Don Marquis Abortion Rhetorical Analysis

Why Abortion is Impermissible

In my own view, I believe that abortion is immoral except in certain situations that the fetus puts both the mother’s and its life in a serious danger.
I am going to assume “the human fetus has a right to life and if the human fetus has a right to life, then abortion is impermissible”, even though it can be challenged. I believe that Don Marquis has presented a strong argument in favor of the view that abortion is immoral. In fact, Marquis’ states in his premise one that “any being that can be deprived of a future like ours has a right to life”, the second premise is that “the human fetus has a future like ours”. Thus, Marquis’ conclusion is “the human fetus has
In this argument, right to life is closely connected with the future- a future like ours concept. We might be tempted to ask what is so unique about our future?! What does the future hold for us?! Our future consists of unique experiences- either good or bad, different activities, pleasures and accumulation of knowledge and etc. All of these experiences have value to us. Sometimes we might not value things that are going to happen in our future because we might think that our future is unknown. For Marquis, the future has value independent of whether or not it is recognized by the person or the fetus. For instance, a suicidal teenager might not see any value to her future but Marquis would maintain that her future has value. Having a future like ours alone is enough of a reason for Marquis to put human fetus under the umbrella of morality, which in this case is, in fact, connected to the issue of killing or aborting the embryo. He is approaching the morality of abortion from the future like ours perspective but not from genealogical or biological factors about the embryo. So a being can have a future like ours but not be a person. For instance, we can also apply this concept to a newborn baby or a toddler. A newborn baby or a toddler doesn’t have the conceptual capacity of an adult human but he/she has a future like ours. So Marquis holds that one can have a future like ours even
This causes a problem for the argument. One critic fundamentally challenged Marquis’ future like ours concept. Let us imagine we have a serum of personhood that can transform a kitten to a person during a nine-month period. Later, that kitten turns into human; thus, he/she will have a right to life because the newly formed human will have a future like ours. However, we also have a serum antidote that will reverse the previous serum’s effects. If we inject the serum when the kitten is at two months, that kitten will not turn into a person but if we inject the antidote when the kitten is a person at nine months, the person will go back to being a kitten. Is there a moral difference between giving the antidote to the kitten? It is intuitive for us that if you inject the antidote when it turned to person, you have done something morally wrong like killed the person whereas when you injected the antidote when it was two months, that cannot be considered killing because the kitten is not human yet. This example clearly illustrates the point that having a future like ours is not strong enough reason for someone to claim right to life. The moral take away from this story is that our intuition dictates that there is a difference between a human fetus and a newborn baby and that the right to life for a newborn baby is