According to Dean Stretton, “The most plausible pro-life argument claims that abortion is seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of something valuable. This paper examines two recent versions of this argument. Don Marquis’s version takes the valuable thing to be a ‘future like ours’, a future containing valuable experiences and activities. Jim Stone’s version takes the valuable thing to be a future containing conscious goods which it is the foetus’s biological nature to make itself have. I give three grounds for rejecting these arguments. First, they lead to unacceptable inequalities in the wrongness of killing. Second, they lead to counterintuitive results in a range of imaginary cases. Third, they ignore the role of psychological connectedness in determining the magnitude or seriousness of deprivation-based harms: because the foetus is only weakly psychologically connected to its own future, it cannot be seriously harmed by being deprived of that future”.
Everyday there are pregnant mothers who abuse drugs and alcohol totally
ignoring the living, growing person inside them. Then, when these children are
born, they are usually born with a drug addiction or birth defects which
sometimes leads to death. One thing's for sure, these children's lives are
greatly complexed before they even reach the light of day. Which leads to my
position that the rights of the child should be extended to the unborn. A
mother should not have the right to use drugs or drink alcohol while she is
pregnant, it is unfair for the child not to even have a chance for a normal life.
If a mother beat her baby and was reported to the child welfare board
they would be thrown in jail without a second thought, but just because a child
is not yet born doesn't that mean that a mother can do anything she wants to it.
Take a child who has been born, then goes through the pain of having an abusive
parent. If the parents are exposed to the authorities they will go to jail and
lose the rights to the child, and with proper counseling and therapy the child
will live a normal life. Yet, if the child is unborn, the mother can do
whatever she would like, even if it means harming the baby and the authorities
can do nothing. When the baby is born, the child might have irreparable brain
damage or some physical defect and would not be able to live a normal life, for
the rest of it's life. The abuse that the unborn child goes through is the same
as if it was born but the severity is much greater, and nothing can be done. To
me, this is child abuse of the worst kind. An unborn child is getting abused
with drugs, alcohol, or whatever the mother may be ingesting, and the child is
unable to defend itself. If the child was born it could call someone for help,
but an unborn child cannot speak and therefore needs someone to speak for it in
case of any danger that might come to it.
Our unborn children should have the same rights as any living person.
In our society we give rights to any living creature, human or not human. Is it
right that we give more rights to animals than we do our own unborn?
