Healthy Abortions: Both Permissible and Impermissible

Additional arguments that support the permissibility of abortions are as follows. 1) Some may argue that abortions due to a lack of money are never permissible because adoptive parents may choose to pay for pre natal care. This is true if money is the only issue, however with rape and alcoholism, the mental health of the mother and the physical health of the fetus need to be taken into account. If the mother were an alcoholic, it would be as if she were torturing the fetus, which most people agree is wrong to do to innocent people. 2) If the mother were very young and still a student, a pregnancy would most likely cause a lot of negative attention which could cause emotional damage both in the present and the future. In this situation, an abortion would also be permissible. 3) In the case of faulty contraceptives, many would argue that it would be better to carry the fetus to term and put it up for adoption. However this poses the same problem as sperm donation: many people do not want their DNA running around somewhere in the world without their knowledge. For this reason, it is completely up to the parents as to whether they want to have a child that they will never know or if they want to abort the fetus in the early stages of the pregnancy. 

In this paper I discussed situations in which abortion is permissible and also a situation in which abortion is impermissible. To support some of my arguments I used ideas from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”. It is important to reiterate that the permissibility of abortions is determined almost entirely on a case-by-case basis. In many situations I find that abortion is permissible however in some cases I find that it is impermissible and I am sure that there are many circumstances that I have not thought about that do not have clear cut answers as to whether they are permissible or not.