Explain and assess Thompson's claim that a successful defence of abortion need not assume anything about the moral status of the foetus
In society today, abortion has become common for a number of reasons: women have a greater legal and social status, foetal abnormalities can be detected and sex is now seen as an act associated more with pleasure rather than procreation. Abortion is commonplace in many countries, with approximately 26 million legal abortions having taken place last year. Despite this, its morality is still disputed. Religious organisations such as the Roman Catholic Church campaign against the availability of abortion, while women's rights groups campaign for greater access. The pro-life stance of the church against the pro-choice position of abortion is discussed in Thomson's article "A Defence of Abortion", in which she moderately leans towards a "pro-choice" outlook on the subject, arguing that abortion can be defended regardless of the moral status of the foetus.
Thomson (1971) firstly considers the traditional anti-abortion argument, "That a foetus is a?person, from the moment of conception". Although she contends throughout her defence of abortion that this view is false, she permits it to her opponents with the eventual goal of proving it wrong. In the case of abortion, there is little difference between a new-born child to a foetus (or a foetus to a fertilized egg), and if we were to treat them differently then we should do also to a premature baby. Warren (1973) claims it is arbitrary to have a specific line where an infant can be killed, and therefore it can be concluded that a foetus is a human from the moment of conception. Thomson argues that this idea is victim to the slippery slope no ...