

A distinct objection arises from the weaker claim that to have moralstatus or a right to life, a being must be conscious (if notnecessarily self-conscious), because to have any interests at all abeing must be conscious. Since early abortions kill fetuses that arenot yet conscious, this view defends abortion in these cases. (SeeSteinbock 1992.)

1.6 The miscarriage objection

Here is yet another objection to claim 3. If fetuses are really fullmoral persons with a right to life, then whenever a miscarriageoccurs, it is a tragedy just like the death of any person. Butmiscarriage is very common; at least ten percent of pregnancies end inmiscarriage. This would make miscarriage the greatest moral tragedy,and the greatest public health crisis, that we face. (See Berg 2017.)But this simply isn’t true, so claim 3 must be false.

2. The argument from loss

Consider the following argument:

1.: Abortion deprives the fetus of a valuable future.
2.: Killing an adult human is wrong (unless justified) because itdeprives them of a valuable future.
3.: If what makes killing an adult human wrong (unless justified) ispresent in another activity, then that activity is also wrong (unlessjustified).

Therefore, abortion is wrong (unless justified).

To understand this argument, let’s start by considering theclaim that killing an adult humanis wrong unless justified.What does this say? The claim says that it is normally wrong to killan adult human, while acknowledging the reality that there are casesin which it is permissible to kill an adult human; in these cases,there is somejustification for the killing. (See section 1.3for discussion of the related fact that even though persons have aright to life, it is sometimes morally permissible to kill them.)(Sometimes philosophers talk of something’s beingwrongunless justified by saying it is “pro tantowrong”.)

The central innovation of this argument against the moralpermissibility of abortion is that it proceeds without claiming thatthe fetus is a person, that the fetus has moral status, or that thefetus has a right to life. It seeks to show that abortion is wrong(unless justified) without a detour into those thorny issues. (Theargument was introduced by Marquis 1989. Relatedly, Quinn 1984 uses aclose examination of identity over time to argue that the fetussuffers a significant loss in abortion.)

The argument from loss is intuitively compelling. It is hard toexplain our reasons against killing adults without appealing to whatadults lose in death. And when a fetus is killed in an abortion, itloses a tremendous amount – it loses out on (at least a goodchance of) life as a person. Not only does the fetus lose the samething an adult loses, but the fetus loses more of that thing.

2.1 The moral status objection

However, the argument’s apparent escape from the thorny issue ofpersonhood and moral status may be an illusion. One might object topremise 2 of the argument as follows. When we ask what makes it wrongto kill a person, the fact that the person is deprived of a valuablefuture is only a partial answer. This explains why the person’sdeath is bad for them. But what gives us a compelling moral reason?That the person has moral statusand that death is bad forthem are the two facts that together provide the compelling moralreason, the objection asserts.

The objector maintains that premise 2 is false, and that it would haveto be revised as follows to be true:

2*.: Killing an adult human is wrong (unless justified) because itdeprives them of a valuable future and they have moral status.

The argument thus needs an additional premise:

4.: A fetus has moral status.

But claim 4 is controversial, and is exactly the controversial claimon which the argument hoped to avoid relying.

2.2 The future-like-ours objection

Another objection takes aim at premise 1 of the argument from loss.This objection denies that abortion deprives the fetus of a valuablefuture. Now, it might seem obvious that abortion does deprive thefetus of a valuable future. After all, if it were not for theabortion, the fetus would very likely go on to have a normal life as aperson, and a person’s life is well worth having, even given thevarious hardships that people endure. The objector agrees to all ofthat. What the objector denies is that the fetus nowhas thatfuture, and that the fetus isdeprived of that future. Theobjector claims that ordinary persons have a future that they lose indeath because ordinary persons bear strong psychological andneurophysiological connections to their immediate futures, andoverlapping chains of such connections to their more distant futures.Ordinary persons in the immediate future will remember the present,and will have the same desires and intentions as in the present.Furthermore, ordinary persons have some control (but of course nottotal control) over how their futures develop. The objector claimsthat it is these connections with the future that mean that a personnow has a future that they can lose. By contrast, fetuses early inpregnancy do not have experiences that can be remembered, theycertainly do not have desires or plans, and they have no capacity tocontrol what happens to them. Thus, the objector claims, they do notnow possess futures that they can lose. (See McInerney 1990.)

