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Chapter five Abortion Listening to the Middle Edward Langerak Says one critic of the philosophical debate on abortion: “Philosophers are not listened to because they do not listen.”1 Though I believe the charge is too strong, my own review of the literature makes it uncomfortably understandable. If there is any public consensus on abortion, as reflected in legal systems as well as in public opinion surveys, it is the middle-of-the-road view that some abortions are not permissible but that others are, and that some of the permissible abortions are more difficult to justify than others. But many of the most widely cited philosophical writings on abortion argue that the only coherent positions tend toward the extremes: all or most abortions are put into the same moral boat with either murder or, more frequently , elective surgery. In fact, proponents of the extremes tend to respect one another as at least being self-consistent, while joining in swift rebuttal of those who want it both ways and ignominiously try to be moderates on either murder or mandatory motherhood. This reaction against the middle derives from some basic beliefs of those on the extremes. On the liberal side are those who believe that fetuses, and perhaps even very young infants, lack some necessary condition (say, self-consciousness) of personhood .2 This view is often combined with the further assertion that the social consequences of society’s conferring on the fetus a claim to life are such that the conferral should not be made until birth or shortly thereafter. On the conservative side there are those who believe that from conception (or very shortly thereafter) the fetus has as strong (or almost as strong) a claim to life as does any person. This claim resides either in some property thought sufficient for personhood (say, genetic endowment) that the fetus has in itself, or in the immediate conferral of personhood on the fetus by God or society. Of course, as Schopenhauer said, arguments are not like taxicabs that you can dismiss when they become inconvenient; and the two extremes are quick to point out the problematic implications of each other’s positions. The liberals are accused Abortion 85 of courting infanticide and the conservatives of trivializing the moral category of murder. Such implications would be more damaging to the extremes were it not that most moderate positions have an equally problematic flaw—that of arbitrary line-drawing. My reading of the abortion literature suggests that there are two widely shared beliefs that moderate positions seek to incorporate in their approaches to the abortion issue. The first belief is that something about the fetus itself, not merely the social consequences of abortion, makes abortions (or at least many abortions ) morally problematic. The second belief is that late abortions are significantly more morally problematic than early abortions. Not only are these beliefs widely shared by moderates, but I find that liberals and conservatives, whose positions implicitly reject one or both of these beliefs, often feel uncomfortable in rejecting them. In accounting for these two beliefs, most middle positions maintain variations of what I call the “stage” approach and what its critics call the “magic moment” approach. The assertion is that at some point in the development of the fetus, say at the point of acquiring some vital sign, of sentience, of quickening, or of viability, the fetus suddenly moves from having no claim to life to having as strong (or almost as strong) a claim as an adult human. While the “stage” approach is consistent with the two beliefs underlying the moderate position, its difficulty has always been to explain the tremendous moral weight put on some specific point in what really amounts to a continuum in development. Critics on both extremes argue that, no matter what stage is picked as the “magic moment,” the whole approach is prima facie arbitrary. The implications of the liberal and conservative positions, including their denial of one or both of the moderate beliefs, and the prima facie arbitrariness of the stage positions, motivate consideration of an alternative that both is coherent and listens to the middle by accounting for the two beliefs. Without examining all the alternatives, I will argue that the potentiality principle is plausible and accounts for the first belief—that something about the fetus itself makes abortion morally problematic—but that, by itself, it cannot account for the second belief—that late abortions are significantly more problematic than early abortions. I will then...

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