Legalizing abortion triggers a series of debates that offer salient opportunities to evaluate ethics, what comprises humanity, and the moral standing of the claims for and against abortion. In 1973, Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade ruled all laws that banned abortions unconstitutional except those that saved the life of a mother. Alas, two articles, On the Moral and Legal Status of .
Abortion and The Wrongs of Abortion, opposing arguments contend whether or not abortions are legalized.While Mary Anne Warren advocates legalization of abortion on the ground that fetuses are not beings with a sense of agency, Peter Simpson disputes that "abortion is a grave moral evil" for myriad reasons: " first because of what it does to the child and second because of what it does to the woman [Simpson 1]." These particular philosophers illustrate opposing arguments regarding the fallacies of opposing contentions, moral standings, and perhaps most important, reasoning whether or not a fetus possesses life, which would therefore evaluating termination of a fetus as murder.
Warren's perspective echoes the premise declaring fetuses are not fully-fledged human beings, at least not "in the morally relevant sense of the term [Warren 1]." Determining whether or not an unborn human is or is not a fully-fledged human then becomes a moot point, and necessarily, a futile argument. She declares, "a fetus is not a person, hence not the sort of entity to which it is proper to ascribe full moral rights [Warren 1]." While conventional wisdom proposes the claim that life begins at the point of conception, the right to life necessitates being a "member of [a] moral community, the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, for the simple reason that it is not a person and that it is personhood, and not genetic humanity.which is .
the basis for membership in this community [Warren 2].