The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice by Christopher Kaczor (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 497 pace and many allusions, Brett has made an important contribution to the conversation. His legal analysis and jurisprudential narrative seem especially insightful and Catholics committed to the public square and the common good would be well served in considering his work. CHRISTOPHER THOMPSON The Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity Saint Paul, Minnesota The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice. By CHRISTOPHER KACZOR. New York: Routledge, 2010. Pp. 246. $30.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-415-88469-3. Given the plethora of scholarly articles and books concerning the moral permissibility of abortion, one may wonder whether there is a place for another volume on the topic. Christopher Kaczor’s powerfully argued text, though, definitely merits any reader’s careful attention. Public and academic debate over the morality of abortion has not waned over the past thirty-plus years, with new arguments being marshaled in postures of attack, defense, and counterattack representing each side. One of the most recent texts arguing in favor of abortion’s moral permissibility is David Boonin’s A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Kaczor presents an effective counterpoint to Boonin. Anyone reading these two texts side-by-side will come to understand the complexity of the ethical issues involved and appreciate the sophisticated metaphysical and moral argumentation required to resolve what sometimes appears to be a perpetually intractable debate. The first half of Kaczor’s volume focuses upon the ontological question of when a human person comes into existence. No conclusion arrived at concerning this ontological question can by itself determine the moral permissibility of abortion. One may accept that a person begins to exist at conception and yet conclude that abortion is permissible under many, if not all, circumstances. Alternatively, one may hold that a person does not begin to exist until some point after conception but yet maintain that abortion is morally impermissible—or that its general permissibility is restricted in various ways—due to an embryo or fetus’s potential to develop into a person, or simply due to its being a member of the species Homo sapiens. After establishing his conclusion that a person begins to exist at conception, Kaczor proceeds in the second half to argue in favor of an embryo or fetus’s inviolable right to life, which entails the general moral impermissibility of abortion, and addresses several “hard cases.” Kaczor concludes with a novel argument—involving the BOOK REVIEWS 498 utilization of artificial wombs—that may allow society to side-step the issue to some extent, although certain ethical concerns will undoubtedly persist. Kaczor carefully analyzes four possible views of when a person’s life begins: after birth, at birth, during pregnancy, and at conception. The first view, argued by Michael Tooley, underwrites the moral permissibility of infanticide as well as abortion. Tooley’s central thesis is that one can have a right to life only if one has the capacity to desire one’s own continued existence, which requires having the capacity for self-consciousness (by “capacity” Tooley means an immediately exercisable ability that does not require any further development in order to be actualizable). Kaczor invokes Aristotle’s concept of “active potentiality” to show how a being without a capacity, in Tooley’s sense, for self-consciousness may yet have the intrinsic potentiality to develop such a capacity, which in turns identifies the being as one whose essential nature includes such a capacity, even if circumstances preclude his ever being able to actualize it. In other words, since an embryo or fetus, if allowed to develop normally, will come to possess selfconsciousness , it is of the same ontological kind as the actually self-conscious being into which it may develop, even if abortion or some other impediment prevents it from ever being actually self-conscious. One question that arises in this context is how far Aristotle’s concept of active potentiality extends. There is a clear line between an embryo or fetus that is able on its own, requiring only a supportive environment—a uterus—to develop into an actually self-conscious being, and a sperm or ovum, each of which requires the other...