ABSTRACT
In the dispute over abortion, one premise of the pro-choice argument has been almost unquestioned: that the body, or organism, in which the fetus is gestating is exclusively the mother’s. For example, this premise is essential to the argument made famous by Judith Jarvis Thomson that a right to abortion can be sustained even when the personhood and right to life of the fetus are granted. But in the early 1980s, Jim Stone and Mark Wicclair argued separately that the fetus, if assumed to be a person as Thomson does arguendo, has a claim to the organs of the mother such that those organs cannot be said to be “exclusively hers”. This chapter argues that if we view the debate in terms framed by the natural law tradition’s understanding of property rights, then the Stone–Wicclair view is not only defensible but true.
