Is Abortion Ever Morally Justifiable? Research Paper

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Is Abortion Ever Morally Justifiable?
Abortion is one of the topics that attract much debate and is a controversial ethical issue. The arguments on both sides of the debate are often strong and compelling. However, arriving at a consensus among the people who hold divergent opinions is a difficult thing. This essay explores the abortion debate with the aim of establishing whether abortion is ever morally justifiable.
Numerous reasons have been given in support of abortion. However, some contributors to the abortion debate argue that arriving at a definite conclusion as to whether abortion is morally or otherwise justifiable is a difficult thing to do. From a medical perspective, abortion is sometimes viewed as morally permissible. According to Christopher Kaczor (2014), abortion is ethically justifiable in the prenatal death of a human fetus because such a death is not contrary to any interest of the human fetus (p. 91). For Kaczor, death would be more painful to a human being who has spent some time investing in their future and not a significant loss to a fetus who does not even know that they exist. The fetus has no physical or psychological investments into the betterment of their future and thus, their death would not be as consequential as that of a grown person who has cultivated and built a life and harbored ambitions for some years in life.
Another perspective on the moral defensibility of abortion is advanced by Edgar Morscher, Otto Neumaier and Peter M. Simons (Eds., 2012). They argue that one of the reasons that those who support abortion give is that it might be used as a method of controlling disability in society. This group of people argues that abortion would be morally justified if it is done on a fetus that has been established to be suffering from different forms of disability which might make the life of the person born troublesome. Those who propound this argument additionally hold that there is a difference between abortion and infanticide. This perspective further argues that the reason why society and medical practitioners view abortion as morally defensible is that it has already decided that such an action should not attract any moral repercussions. On the contrary, infanticide on the grounds of disability is seen as indefensible from this perspective. One important thing to note about the argument developed by this pro-abortion campaign is that they do not suggest that the abortion or infanticide of fetuses or neonates is compulsory. The gist of the argument put forward by Morscher, Neumaier and Simons is that it is not always wrong to do abort, but they do not insist that it must be done.
Jing-Bao Nie (2005) explores the topic of coerced abortion in China and argues that different role played by stakeholders in birth control programs such as the state and the general public makes it difficult to accept abortion as a morally defendable practice. The fact that the public at large in China perceives coerced abortion as a fair practice of enhancing population control does not make the issue morally justifiable. If it did, Nie argues that it would make other practices such as slavery, racism, sexism alongside other forms of discrimination that were supported in ...