Similarly, one might object to premise 1 by saying that while thefetus does lose out on a future life, that loss is of littlesignificance to the fetus currently. The “time-relativeinterests view” (McMahan 2002) holds that how much somethinggood or bad in my future matters to menow depends on thelevel of psychological connection between me now and me when I wouldhave that future experience. A good thing that would happen to me farin the future, when I am a very different person, is less in my owninterests now, than something else which is less valuable but wouldhappen sooner, to a version of me that is more like my current self.On this view, the pre-conscious fetus has no interest in any of itsvaluable future, since it has no psychological connection at all tothat future. Even a fetus with some consciousness still has virtuallyno psychological connection to its future, in that its future selfwill not remember its current life; so it also has no interest ingetting to have that future life (DeGrazia 2007).

2.3 How this relates to the violinist case argument

The argument from loss is often taught to students alongside theargument from the violinist case (see section 1.2). Since the firstargument is against abortion, and the second argument defendsabortion, the two arguments might appear to disagree. It is importantto see that they do not. The argument from loss concludes with theclaim that abortion is wrong unless justified. But this is the verysame assumption that the violinist argumentgrants toopponents of abortion. The argument from loss seeks to make the casethat there’s a strong reason against abortion. The violinistcase argument grants that there is a strong reason against abortion,and argues that nevertheless abortion can be defended. (Marquis 1989includes a brief paragraph stating the assumption that if there is astrong reason against abortion, then, all things considered, abortionis wrong; no argument for this is given, and Thomson 1971 is not citedor discussed.)

3. The argument from the Golden Rule

Consider the following argument:

1.: We should treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves.(The Golden Rule.)
2.: We are glad that we were not aborted.

Therefore, we should not abort others.

There is some intuitive plausibility to this argument. (The argumentis offered by Hare 1975.) The claim that we should treat others as wewould want to be treated ourselves does seem right. Teaching childrenthe Golden Rule is a useful way of teaching them to treat otherchildren nicely.

Like the argument from loss, this argument aspires to settle thatabortion is morally wrong without addressing the thorny question ofwhether a fetus is a person, or has moral status. If the Golden Ruleis all we need, then we can side step these thorny issues.

But the apparent side step may not work. An objector may say thatclaim 1 is implausible when taken with sufficiently wide scope. Is“others” meant to range over all things? All livingbeings? It is too controversial in that form. Surely the plausibleversion of claim 1 is this:

1*.: If a being has full moral status, then we should treat it as wewould want to be treated.

This claim captures that we should treat persons as we would want tobe treated. It does not say anything about how we should treatanimals, if they have some moral status but not full moral status.(And that’s good: the Golden Rule is not very plausible whenapplied to animals. We should not treat animals the way we treatpeople. Or alternatively, “the way we would want to betreated” would mean “if we were animals”; but thenwe wouldn’t really know what to say about that: itwouldn’t provide guidance.)

But if the argument includes claim 1* rather than claim 1, then theargument needs the following claim:

3.: Fetuses have full moral status.

Thus, the argument can be rejected simply by rejecting the claim thatfetuses have full moral status. (See Harman 2009, footnote 12.)

4. The argument from intrinsic value

Consider the following argument:

1.: It is wrong to destroy something with intrinsic value, absentjustification.
2.: Human life has intrinsic value.

Therefore, abortion is wrong, absent justification.

Like the argument from loss (section 2), this argument does notestablish that it is morally wrong to have an abortion, all thingsconsidered. Its conclusion is that abortion is wrong unless it can bejustified. (Thus, as discussed in section 2.3, nothing in thisargument disagrees with the defense of abortion from the violinistcase (section 1.2).)

It has been argued that popular opposition to abortion in the UnitedStates is best seen as expressing a view along the lines of theargument from intrinsic value (see Dworkin 1993). After all, opponentsof abortion in the United States often think that abortion in the caseof rape is morally permissible. This view would be hard to understandif they believed that abortion was akin to the murder of an innocentperson. (It’s not okay to murder an innocent person, even ifsomehow murdering that innocent is the only way to psychologicallymove on after having been raped.) So, we can make more sense of theiropposition to abortion if we see them as believing that abortioninvolves the destruction of something with intrinsic value. This isthe kind of moral consideration that might be overruled byconsiderations of the trauma that a rape victim is likely toexperience if she is forced to continue a pregnancy to term.

