my answers wrote:

Whose Body Is It Anyway? - Judgement
Your moral judgement of abortion* Pass
Internal consistency of your views Pass
Your responses during this activity indicate that you should think abortion is always morally justified and that you should not have any significant moral qualms about the practice. This is broadly in line with your stated position on abortion, which is that it is normally justified. Though there is some inconsistency between your responses, your position on abortion seems generally coherent and well thought out (which, of course, is not the same as saying it is right).

Note: This activity has three pages of analysis - this page and two further pages. If you want to know everything we've worked out about your views on abortion, you need to read all three pages. At the end, you'll find a specially written essay on Judith Jarvis Thomson's thought experiments. This is well worth reading, especially if you're not clear about the rationale for the thought experiments.

There are two broad reasons why this test has determined you should think abortion is morally justified. First, your view of what gives human life value is out of line with the idea a fetus has both the kind of life worth preserving and also the right to that life. Specifically, you claimed it is the attributes of personhood that give life value and secure the right to life. However, as you likely realise, there is no reason to think a fetus is a person in the required way. Second, you indicated that you think a woman's right to exercise control over what happens to her own body takes precedence over a fetus's right to life (if it has such a right). This was evident in your responses to the soccer player scenario and the first people-seeds scenario, where you allowed your right to self-determination to trump the soccer player's and person-plant's right to life. There isn't really any doubt here. Your responses clearly show you should consider a woman morally justified if she chooses to have an abortion.

Your Responses

•The soccer player has no right to use your body.
•The person-plant has no right to use your house.
•It's okay to destroy the person-plant if you don't want it using your house.
•The attributes of personhood give life value and secure the right to life.
•Abortion is normally morally justified.



There is an issue worth flagging up here which has to do with your belief it is the attributes of personhood that give human life value and secure the right to life. As we noted above, a fetus is not a person. More than this, though, it is never a person. You stated that in the late stages of pregnancy, abortion is only justified in limited circumstances. However, given that a fetus is never a person, it isn't clear why you would think this - in other words, why you would think abortion is only normally, rather than always, morally justified.

The other point to make here is there is something slightly puzzling about your attitude towards spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). It is estimated there are around 1,000,000 miscarriages every year in the United States. Therefore, at first sight, it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable that you ranked the issue as one of the top three medical problems in terms of its seriousness. However, there is something a little puzzling about this response (if, as per your instructions, you didn't take into account the upset caused to those people who suffer miscarriages when determining how to rank the various issues). No miscarriages occur when the fetus is a person, since the fetus is never a person. Therefore, in your terms, there is no tragedy in the loss of its life beyond the unhappiness caused to those who care about it (which of course is morally significant, but not relevant from the point of view of this activity). However, perhaps your focus was on the misery caused by spontaneous abortion, in which case your response is understandable.