Grey areas in the discussion, not in my feeling on the subject. The issue of rape and incest are the areas I am refering to, many feel that these are the main exceptions. Another area, which personally repulses me is women having an abortion after finding out the child will have a disability like down syndrome or many other kind of handicaps.
Saying things like, "It's okay to abort in cases of rape, but not one night stands," is begging the fundamental question here. That question being, "Is abortion intrinsically morally wrong?"
If it isn't, abortion should be acceptable under all circumstances at the sole discretion of the mother.
If abortion
is intrinsically morally wrong, the next question is, "Why?"
Yes, a foetus is living - but taking life isn't morally wrong. We spray spiders in our homes, we wolf down cheeseburgers, we kill countless animals for sport, food, research and more every second of every day, and society at large has no qualms about it. When we say that 'killing is wrong' we're talking about killing
human beings; we're the only special case to whom the right to life applies.
So the debate comes down to a question of what constitutes a human being. Some people hold superstitions about 'souls' or other intangible unprovable evidence of humanity, but such ideas can not hold any kind of weight in legal, practical scenarios.
In society at large, a human being is defined primarily by their
mind, specifically their capacity for consciousness and sentience. This is why, even in countries that prohibit euthanasia, it's okay to harvest organs from a human body whose brain has been irreparably destroyed. Whole-brain death is legally considered death of the human being, even if their body survives or is kept alive artificially. Without the capacity for consciousness, no human being exists.
"Current neurology suggests that a foetus doesn't possess enough neural structure to harbor consciousness until about 26 weeks, when it first seems to react to pain. Before that, the fetal neural structure is about as sophisticated as that of a sea slug and its EEG as flat and unorganized as that of someone brain-dead." (
Source, paraphrased from Michael Gazzaniga's
The Ethical Brain).
That is, according to current scientific evidence coupled with societal and legal views of humanity, a foetus
is not a human being before about 26 weeks into a pregnancy. Aborting a foetus at 22 weeks is destroying life, but it is not killing a human being.
Given all this, I have to wonder on what basis - other than the entirely untenable position derived from the supposed existence of 'souls' - one might claim that early-term abortion is intrinsically morally wrong.