Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know ®

by Bonnie Steinbock

Once a fetus can experience pain, it has an interest in not experiencing pain, and we have a reason to do what we can to avoid the unnecessary infliction of pain on the fetus.

anesthesia

the reasons for having an abortion should be stronger in the case of late abortions than in t...

Simply not wanting to have a child is a perfectly good reason to terminate a pregnancy in the early stages, but in the later stages, a stronger justification, such as a risk to the woman’s heal...

Thus, the interest view is a gradualist view that has the advantage of cohering with the most people’s strong intuition that late abortions require...

Both conservatives and liberals seem committed to the view that abortion is morally the same throughout pregnancy, a view that conflicts with most people’s views and common sense.

On the interest view, the sentient fetus has moral standing, but so does the pregnant woman. In general, her interests count for more because she is a full-fledged person, with interests that go far beyond not experiencing pain. Her interests stem from her projects, values, and relationships with others. These are not the kinds of interests that a fetus can have,

We can ascribe to the sentient fetus not merely an interest in avoiding pain, but also an interest, albeit a weak one, in continuing to exist.

reason for preserving its life when this does not conflict with the woman’s important interests.

in the United States, only 1.2 percent of all abortions occur at or after twenty-one weeks.

the justifiability of abortion rests not only on whether the fetus is a person, with a right to life, but also on whether the fetus has a right to what it needs to stay alive: namely, the body of the pregnant woman.

To show that we can differentiate between the right to life and the right to use another person’s body, Thomson assumes, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person with a right to life.

the Famous Violinist.

Take note of the thought experiment AND the argument based on it.

to stay attached

would be very nice of you

but

simply having a right to life does not entitle you to whatever you need to stay alive.

Pregnancy can impose serious burdens on the woman: physical, emotional, economic.12 We may have moral obligations to others to keep them alive when we can do so without undergoing serious burdens, but making huge sacrifices to save someone else’s life is above and beyond the call of duty.

it may be objected that the fetus does have the right to the woman’s body because she is (partly) responsible for its being there.

Counterargument to Thompson

this would be true only of voluntary intercourse.

S&M's response

Can Thomson claim that even when the pregnancy results from voluntary intercourse,

if the woman has acted responsibly and done what is reasonably expected of her to prevent the existence of the fetus (i.e., has used contraception), then she cannot be held responsible for its presence.

Others think that she is responsible since contraceptive failure is known to occur.

Thomson’s argument provides a very limited defense of abortion, however, since in most cases the woman is (partly) responsible for becoming pregnant.

Combining the view of moral status provided by the interest view with bodily self-determination provides a stronger justification for abortion than either argument alone.

our view

prevention

treatment

enhance

somatic cell

Somatic cell gene therapy is experimental and is only used for serious diseases when there is no better alternative.

Germline gene therapy

is prohibited in the United States, in many European countries, in China, and in many countries around the world.

If it could be done safely

HHGE thus holds the promise of eradicating some genetic diseases from the face of the earth within a few generations.

and

harmful side effects would also b...

Some well-known monogenic disorders are Huntington’s disease, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell disease, and cystic fibrosis.

some forms of blindness, breast and ovarian cancer, and early-onset Alzheimer’s.

lung cancer.

CRISPR-based treatments for genetic disorders have the potential to be used in thousands of conditions caused by specific inherited mutations.

edit a human embryo.

to splice out a mutation

That

is the cause of a deadl...

embryos

never intended for implantation.

whether the therapy would have prevented the disease in a child, had the embryo been implanted and gone to term.

unintended harmful side effects.

unwanted changes