ABSTRACT

In order to address the issue of abortion this paper has predominantly focused on providing a response to Tooley’s widely read discussion of the moral status of abortion and infanticide. In challenging Tooley no exception has been made to his understanding of actual persons, and the basis on which they have a right to continued existence. What has been challenged is his limiting of that right to actual persons only. It has been argued that the right to continue to exist ought to be extended to potential persons because they are the very same enduring subject of experience as the person they will become, and it can therefore plausibly be assumed that they will come to possess the corresponding desire if they are not interfered with. In making this claim though, support has not been provided for the anti-abortionist stance, which portrays the destruction of the human embryo and foetus as intrinsically and always morally problematic. Rather, it has been argued that in the case of human potential persons, only the post-24-week-old foetus has a right to continue to exist, because only the post-24-week-old foetus has an active potential to become a person. Consequently, it is only after this point in foetal development that abortion is prima facie wrong.