MARY ANNE  WARREN'S "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion" 

I. Response to Thomson

            Not clear enough what constitutes responsibility for becoming pregnant.

II. Response to Noonan

Noonan's argument equivocates: different meaning of “human” are employed in each premise.

1.      It is wrong to kill human beings

2.      A fetus is human from the moment of conception

It is wrong to abort a fetus.

      First premise is “human” in the sense of being a PERSON. 

      Second premise is biological/genetic meaning.

III. Six criteria for MORAL personhood

• Sentience (capacity for conscious experiences, particular the capacity to feel pleasure and pain)

• Emotionality (capacity to experience emotions)

• Reason (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)

• The capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types (i.e., on indefinitely many possible topics) (This is the famous TURING TEST)

• Self-awareness (requiring the presence of self-concepts, either individual or racial, or both)

• Moral Agency (the capacity to regulate one's own actions by thinking about moral principles or ideals)

If a being has NONE of the six, it has no rights.

Strength of this approach: forces us to consider which non-humans (genetic sense) are persons.

Newborns aren’t clearly persons, either. Doesn’t this justify infanticide?

Warren thinks she can LIMIT infanticide while PERMITTING most abortion.

Warren's response focuses on the similarity between infants and persons. It is not just that infants are members of our species, but rather that they satisfy three of the six criteria for personhood. (They possess sentience, emotionality, and the rudiments of the capacity to communicate.)

But so what? Most of the animals that we EAT also satisfy those same three.

The really important thing for Warren is not that infants are members of our species, but rather that actual persons confer value on them because of that resemblance. Out of respect for those other persons, we shouldn't kill infants. The same is not true of most abortions, because our valuing something does not outweigh the actual rights of the pregnant woman.

In some circumstance, Warren admits, abortion would be wrong (e.g., killing a viable fetus when doing so is unrelated to preserving maternal health or life).

And in some circumstances, where the members of a society do NOT value infants and "cannot possibly care for all the children who are born" without harming the society, then infanticide is "permitted ... as a necessary evil."