Kant On Late Term Abortion

: A growing issue in our society today is late-term abortion. A mother and baby develop a very emotional connection through pregnancy, which can leave a mother feeling very devastated if she pursues this act. Since late-term unborn babies begin to develop a sense of consciousness, there is no reason that they should not be treated as people and be acknowledged as having human rights. In a situation where two people’s benefits are conflicting, this right must be deliberated and equivalent. I will argue that the moral principles of Kant, Marquis, and Thomson on abortion will oppose Sue and her husband’s decision to have a late-term abortion at seven months pregnant.

Reason 1: As discussed in the Marquis document, “The loss of one’s life
This would be a specific type of deontology, in which morality of an action is based only on the compliance of the action itself, not on the action’s consequences. Overall, nobody should merely be used to obtain a goal. According to Kant’s second formulation, a person is obligated to account for the dignity and value they possess in oneself and in others. It is the argumentation and their position as rational and noble beings. In Sue’s case she decided she was not ready to have a baby, but was too afraid to let someone adopt it. Once the infant is born, it can no longer pose any threat to the woman’s life or health since she is given the opportunity to put it up for adoption. For some women, having the baby be raised by someone other than themselves may sound scary, so they take the abortion route. Yes, a lot of women may suffer from the idea that their child is being thrown into the adoption system, and the mother will be worried about the child’s happiness, education or health, but in the end the mother should have been more responsible to discuss these things with her family or husband in order to avoid late-term abortion. Surely, there are better ways of dealing with these problems than permitting late-term abortion in such cases. For any killing where the victim did have a valuable future like ours, having that future by itself is sufficient to create the strong presumption that the killing is seriously wrong (Marquis, 4). According to Marquis, killing a fetus is just as wrong as killing a human being after birth. The loss of the future of any human being by killing or by abortion is unjustified. In essence, a seven-month old fetus is not that much different in appearance from a newborn, and has measurable brain activity.