Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jun 5;47(7):515-518.
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2020-106153. Online ahead of print.

Strengthening the impairment argument against abortion

Bruce Philip Blackshaw  1 , Perry Hendricks  2
Affiliations

Strengthening the impairment argument against abortion

Bruce Philip Blackshaw et al. J Med Ethics. .

Abstract

Perry Hendricks' impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle (TIP). Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris paribus clause of TIP, which requires that the relevant details surrounding each impairment be sufficiently similar. In this article, we show that the ceteris paribus clause is superfluous, and by replacing it with a more restrictive condition, the impairment argument is considerably strengthened.

Keywords: abortion; embryos and fetuses; ethics; moral status.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None declared.

References

    1. Hendricks P. Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is Immoral: the impairment argument. Bioethics 2019;33(2):245–53. 10.1111/bioe.12533 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Hendricks PC. (Regrettably) abortion remains Immoral: the impairment argument defended. Bioethics 2019;33(8):968–9. 10.1111/bioe.12644 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Blackshaw BP. The impairment argument for the immorality of abortion revisited. Bioethics 2020;34(2):211–3. 10.1111/bioe.12698 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Pickard C. Abortion is incommensurable with fetal alcohol syndrome. Bioethics 2020;34(2):207–10. 10.1111/bioe.12697 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Räsänen J. Against the impairment argument: a reply to Hendricks. Bioethics 2020:1–3. 10.1111/bioe.12720 - DOI - PubMed