Does birth matter?

Journal of Medical Ethics, 2021

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creating a dilemma for those who seek to argue that birth matters. I argue that the only way to resolve this dilemma, is to bite the naturalist bullet and accept that the intuitively plausible idea that birth constitutes a morally relevant event is simply mistaken and biologically misinformed.

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy , 2021

The morality of abortion is a longstanding controversy. One may wonder whether it is even possible to make significant progress on an issue over which so much ink has already been spilled and there is such polarizing disagreement (Boyle, 1994, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19:183-200). The papers in this issue show that this progress is possible-there is more to be said about abortion and other crucial beginning-of-life issues. They do so largely by applying contemporary philosophical tools to moral questions involving life's beginning. The first two papers defend the pro-life view from recent objections involving miscarriage and abortion doctors. The third shows how the social model of disability and the concept of transformative experience apply to classic debates like abortion and euthanasia. The final two papers address how rights and harms apply to children and to beings that do not yet exist. All five papers make a noteworthy contribution to the moral issues that arise at the beginning of life.

2008

Fetal personhood: an intrinsic property or a matter of multiple attributions? JL HE QUESTION "When does human life begin?" has become the well-known and controversial encapsulation of a central issue in the conflict over abortionthe moral status of embryonic/fetal life. From one perspective the question as put is thought to frame the issue adequately. In this view personhood is a matter of natural objectivity; we are simply presented with the fact of full humanness or personhood-an intrinsic and scientifically discoverable property emerging during the course of a continuous ontogenetic process. However, there is a problem with this notion of intrinsic personhood, and it is deciding which of several different suggested properties is the one "real" answer to when a particular and personal human life has begun. Is it possession of the unique human genome achieved after fertilization, loss of embryonic ability to twin (i.e. developmental individuality) roughly two weeks later, appearance of fetal motility at six to seven weeks of gestation, emergence of unmistakably human form a few weeks later still, first awareness, or birth? In deciding, one must give reasons for one's choice and thereby necessarily introduce "extra-biological" dimensions as part of the choosing. As a result, the biological indicators come to serve as little more than the material referents for these reasons. The recognition that reasoned choices among contending properties must be made has led many to focus precisely on those reasons, and to claim that the properties whereby we understand and value prenatal personhood are not those discoverable by science but those constituted within a social fabric, and most properly by those who are directly involved with the fetus before and after its birth (Solomon, 1983, p.220). Harrison (1983), for example, claims that our evaluation of embryonic and fetal human life is a complex exercise of moral agency in the face of a precise moral question: "When shall we predicate full human value to developing fetal life?" Such predication or attribution is clearly a socially constitutive act extrinsic to the fetus. It is not, however, an act unconcerned with the changing nature of the fetus or its intimate and dependent relation to the woman nurturing it. Thus, as we exercise this moral agency we are counselled to take into account "developmental criteria for stipulating the degree of similarity to existing human beings required for counting fetal life as a human life" while

The Northern Ireland legal quarterly, 2000

2020

This thesis contends that the concept of moral status, which earmarks those entities towards which we have moral obligations, ought to be re-evaluated so that it is ascribed on the basis of multiple criteria, each of which may have increasing levels of strength. This will produce a more nuanced framework of evaluation that will guide how human embryos and pre-sentient fetuses ought to be treated, whether created through natural reproduction or in vitro fertilisation. Most literature focusing on the embryo and fetus has concluded that there are no grounds for ascribing moral status before sentience. My original contribution is to argue that a combination of four criteria ascribe a minimal moral status that incurs limits on how these entities ought to be treated: life, genetic potential, relationship and function. I analyse the weaknesses of traditional concepts of moral status and argue for a multi-criterial analysis, inspired by Mary-Anne Warren’s work (1997). Her consideration of b...

The question of the embryo's moral status _Original Article Abstract_French and German abstracts see p. 80 The embryo's moral status is a hotly debated question. Some authors give the embryo the same status as that of an adult human being, while others consider it as more akin to things or living beings such as animals. The difficulty is that, although an embryo will sometimes become an adult human being, he is not already one. To shed some light on this vexing topic, it is necessary to go back to the notion of moral status and examine the way in which we attribute it to human beings. We deem that a being's moral status depends on its intrinsic value, and that its intrinsic value depends on its intrinsic properties. The relevant intrinsic property for an adult human being is the possession of reason, and this property confers to its bearer the status of a person. So, is the embryo a person? The answer depends on the meaning we give to the expression «to possess reason». Is it an actual or a dispositional property? If it is a disposition, is it an actual one or a future-oriented one? The examination of the notion of a disposition gives a stronger support to the thesis that an embryo is not a person proper, but rather a potential one.

In this article, I present a new interpretation of the pro-life view on the status of early human embryos. In my understanding, this position is based not on presumptions about the ontological status of embryos and their developmental capabilities but on the specific criteria of rational decisions under uncertainty and on a cautious response to the ambiguous status of embryos. This view, which uses the decision theory model of moral reasoning, promises to reconcile the uncertainty about the ontological status of embryos with the certainty about normative obligations. I will demonstrate that my interpretation of the pro-life view, although seeming to be stronger than the standard one, has limited scope and cannot be used to limit destructive research on human embryos.

De Ethica

Many people believe the morality of abortion stands or falls with the moral status of the fetus. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument bypasses the question of fetal moral status; even if the fetus has a right to life, she argues the gestational mother has a right to disconnect herself from the fetus. However, should ectogenesis – a technology that would allow the fetus to develop outside the womb – become sufficiently advanced, the fetus would no longer need a gestational mother to live. Recently, Joona Räsänen has argued that parents have a right to secure the death of a fetus that has been removed from the mother’s body, and that this right might extend to infanticide. However, here I argue Räsänen’s position ignores the moral status of the fetus; if the fetus is morally comparable to beings like us, then of course parents lack a right to the death of their children. However, if the fetus is morally comparable to a tumor, then the right to kill it is philosophically unin...

2017

All throughout history the unborn, and implicitly its protection, have been subject for academics and practitioners of various areas. The problem of the origin of the soul and the exact determination of the moment when it is united with the body was crucial in enabling us to define the exact moment when the human life begins, and, consequently, for providing proper protection for the unborn child. In this context visions of the Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and of the Latin writer Tertullian, as well as Christian perspectives were analysed in order to identify the starting point of the human being to help determine the level of protection provided for the unborn in history. Finally, considering the fact that not even today has consensus been achieved concerning the beginning of human life, it was and still is difficult to provide proper legal protection for the unborn child, but in our opinion this is by far not impossible.

Monash Bioethics Review Vol 31 N 2, 2013

This paper articulates a careful and detailed objection to the moral permissibility of post-natal abortion (Giubilini and Minerva 2012), which does not reject the argument"s premises, namely that the newborn is not a person in the morally relevant sense (Tooley"s 1972).