Abortion
Abortion.
Abortion: a word that causes a great deal of controversy amongst different religions, values and beliefs around the morality that surrounds this issue. Abortion has been a debated subject regarding if the fetus is in fact an actual person and what rights, if any, a woman has in terminating a pregnancy. However, since abortion was legalized in Canada in 1969 abortion has been at the center of political and morale debate, as society aims to determine whether abortion is morally acceptable or not. Is abortion morally wrong because it is essentially homicide? Is the fetus in fact a person? Or do women have the right to decide what happens over their own bodies? Do women have the right to override the rights of the fetus in the end? Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to prove that even if the fetus is a person with full morale rights, it may be morally permissible for women to have an abortion in light of their rights to property, self-defense and autonomy over their bodies.
First, we must try to define if the fetus is a person or not. The status of a fetus refers to a "human offspring at any stage of its prental development, from conception to birth." Therefore, a fetus is a general term for the unborn at all phases of its development. The argument against a fetus being a person is that there is an initial phase where the fetus supposedly does not qualify as a person. Therefore, there would be an initial phase that the fetus would not count as murder. A few minutes after conception are zygotes actual people? It would be hard to support this idea, as commonsense tells us that the small cluster of cells has nothing to do with being a person. If the zygotes were actually people, then we would be concerned with the lost of numerous embryos due to natural causes nor do we have funerals for them. However, it is those cells that create and become a person. Therefore, the fetus is human in the genetic sense. In...
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