Abstract

Abortion has frequently been characterized as a competition between the right to privacy and the right to life. In order to decide which right should be honored, one must give careful attention to both rights and the grounds on which each of them is granted. This work discusses the bases for granting each of these rights and also describes the way in which the rights compete. It is concluded that in a large majority of cases, the fetal right to life should be honored against the mother's right to privacy. ;Chapter 1 discusses an article by Judith Thomson concerning the right to privacy and the right to life. It is argued that her article is flawed because of morally important disanalogies between the circumstances extant in the vast majority of pregnancies and the circumstances which are found in the analogy which she gives. ;Chapter 2 gives a detailed analysis of the concept of a rights waiver. Three criteria are given for establishing a rights waiver: a causal criterion, a voluntariness criterion, and a foreseeability criterion. These are discussed and applied to the case of pregnancy arising from voluntary intercourse. It is argued that voluntary intercourse does, in most cases, constitute a waiver of the woman's right to privacy against the fetus. ;Chapter 3 examines the basis for establishing the "obligation to care." Two sets of criteria are given: relationship criteria and circumstance criteria, both of which must be met in order to infer an obligation to care. In the circumstances which generally surround pregnancy and abortion, it was found that one can generally infer that the mother has an obligation to care for the fetus developing within her. ;Chapter 4 focuses on the right to life. it gives a discussion of the potentiality principle, and defends both its coherence and its moral validity. It argued that this is sufficient grounds for granting the right to life from the earliest stages of pregnancy. ;Chapter 5 gives a general framework for resolving conflicts between rights. A methodology is proposed which involves graphing competing rights claims against one another and honoring the right which is highest on the graph. This methodology is applied to several well-known authors who have written on the subject of abortion. It is concluded that even very liberal positions on the right to life are not sufficient justification for granting mid to late-term abortions