Ireland will have a referendum on whether abortion should be permitted on 25th May. A referendum has to be held in order to alter the constitution. In 1983 voters approved of the Eighth Amendment – which created a constitutional recognition that gives equal status to the unborn and the mother – but requests to have it repealed have been steadily increasing in the past number years. In January, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said

If the amendment is repealed, the government may introduce legislation permitting unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. At present, terminations are only permissible when the life of the mother is at risk, and under law anyone who seeks an abortion could potentially face 14 years in prison.

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There’s probably no ethical issue more contentious than abortion in Ireland today. It has received extensive coverage in the media long before the government announced the referendum. On the whole, the debate has been sharply contested and it hasn’t allowed much space for reasoned debate. Here, I would like to briefly – and dispassionately – discuss the ethics of abortion.

afterwards when it’s no longer possible for the embryo to divide into twins – and that a new human individual has come to exist, in the sense that it’s a member of the species

Those who are anti-abortion say the key question is when human life begins. They believe the answer must be at conception, when sperm and egg unite. I’m happy to accept that life begins at conception – or at least 14 days

However the claim is trivial. It’s not sufficient to say that because an embryo is a living human being, belonging to the species, it’s wrong to kill it. The effort by opponents of abortion to identify the beginning of human life on scientific grounds naively misunderstands the role science plays in moral reasoning. The fallacy involves the move from the empirical claim that unborn foetuses are living human beings to the ethical claim that they have the same moral status as every other human individual. In other words, it commits the is-ought fallacy . Anti-abortionists still need to explain why it’s wrong to end human life.

Another tactic is to highlight the resemblance of the foetus to infants and adults. Some pro-life advocates argue that foetuses, earlier than 12 weeks after conception, look similar to an older child: they can respond to stress, their hearts are beating and their feet, legs, arms and hands all look very familiar. But why are such resemblances morally relevant? Philosophers Laura Purdy and Michael Tooley havethat if pig foetuses resembled adult humans, nobody would say it’d be wrong to kill them. Who thinks a baby doll has the same moral status as an infant child? The foetus may resemble older humans in many ways, but it doesn’t show it has a right to life. For the argument to work it would have to show that there was something more present (e.g. psychological capacities) than a select number of physical resemblances. It’s fair to say that any appeal to resemblance, in the abortion debate, is an attempt to persuade others by appealing to their emotions rather than putting forward well thought out arguments.

It’s also the case that we cannot simply defend abortion by an appeal to a woman’s right to choose. If we assume the unborn foetus and the woman have the same right to life, it’s not clear that she has the absolute right to control her own body; and temporarily restricting her autonomy, in order to protect the right of the foetus, would seem to be a defensible position, or at least one that is open to debate.

Some of the pro-abortion rhetoric seems to suggest that once you maintain that a woman has the right to choose, you don’t even need to address the question of what is the moral status of the unborn foetus. I think that’s a mistake – and it’s precisely the point that opponents of abortion contest. No one would say laws around smacking children are a matter of parental choice. Those who defend a woman’s right to control her own body cannot avoid the issue of the moral status of the foetus for it must be first established that the foetus falls inside the domain of personal choice.

Another argument commonly presented says that abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor. It begs the question, though, by assuming that abortion is essentially an individual healthcare matter. In other words, it assumes precisely what is being debated. Others argue that it’s possible for someone to be morally opposed to abortion themselves but still be pro-choice. However, that would only seem to make sense if we already believed that abortion is morally defensible, or at least only slightly wrong. And, moreover, it’s not very likely to be effective when it comes to convincing those who equate abortion with murder.





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A better approach, in my view, is to argue that it’s only wrong to kill conscious beings (or, arguably, only those who are self-conscious). Any living organism, including a human organism, cannot satisfy this requirement unless it has, at least, the capacity for consciousness. Human foetuses probably don’t develop this capacity until after

of gestation – still several weeks before the 12-week limit. Therefore, according to this view, it would not be wrong to abort a human foetus anytime during the first trimester. The interest of the pregnant woman, during the first 12 week period (and perhaps beyond that point), clearly outweigh any interest the unborn foetus has. In view of the fact that an early foetus is not yet sentient, it’s unreasonable to want to defend it against the interest of a woman who is unwillingly pregnant.