A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part V

I have spent four parts in this series responding to Warren's argument that the unborn cannot be considered persons. Warren wrote her essay in 1973 in a publication called The Monist, but in 1982 she re-published the essay with an added postscript. One of the objections she was receiving to her paper is that it would also justify infanticide as well as abortion. She sought to reply to this claim in her postscript.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part IV

In part one, I examined Warren's claim about humanity, in part two I examined Warren's qualifications for personhood and showed why the unborn qualify, and in part three I examined Warren's two questions about personhood and showed that her position fails to disqualify the unborn from personhood. In this article, I will examine her argument about potentiality.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part III

In part one of this series, I examined Warren's definition of human, and in part two I examined her argument about what a person is and showed why the unborn certainly qualify. This article will be the third part of five, in which I'll examine Warren's claims about the right to life.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part II

In part one of this examination, I showed that the pro-life position is not logically incoherent in considering the unborn to be human beings, both in the genetic sense and the moral sense. In this article, I'll examine her criteria for personhood and show how the unborn certainly qualify.

A Critique of Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Part I

I recently gave an in-depth critique of one of the most important articles ever written on the abortion issue. I would like to turn my attention now to another popular essay written by Mary Anne Warren called On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. Whereas Thomson argued that pro-choice people can assume the unborn are full human persons and still justify abortion, Warren argued that the unborn certainly are not persons because they don't fulfill the qualifications of personhood.