Reproductive Ethics: Abortion and Genetic Enhancement

The philosophical debate over abortion has classically centered on the moral status of the fetus — whether, and at what point, it acquires the properties (sentience, self-consciousness, rational agency) that ground a right to life comparable to a born person's. Don Marquis, in his widely taught 1989 article "Why Abortion is Immoral" in the Journal of Philosophy, argued that what makes killing an adult wrong is that it deprives the victim of a "future like ours" — a future of valuable experiences, projects, and enjoyments — and that this "future like ours" account applies equally to a typical fetus, making most abortions seriously immoral on grounds independent of any specific religious premise. Mary Anne Warren, by contrast, in "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion" (1973), proposed a set of criteria for full moral personhood — consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, and self-awareness — arguing that a fetus, lacking these developed capacities, does not qualify as a person in the morally relevant sense, even if it is biologically human.