Abortion and embodiment

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    Feminist perspectives on abortion focus on a fact the moral implications of which are either overlooked or considered unimportant by most other disputants in the debate. This is the fact that a foetus is not a free-floating entity about whom questions of potentiality and personhood arise as though in a vacuum. Rather a foetus is a being whose existence and welfare are biologically and morally inseparable from the woman in whose body it develops. From a feminist perspective the central moral subjects of the abortion question are thus not only, or not primarily, foetuses but women.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationWomen, medicine, ethics and the law
    EditorsSusan Sherwin, Barbara Parish
    Place of PublicationBurlington, VT
    PublisherAshgate
    Pages73-92
    Number of pages20
    ISBN (Print)0754620468
    Publication statusPublished - 2002

    Publication series

    NameInternational library of medicine, ethics and law
    PublisherAshgate

    Bibliographical note

    Originally published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 70 (2) June, 1992, pp. 136-155.

    Reissued 2018 by Routledge.

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