ABORTION: The ethical problem and how it can be corrected ethically

Introduction

The word abortion brings many different views and ideas to mind that range from a woman's right to her body to outright murder. Though at the present, a lot of governments in world permit abortions to an assured degree, millions of populace has debated for years whether abortions are morally good enough or not. It is in the view of this author that abortion, though a contentious topic is usually wrong and is not supposed to be allowed in the enormous majority of cases.

Abortion: The ethical problem and how it can be corrected ethically

In the Evangelism Vitae, Pope John Paul II believes abortion is a very serious problem and should not be allowed. He states that people should not use euphemisms for abortion, but to call it by its real name: (Fletcher, 01) the killing of a person. Because Pope John Paul II views life as beginning at conception, he strongly opposes abortion at any stage. The basis for his argument is that an embryo is an innocent being that can not defend itself at all and is completely dependent on the mother for everything. This point is correct because an embryo has not done anything to anyone; the embryo was created by the actions of the mother and father, and it is for this reason it can be said the embryo is an innocent being. From his religious view point Pope John Paul views the murder of anyone innocent to be morally wrong because everyone has a right to life.

Don Marquis provides and interesting view on the abortion issue that many pro-life people support. He establishes his criteria by first describing why the majority of people view killings as wrong. According to Marquis, killing someone is wrong if the person has a "future like ours." This means that if the being will develop life experiences and have potential for a future that will give rise to human values and values then it is wrong to kill that person. A great aspect of this theory is that it allows for euthanasia for those individuals that are in a persistent vegetative state or terminally ill; in these cases the individual would not have a future like ours and it would not be morally wrong to kill them. I believe this way of looking at the abortion argument is great because it avoids the controversial issue of the status of the embryo during its developmental stages. All embryos will develop into humans and therefore have futures like our own which would make it wrong to kill them.

One objection raised against the future like ours theory is on the issue of contraception and preventing sperm and eggs from uniting to form an embryo. Marquis maintains that his idea does not characterize contraceptives to be unmoral because he states that "there is no non-arbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of the contraception." He also adds that millions of sperm are released and ...