It has been argued (by Dworkin 1993) that those who are“pro-choice” in the United States (that is, those whobelieve that abortion should be legally permissible) arealsocommitted to the view that human life has intrinsic value. After all,people who are pro-choice are typically reluctant to call themselves“pro-abortion”; rather, they see abortion as a regrettableoccurrence that should nevertheless be available to women. It would befar better if unwanted pregnancy were entirely avoided througheffective birth control, they think. They do think that something badhappens in an abortion; they simply think that it is not wrong tocause this bad outcome. After all, they acknowledge that it makessense to regret an abortion, and that abortion is not as trivial as anappendectomy. (Similarly, Hursthouse 1991 argues that abortion“is always a matter of some seriousness” (page 238).)

Thus, on the view we’re considering, those in the United Stateswho oppose abortion and those who defend abortion rights actually havevery similar views. They are not diametrically opposed, one sidebelieving that abortion is trivial and the other believing thatabortion is murder. Rather, both sides agree that human life hasintrinsic value; they simply disagree on the significance of thisfact: how bad is the fetus’s death, and what does it take tojustify causing that death? This is a disagreement of degree, not ofkind, the view holds. (For another argument that both sides of theabortion debate accept the same basic principles, see Warnke1999.)

Against the claim that those opposed to abortion are opposed on thegrounds that fetal life has intrinsic value, it has been pointed outthat many U.S. citizens are Catholic, and the Catholic church doestreat abortion as murder (Thomson 1995).

And against the claim that those who are “pro-choice” alsobelieve that fetal life has intrinsic value, it has been argued thatwe can make sense of regret for abortion, and of the fact thatabortion is not trivial, by appeal to the significance of the flipsideof abortion: continuing a pregnancy is of great moral consequence(Harman 1999).

(Dworkin 1993 draws a political and legal conclusion from his claimthat both sides of the abortion debate believe that fetal life hasintrinsic value and simply disagree about what it takes to justifydestroying that value. He adds the further claim that beliefs aboutthe value of fetal life are religious in nature. His conclusion isthat we cannot outlaw abortion, because that would impose a religiousview on some people who don’t hold it. Dworkin neverthelessholds that, because abortion is a serious matter, waiting periods maybe legally imposed. Stroud 1996 responds that we can’t ingeneral impose waiting periods on people while they work out wherethey stand on religious questions; for example, it would not be okayto impose a waiting period before joining a church.)

5. The argument from moral risk

Consider the following argument:

1.: If you have considered arguments that abortion is wrong andrejected them, you may have made a mistake in your reasoning: there issome chance that abortion is seriously wrong despite your rejection ofthese arguments.
2.: If there is some chance that abortion is seriously wrong, then inhaving an abortion you would be taking a moral risk.
3.: There is a strong moral reason against taking a moral risk ofdoing something seriously wrong.

Therefore, there is a strong moral reason against having anabortion.

This argument holds that, from the perspective of anyone decidingwhether to have an abortion, even if she has rejected argumentsagainst the permissibility of abortion, there is nevertheless a strongmoral reason against abortion given by the moral risk that she wouldbe taking. There’s some chance that she’s mistaken aboutwhether abortion is morally permissible; perhaps, contrary to her ownthinking, abortion is morally wrong. (The argument is offered inMoller 2011. A similar argument against abortion is made byLockhart 2000. Baker 2016 uses considerations of moral risk to arguethat abortion should be illegal.)

One thing to emphasize about this argument is that it holds that thereis a strong moral reason against abortion even if in fact all theanti-abortion arguments are bad arguments. The mere existence of thesearguments, and the fallibility of our own moral reasoning, generates astrong moral reason against abortion even if, in itself, abortion isreally morally unproblematic.

