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What is the legal status of abortion and the human fetus? In an extended analysis of mainstream arguments involving abortion and the status of 'personhood' that is often applied to the fetus, this book provides novel answers to some of the core 'pro-life' arguments in favour of recognizing fetal personhood and moral rights.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One: Ordering the Argument
- 1: What Should Abortion Argument be About?
- 2: Gestation as Good Samaritanism
- 3: Abortion as Justified Homicide
- 4: Analogical Arguments and Sex Equality
- Part Two: The Threshold of Personhood
- 5: Vagueness, Arbitrariness, and 'Punctualism'
- 6: Dualism, Substantial Identity, and the Precautionary Principle
- 7: Gradualism and Human Embodiment
- 8: Human Equality and the Significance of Birth
- Part Three: Principle and Pragmatism
- 9: Regulating Abortion
- 10: Selective Abortion: Sex and Disability
- 11: Matters of Conscience
About the author
Kate Greasley is a Lecturer in Law at University College London. After completing her doctorate in law at New College, Oxford, she was appointed to a Junior Research Fellowship in Law at University College, Oxford, from 2013 to 2016. Her research and teaching covers medical law and ethics, criminal law, and legal theory. She has written extensively to date about issues in abortion law and ethics, as well as other topics in bioethics, including assisted dying, property rights in human body parts, and the commercialization of human organs.
Summary
What is the legal status of abortion and the human fetus? In an extended analysis of mainstream arguments involving abortion and the status of 'personhood' that is often applied to the fetus, this book provides novel answers to some of the core 'pro-life' arguments in favour of recognizing fetal personhood and moral rights.
Additional text
In this rigorous, elegant and ambitious book, Kate Greasley does not attempt to sidestep anything. Greasley tackles the moral status of the fetus head-on, and while it would be impossible for one book to resolve, conclusively and to everyone's satisfaction, the question of fetal personhood, her important new monograph must now be required reading for anyone who wishes to claim in the future that the fetus either is, or is not, a person.
