The Abortion Issue by Mary Anne Warren
In Mary Anne Warren’s “The Abortion Issue,” children are not
persons in the empirical sense. Warren
believes that prior to a certain point in a pregnancy, the child does not have
“the capacity to understand” the ramifications of what an abortion would be,
therefore the abortion does not infringe upon the rights of the unborn fetus.
She states that: “…in the ways that matter from a moral point of view, human
fetuses are very unlike human persons, particularly in their early months of
development”(152). In essence, personhood as defined by Warren can only come after the first
trimester. Before that time, the fetus does not have the sentience that would
make it a person. Warren’s
main criteria for what makes a person will be considered first, then we will move on to her argument on sentience, and the
differences she notes between a fetus and an infant.