How might one respond to this argument? One might grant the conclusionand hold that nevertheless, actual abortions are permissible becausethe burdens on women of not aborting are significant. (Moller 2011allows that this may be the case.) One might deny that someone whosemoral reasoning is sound really is in a position in which she shouldacknowledge that it might be true that she is mistaken about theethics of abortion. Or, one might challenge the idea that this kind ofepistemic moral risk – stemming from the possibility thatone’s moral thinking is mistaken – generates any moralreasons at all: one might hold that while non-moral risks generatemoral reasons, purely moral risks do not (Weatherson 2019 and Harman2015).

6. The expressive argument against selective abortion

Some arguments conclude that some abortions are wrong (including someearly abortions), without also concluding that all abortions arewrong. Some abortions are performed because prenatal testing reveals agenetic abnormality in the fetus that would cause the fetus to bedisabled. Consider the following argument:

1.: Abortion of an otherwise wanted pregnancy because the fetus willhave a disability expresses a discriminatory attitude: that disabledpeople should not have been born, don’t have a right to exist,or are less valuable than non-disabled people.
2.: Expressing a discriminatory attitude like that is morallywrong.

Therefore, Abortion of an otherwise wanted pregnancy because the fetuswill have a disability is morally wrong.

This argument is compatible with the claim that, in general, abortionis morally permissible. According to this argument, it’s thereason for these abortions that makes them wrong, not the mere factthat they are abortions. (See Asch 1989, Wendell 1996, and Parens andAsch 2000.)

One way of arguing for premise 1 would be to point out thatprospective parents often have mistaken, distorted impressions of whatlife with a disability involves, and doctors and genetic counselorstoo often emphasize the negatives without sharing positive stories oflives of disabled persons (Parens and Asch 2000, Kaposy 2018). Manydisabled persons argue that a life with a disability is not a worselife than a life without a disability, when all is considered (Barnes2016).

6.1 The burdens objection

One objection to this argument disputes premise 1 by saying that apregnant woman may worry not that her disabled child would have toohard a life, but that raising the child would be too difficult for herand her family, given their limited resources. For example, she mightalready be raising a disabled child. (See Kittay 2019.)

6.2 The objection from preventing disability

Another objection to this argument disputes premise 1 by pointing outthat women can morally permissibly prevent their fetuses from becomingdisabled by taking folic acid and avoiding medicines that would causeabnormalities in their fetuses. Thus, it appears that it is morallylegitimate for parents to aim to have non-disabled children. (SeeParens and Asch 2000.)

6.3 The objection from lack of harm

A third objection to the argument disputes premise 2 by saying thatexpressing a discriminatory attitude is morally wrong only if theexpression leads to harm for the relevant people. The objector thengoes on to argue that it is very hard to show, and it is implausible,that there are any harms that disabled people suffer that they wouldnot suffer if these expressions did not occur. After all, there isunfortunately plenty of prejudice against disabled people, independentof people’s procreative decisions and what they express. (SeeNelson 2007.)

6.4 The objection from equivocation about value

A fourth objection to the argument points out that there is adifference between holding that a disability would be bad for theperson who is disabled, on the one hand, and holding that disabledpersons are less valuable or less worthy of existing, on the otherhand. The objector maintains that abortion of a disabled fetusexpresses only the first of these ideas, not the second.

7. Why the ethics of abortion matters

If abortion is murder, then it’s quite straightforward why theethics of abortion matters: there is murder going on, and we shouldrecognize that. But suppose that abortion is not murder; indeed,suppose that abortion is morally permissible. Why is that factimportant?

The violinist case argument (Thomson 1971) looms large inphilosophical teaching and discussion of abortion. The argument aimsto establish thateven if fetuses have a right to life, thennevertheless abortion is permissible. But there are two ways in whichthe prominence of this argument is misleading regarding what is atstake when it comes to the ethics of abortion. First, the argumentproceeds by relying heavily on the burdens on a woman ofpregnancy: it is precisely because pregnancy is onerous (andpregnancy and childbirth are dangerous) that we may permissiblydecline to undergo these burdens for another, even if that other has aright to life. But the importance to women of abortion access is notfundamentally about the burdens of pregnancy; it is also about theburdens and life-altering nature ofmotherhood. Theliberation of women has depended crucially and fundamentally onwomen’s gaining the ability to decide whether, and when, tobecome parents to new children. The autonomy of women is at stake.(The burdens of pregnancy might be enough to entitle women and anyonewho can become pregnant to a right to abortion, but they alone do nottell the fundamental story of why that right is needed.)

