Is abortion ever morally justifiable? Of course there are two ways in which one can answer this question. Yes there are times in which abortion is a moral alternative to child birth, and no there is never a time in which abortion is morally justifiable. In order to determine whether or not abortion is ever morally justifiable one must look at both sides of the issue and compare them. On one side there are the Thomistic views on the morality of abortion, and on the other side you have the reasoning given by modern abortion supporters. As with most issues there is not only a clear-cut black and white side, but there is also a grey area somewhere in the middle. It is for this reason that I will also be including my personal interpretation of what I learn by comparing both sides of this most important issue.
It has been said that abortion is allowable because a fetus, not being a person, has no rights. By all Thomistic accounts, this assumption is a gross fallacy. "An abortion is the expulsion of a nonliving and nonviable fetus from the womb. Since the fetus cannot live outside its mother until the completion of the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy, removal of a nonviable fetus from the womb is the equivalent of destroying it (Higgins)."" Although an abortion may be performed in order to save the life of a pregnant women, or in order to escape the moral obligations associated with a pregnancy, it is "a direct attack upon innocent human life and is always murder (Higgins)."" Considering that each human being begins their life in the form of a fetus, it is hard to support the argument that a fetus is not a human, and thus even harder to dispute the fact that a fetus does have rights. Furthermore, "the morality of the problem has no relation to the dispute over the time when the rational soul is infused into the embryo. The likeliest opinion is that this occurs when, after fertilization, a distinctly new living thing is formed.
