Human Rights and an Analogy

Often, Hursthouse brings up the matter of the woman’s rights with respect to aborting the child she bears; however, he ignores the rights of the developing child. This is a huge flaw, since abortion is not just about the biological parents and what say they have in the matter. It is greatly important to recognize that the fetus, a developing human being, merits the rights of any human. This includes the right to life. If Hursthouse is to say that abortion is still appropriate in certain circumstances, then he is proponing the infringement of the developing child’s rights and also supporting his/her murder. He may instead argue that the fetus does not obtain his rights until a certain stage of the pregnancy, in which case abortion prior to that stage would not be infringing on any rights, as they would not yet have been dealt. However, he could not say that either, since he already argued that “the status of the fetus… is, according to virtue theory, simply not relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion” (236). On the matter of virtue theory, I believe that honoring the right to life that a fetus has, beginning at conception, is in line with the Aristotelian action of giving to others their due, the virtue of which is justice. Thus, virtue theory would not support abortion.

Another matter I would like to mention is that of a fallacy of false analogy. Hursthouse makes a comparison between deliberate abortion and natural abortion, or miscarriage. He argues for consistency – that if someone thinks abortion is the act of killing something of no importance or is the exercise of one’s rights, then one should hold the same view towards miscarriage. Thus, one ought to think a miscarriage is no big deal, like a botched haircut (238). For a person who holds the opinion that an abortion is no pressing matter, s/he would not be wrong to also feel pity for the woman who suffers a miscarriage. The difference between a deliberate abortion and a natural abortion is that miscarriages are typically unintentional. Thus, the loss of the developing child should warrant pity, because the mother desired to have the child. Abortions are usually undergone in cases where the child is not desired. Thus, a person who feels no pity over the loss of an unwanted thing can rationally pity someone who has lost a desired thing.