Second, and relatedly, the argument proceeds bygranting thatfetuses have a right to life. While it is certainly important to show(if it can be done) that abortion is permissible even on thisassumption, it is also important for us to remember—in thinkingabout the importance of the ethics of abortion—that the claimthat fetuses have a right to life is a controversial claim that no oneis entitled to take as common ground. And without that claim, there isno need to appeal tothe burdens of pregnancy to justifyabortion. Indeed, there is no need for justification at all.

One might object that pregnancy cannot force anyone into motherhood aslong as one has the option of making an adoption plan for one’schild. A pregnant woman can avoid motherhood by continuing herpregnancy and making an adoption plan—there is no need foraccess to abortion to avoid motherhood. But this objection ignores thereality that many women bond with and come to love their fetuses whilethey carry them to term, and/or many women simply prefer not to makean adoption plan for their own child, even while they would stronglyprefer to end a pregnancy and not to become a mother to a new child atthis time. Thus, the reality is that restrictions of abortion accessconsign many women to motherhood at times they would prefer not tobecome mothers—even if the option to make an adoption plan isavailable. And of course, it is not just women who are affected inthis way, butanyone who can become pregnant; this includeswomen, some nonbinary persons, and transgender men. For many pregnantpeople, lack of access to abortion forces them to turn a fetus thatthey think does not matter at all into a child they deeply love. (SeeHarman 2021.)

Bibliography

Asch, Adrienne, 1989, “Reproductive Technology andDisability”, in Sherrill Cohen and Nadine Taub (eds.),Reproductive Laws for the 1990s, Clifton, NJ: Humana Press,pp. 69–124.
Baker, Deane-Peter, 2016,Citizen Killings: Liberalism, StatePolicy and Moral Risk, London: Bloomsbury.
Barnes, Elizabeth, 2016,The Minority Body: A Theory ofDisability, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berg, Amy, 2017, “Abortion and Miscarriage”,Philosophical Studies, 174(5): 1217–1226.
Boonin, David, 2003,A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Nancy, 1984, “Abortion and Self-defense”,Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13(3): 175–207.
DeGrazia, David, 2007, “The Harm of Death, Time-RelativeInterests, and Abortion”,Philosophical Forum, 38(1):57–80.
Dworkin, Ronald, 1993,Life’s Dominion: An Argumentabout Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom, London:HarperCollins.
English, Jane, 1975, “Abortion and the Concept of aPerson”,Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5(2):233–243.
Frowe, Helen and Jonathan Parry, 2024, “Self-defense”,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024Edition), Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL =https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/self-defense/
Hare, R. M., 1975, “Abortion and the Golden Rule”,Philosophy and Public Affairs, 4(3): 201–222.
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Other Internet Resources

“Is Abortion Immoral?” a video episode of the podcastBrain in a Vat, featuring Nathan Nobis, January 24, 2021.
“Judith Jarvis Thomson,” a podcast episode ofPhilosophy Talk, March 16, 2025.
“Love and Abortion,” videos of The Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics at Oxford University,given by Elizabeth Harman, April 25–May 9, 2024.

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The Ethics of Abortion

1. The argument from a right to life

1.1 The equivocation objection

1.2 The violinist case objection

1.2.1 Response from consensual sex

1.2.2 Does the violinist case provide its own positive argument?

1.3 What is a right to life?

Can self-defense justify abortion?

1.4 Potentiality

1.4.1 The kitten serum case objection

1.4.2. The actual future principle

1.5 The self-consciousness objection

1.6 The miscarriage objection

2. The argument from loss

2.1 The moral status objection

2.2 The future-like-ours objection

2.3 How this relates to the violinist case argument

3. The argument from the Golden Rule

4. The argument from intrinsic value

5. The argument from moral risk

6. The expressive argument against selective abortion

6.1 The burdens objection

6.2 The objection from preventing disability

6.3 The objection from lack of harm

6.4 The objection from equivocation about value

7. Why the ethics of abortion matters

Bibliography

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