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Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Abstract

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Hypatia, Inc.

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