Is Abortion Morally Permissible if the Embryo is a Person?

Re-defining embryos and fetuses as persons under the law has been a long-term aim of hard-line anti-abortion advocates. Since the repeal of Roe v Wade, these efforts have stepped up in the US, with some success. This brings to back to the fore a central dispute in abortion ethics: is abortion still morally permissible even if the embryo is a person in the full rights-holding sense? Here is a related but distinct question: should abortion be legally permissible even if the embryo is a person? In this talk, I trace four key arguments in favour of the claim that embryonic and foetal personhood is compatible with the moral and legal permissibility of abortion in almost all instances: 1. The Good Samaritan Argument, 2. The Justified Homicide Argument, 3. The Justified Toleration Argument, and 4. The Back-Street Abortion Argument. I underscore the pitfalls in each argument, and sketch what this means for the relevance of the personhood or moral status question to abortion ethics.

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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