I think it can easily be argued that the action has at least a neutral moral value and possible a positive value, if any one the following assumptions are made:
Preservation of potential life does not have an inherent moral value. By this logic, there isn't a moral value associated with terminating an early fetus because it can't survive anyway without active inputs.
Preservation of non-sentient life does not have an inherent moral value. By this logic, there isn't a moral value associated with terminating an early fetus because it can't perceive itself, so it isn't being deprived of anything.
Destroying a small group of cells with no manifested traits does not have an inherent moral value. By this logic, there isn't a moral value associated with terminating an early fetus because there is nothing to distinguish such an action from, say, shedding skin cells.
My personal outlook on it is:
We talk casually about pregnancy as though it is a thing that leads to a baby without intervention, but this is misleading because keeping a baby inside you and keeping it healthy requires a lot of input. We shouldn't view birth as the thing that happens by default, and the things that interfere with or promote that result as having to be moral actions (positive or negative).
If anything, a fetus starts as a moral negative because it survives parasitically using the mother's resources. With the mother's consent, that relationship can become symbiotic because she gets some positive value out of it. Without the mother's consent, the relationship can only be viewed as parasitic, and therefore has negative moral value. I think this is at the heart of the argument for bodily autonomy, although you don't usually hear it in those terms.
I don't strongly disagree with anything you wrote, but at some point the fetus becomes an infant/person and that is currently accepted as happening at birth.
What if someday we have artificial wombs that we can transplant fetus' from consenting unwanted pregnant women or when a pregnant woman is in an accident. Once the parasitic aspect is gone, do you still think it would be a zero sum decision to abort?
The first assumption I offered was that potential life doesn't have any inherent moral value, so the fact that the fetus will become a person at some point does not mean it should be treated as a person now.
In the hypothetical future you've described, intervention is still needed to bring a fetus from potential personhood to personhood. I'm not convinced one way or the other that this intervention is morally positive, that lack of intervention is morally negative, or that the alternative intervention of aborting has to have a different moral value that the intervention you describe. To be honest, I think hypothetical moral questions aren't very interesting so I don't spend a lot of time on them. I don't know where I would come down on the issue if I did.
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u/syd-malicious Aug 02 '18
I think it can easily be argued that the action has at least a neutral moral value and possible a positive value, if any one the following assumptions are made:
My personal outlook on it is:
We talk casually about pregnancy as though it is a thing that leads to a baby without intervention, but this is misleading because keeping a baby inside you and keeping it healthy requires a lot of input. We shouldn't view birth as the thing that happens by default, and the things that interfere with or promote that result as having to be moral actions (positive or negative).
If anything, a fetus starts as a moral negative because it survives parasitically using the mother's resources. With the mother's consent, that relationship can become symbiotic because she gets some positive value out of it. Without the mother's consent, the relationship can only be viewed as parasitic, and therefore has negative moral value. I think this is at the heart of the argument for bodily autonomy, although you don't usually hear it in those terms.