Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: I am going to argue that grief in miscarriage tells against person-denying arguments for the permissibility of abortion.1 By "person-denying argument," I mean arguments for the permissibility of abortion that rely centrally on the claim that the foetus lacks moral status.When I say that it "tells against," what I mean is that we should take grief responses to miscarriage as defeasible evidence against the soundness of such arguments.In "Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion," Elizabeth Harman considers the worry that what she calls the "very liberal view" of early abortion-according to which early abortion is morally neutral and needs no justification-is "incompatible with any reasonable view that takes seriously the badness of early miscarriages." 2 Harman argues that, despite appearances, it is not.3 I will argue that, as regards person-denying arguments, the incompatibility worry deserves to be taken seriously, because grief following miscarriage presupposes foetal moral status.In this article, I would like to take a focused look at what miscarriage tells us about the moral terrain of abortion-at what kind of moral evidence it is, and how it bears on moral claims about abortion.My worry is that grief is a very common response to miscarriage, and that grief presupposes moral status.In grieving the loss of an entity, one perceives that entity to be someone of special value.The claim that the foetus lacks moral status then implies that feeling grief over the loss of it is based on a mistake-a cognitive error, like a mistaken belief-since the evaluative content of the belief runs contrary to the lacking moral status claim.Although it is not the case that all women and couples who experience miscarriage experience grief, many do.4 If we claim that the foetus lacks moral status, then we have also to claim that women and couples who grieve their miscarriages are wrong to do so: that they are making an error.And on pain of disregarding women's testimony, I argue that we ought not accept such a conclusion lightly.Grief in miscarriage, then, is defeasible evidence against the claim that the foetus lacks moral status.My argument is not an argument against the permissibility of abortion, and nor does it, to my mind, lend support to arguments against the permissibility of abortion.My claim, rather, is that if we take the experience of miscarriage seriously, it casts doubt on the plausibility of this particular sort of account of the permissibility of abortion.If my argument is a good one, then it gives us reason
Source: Journal of Social Philosophy
DOI: 10.1111/josp.12086
Author: Lindsey Porter
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,350
OpenAlex ID: W1605729962