"… But I Could Never Have One": The Abortion Intuition and Moral Luck

In: Hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, Volume 24, Issue 1, p. 41-55

Abstract

Starting from the intuition, shared by many women, that the legal right to an abortion must be defended but that they themselves could never undergo one, I offer an account of why pregnancy is morally valuable and why, nevertheless, it is often permissible to end one. Developing the idea that human pregnancy centrally involves the activity of calling a fetus into personhood, I argue that the permissibility of stopping this activity hinges on the goodness or badness of one's moral luck.