The Issue of Abortion by Warren

Jennifer Hallock

Current Moral and Social Issues

Paper One: 8/7/00

In Mary Anne Warren's "The Abortion Issue," children are not persons in the empirical sense. Warren believes that prior to a certain point in a pregnancy, the child does not have "the capacity to understand" the ramifications of what an abortion would be, therefore the abortion does not infringe upon the rights of the unborn fetus. She states that: "Ð'...in the ways that matter from a moral point of view, human fetuses are very unlike human persons, particularly in their early months of development"(152). In essence, personhood as defined by Warren can only come after the first trimester. Before that time, the fetus does not have the sentience that would make it a person. Warren's main criteria for what makes a person will be considered first, then we will move on to her argument on sentience, and the differences she notes between a fetus and an infant.

As she states in her paper, there are five main categories that empirically place something as a person. They include sentience, or conscious behavior, such as awareness of our surroundings, rationality: the ability to respond according to what affects us, self-concept: the ability to understand what we are, self-motivated behavior: the planning and carrying out of our own beliefs and thoughts beyond how we are externally affected, and linguistic capacity, or the use of a system to convey messages. Warren does not raise the answers to already obvious arguments when considering these categories. For example, someone who has lost the use of one of their senses still may have the use of others, so that does not make them non-empirically a person. A paralyzed person is also empirically human due to the fact that their internal capacities are still the same, and the physical limitation does not eliminate them under any means from "personhood", as Warren defines it. When considering a later-term fetus, she recognizes the unborn's ability for sentience, but without rationality, self-awareness, and other mental and behavioral capacities, they are still far from being persons in the empirical sense. In other words, without the ability to act and learn from the use of the capacities given, one is not deemed a person. A major sticking point in how we deem life according to Warren is whether or not we can morally value something as equal to other things. For example, she considers plant life and renders it different than other life as it lacks sentience.

One of the more vulnerable parts of her arguments centers on the consideration of whether sentient fetuses are persons. While they may not have the ability to act upon their sentience, that does not mean that they are not persons. Here is where she brings up the reasons why infants are persons, and thus somehow morally above even sentient fetuses, and especially fetuses not beyond the first trimester. Her