Abortion - Mackenzie

Abortion - Mackenzie

1. Responsibility and Autonomy

   • Causal vs. Moral Responsibility
     • Causal Responsibility: responsibility for the direct causal consequences of one's actions in cases where those consequences can be said to be reasonably foreseeable and where a person's actions were freely chosen
   • Decision Responsibility vs. Parental Responsibility
     • Decision Responsibility
       • Moral responsibility in pregnancy cannot be construed just in terms of responsibility towards the foetus
         • Exercising moral responsibility in no way entails a commitment to maternity
         • The choice of abortion is in many cases the morally responsible decision.
     • Parental Responsibility
       • A responsibility to maintaining the existence of the foetus, commit to providing the care and nurture needed for it to flourish, and commit to bringing into existence a future child
         • The decision to abort is a decision, for whatever reason, that one is not prepared to bring such a child into existence
       • Assuming parental responsibility does not entail legal liability for the fetus' welfare
     • Deciding against parental responsibility does not mean one is relinquishing moral responsibility - sometimes the decision to abort is most morally responsible
   • Men and women are equally responsible for pregnancy in the causal sense, causal responsibility and decision responsibility are in effect completely separable for men, but inseparable for women.
     • Pregnancy is never simply a biological process, it is always an active process of shaping for oneself a bodily and a moral perspective
     • Prior to birth the impact upon their autonomy of any decision is very different from its impact on the autonomy of the woman. This is why in cases of conflict the woman's decision should prevail.
   • Some women's lives are so little under their own control that they cannot be said to be making autonomous decisions
     • Given the difficulty in deciding whether a woman has moral responsibility for the fetus, a division needs to be made between moral assessment and legal sanctions

2. Mackenzie: Conflict-of-rights approaches and rights-based models of bodily autonomy are misrepresentative

   • Conflict-of-rights approach fails to address responsibility in pregnancy and mischaracterises the moral relationship between woman and fetus
   • Oversimplification of the status of the fetus
   • Misconstrues of the notion of bodily autonomy because it is inattentive to the kind of reflective bodily perspective that arises from a phenomenological account of pregnant embodiment.
   • The right to abortion cannot entail a fight to secure the death of the foetus but only a right to foetal evacuation.

3. Thomson: One does not necessarily have automatic moral responsibility to maintain the existence of a being dependent upon oneself -- even if that being does have full moral standing and hence a right to life

   • This strategy fails because the examples chosen are disanalogous to the case of the foetus in one relevant respect, namely with respect to causal responsibility
   • Causal responsibility for the existence of a being does not necessarily mean that one is required to assume moral responsibility for maintaining its existence. For to what extent is a person still morally responsible for the consequences of an action if she has taken reasonable precautions against those consequences occurring?
     • House-owner covering windows with mesh to prevent entry of people-seeds
     • Opening a window, installing bars and robbers

4. Fetal Status and Potentiality

   • Moral status of the fetus is not instrinsic, it is dependent on the relational properties it has with others
   • At what point do we treat a foetus like a person?
   • Warren's Requirements for Personhood
     • 1. Consciousness
     • 2. Reasoning
     • 3. Self-motivated Activity
     • 4. The capacity to communicate
     • 5. Self-awareness
   • Mackenzie: Fetuses are morally significant by virtue of the fact that they are potential persons
     • Potential for personhood remains constant
     • Moral significance changes
       • In terms of its intrinsic properties, an early stage fetus does not have great moral value
       • A highly developed fetus has gradually increasing moral significance
   • Warren: a being has no intrinsic moral significance unless it is a person

5. Pregnant Embodiment and Bodily Autonomy

   • The availability of abortion is necessary for the moral autonomy of women
   • Bodily Autonomy, Subjectivity, and Responsibility
     • Phenomenological account of pregnancy: self/other, inside/outside, a fetus is part of and at the same time separate from the woman
       • This double character of the foetus' bodily and moral relationship to the woman that explains both why questions of responsibility are central to the experience of pregnancy and why the right of determination over the fate of the foetus is essential for a woman's autonomy
     • Pregnancy seems to defy the making of a sharp distinction between a passive, unconscious, biological process and an active, conscious, rational process
     • The experience of pregnant embodiment, that is, the gradual differentiation and development from within her own body of another being which is now a part of herself, thus affects a woman's mode of being-in-the-world both physically and morally and, as a consequence, re-shapes her sense of self.
   • Evacuation and Abortion
     • In order to secure women's autonomy, abortion must be understood as fetal death and not fetal evacuation
     • The fetus is the potential for a child
       • The abortion decision involves a decision that this part of a woman should not become a being in relation to whom such questions of parental responsibility and emotional attachment arise
     • Property-contract models of bodily autonomy are inattentive to the phenomenological experience of pregnancy and ignore questions of moral responsibility they misrepresent the nature of this decision. For, if the demand for abortion is just the demand to control one's own body and use its parts as one sees fit, then abortion cannot involve the fight to choose whether or not to bring a child into existence but only the fight to evacuate a foetus from one's body
       • E.g. Thomson