ABSTRACT
Feminist perspectives on abortion focus on a fact the moral implications of which are either overlooked or considered unimportant by most other disputants in the debate. Appeals to responsibility in the context of the abortion debate usually trade on the asymmetry between the situation of men and women with regard to pregnancy. A number of different aspects of responsibility are often conflated in the abortion debate. The force of the feminist defence of abortion must lie in its highlighting of the moral particularity of the relationship between a woman and a foetus. To think that the question of autonomy in abortion is just a question about preserving the integrity of one’s body boundaries, and to see the foetus merely as an occupant of the woman’s uterus, is thus to divorce women’s bodies from their subjectivities. The chapter draws on a phenomenological account of pregnancy in order to explain the connection between autonomy, bodily autonomy and pregnant embodiment.
