Abortion, intimacy, and the duty to gestate

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (3):295-312 (1999)
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Abstract

In this article, I urge that mainstream discussions of abortion are dissatisfying in large part because they proceed in polite abstraction from the distinctive circumstances and meanings of gestation. Such discussions, in fact, apply to abortion conceptual tools that were designed on the premiss that people are physically demarcated, even as gestation is marked by a thorough-going intertwinement. We cannot fully appreciate what is normatively at stake with legally forcing continued gestation, or again how to discuss moral responsibilities to continue gestating, until we appreciate in their own terms the goods and evils distinctive of gestational connection. To underscore the need to explore further the meanings of gestation, I provide two examples of the difference it might make to legal and moral discussions of abortion if we appreciate more fully that gestation is an intimacy.

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Margaret Little
Georgetown University

References found in this work

Abortion.Joel Feinberg - 1980 - In Tom L. Beauchamp & Tom Regan (eds.), Matters of Life and Death. Temple University Press.
Creation and Abortion: A Study in Moral and Legal Philosophy.F. M. Kamm - 1993 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (4):331-348.
Abortion and pregnancy due to rape.Michael Wreen - 1992 - Philosophia 21 (3-4):201-220.
Redefining abortion.B. K. Rothman - 1997 - In Hugh LaFollette - (ed.), Ethics in Practice. Blackwell. pp. 103--111.

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