ABSTRACT
Sometimes people who disagree passionately with one another have no clear grasp of what they are disagreeing about, even when the dispute is violent and profound. Most people assume that the great, divisive abortion argument is at bottom an argument about a
moral and metaphysical issue: whether even a just-fertilized embryo is
already a human creature with rights and interests of its own, a person
in the sense I defined in chapter i, an unborn child, helpless against the
abortionist's slaughtering knife. The political rhetoric is explicit that this
is the issue in controversy. The "human life" amendment that anti-
abortion groups have tried to make part of the United States Constitu-
tion declares, "The paramount right to life is vested in each human
being from the moment of fertilization without regard to age, health, or
conditions of dependency." The "pro-choice" world defends abortion
by claiming that an embryo is no more a child than an acorn is an oak.
