Fetal Anomaly Abortions and the Duties of Parenthood

Abortion for reasons of foetal abnormality raise interesting problems for defenders of abortion rights. Seeking to avoid the special burdens of caring for a disabled child is, seemingly, among the more compelling of reasons to abort. At the same time, abortions that select against disease and disability are problematic in a way that non-selective abortions are not. This paper seeks to explain one dimension of moral ambivalence about foetal abnormality abortions, in terms of the duties of parenthood. It argues that parental obligations to affirm the life of one’s own, individual, child echo and exert force throughout gestation in wanted pregnancies in a way that they do not in pregnancies that are altogether unwanted (meaning: pregnancies that are unwanted regardless of any known foetal characteristics). To contemplate rejecting a possible child on the basis of some essential, distinguishing characteristic is at odds with expectant parents’ emotional and psychological preparations to be good parents. I argue that this feature of gestation can demystify moral ambivalence around foetal abnormality abortions against the backdrop of a liberal and permissive abortion framework that ascribes a fairly low moral status to the embryo or foetus.

Dr. Greasley is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Law at Oxford University. She has published on the abortion debate, the ethics of organ transplantation, feminist legal theory, and the morality of lying. Her books include Arguments about Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Abortion: For and Against, with Christopher Kaczor (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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