The book is being used to create some educational experiences for medical students. The book is well balanced in its discussion of abortion from ethical and non-ethical perspectives.
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Arguments about Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law
by
Kate Greasley
(Author)
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Does the morality of abortion depend on the moral status of the human fetus? Must the law of abortion presume an answer to the question of when personhood begins? Can a law which permits late abortion but not infanticide be morally justified? These are just some of the questions this book sets out to address.
With an extended analysis of the moral and legal status of abortion, Kate Greasley offers an alternative account to the reputable arguments of Ronald Dworkin and Judith Jarvis Thomson and instead brings the philosophical notion of 'personhood' to the foreground of this debate.
Structured in three parts, the book will (I) consider the relevance of prenatal personhood for the moral and legal evaluation of abortion; (II) trace the key features of the conventional debate about when personhood begins and explore the most prominent issues in abortion ethics literature: the human equality problem and the difference between abortion and infanticide; and (III) examine abortion law and regulation as well as the differing attitudes to selective abortion. The book concludes with a snapshot into the current controversy surrounding the scope of the right to conscientiously object to participation in abortion provision.
With an extended analysis of the moral and legal status of abortion, Kate Greasley offers an alternative account to the reputable arguments of Ronald Dworkin and Judith Jarvis Thomson and instead brings the philosophical notion of 'personhood' to the foreground of this debate.
Structured in three parts, the book will (I) consider the relevance of prenatal personhood for the moral and legal evaluation of abortion; (II) trace the key features of the conventional debate about when personhood begins and explore the most prominent issues in abortion ethics literature: the human equality problem and the difference between abortion and infanticide; and (III) examine abortion law and regulation as well as the differing attitudes to selective abortion. The book concludes with a snapshot into the current controversy surrounding the scope of the right to conscientiously object to participation in abortion provision.
- ISBN-100198766785
- ISBN-13978-0198766780
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateMarch 19, 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions9.3 x 1 x 6.4 inches
- Print length280 pages
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WARNING:
California’s Proposition 65
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Above all the book is engaging, thoughtful and thought provoking, readable, comprehensive and a must read for anyone considering the abortion debate." -- Bob Lane, Metapsychology Online Reviews"This book is required reading for those interested in the ethics of abortion. It is a clear, novel and intellectually honest exploration of a wide range of pertinent ethical and legal issues." -- Calum Miller, The New Bioethics"This book represents an important contribution to discussions of abortion ethics. Greasley's account of what makes someone a person has significant advantages, not least that it is built on careful consideration of the biological circumstances of abortion, pregnancy, and birth." -- Amy Berg, Ethics"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." -- Emily Jackson, Modern Law Review
Book Description
Provides a sustained argument of an emotionally charged debate
About the Author
Kate Greasley, Lecturer in Law, University College London
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.
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Oxford University Press (March 19, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 280 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0198766785
- ISBN-13 : 978-0198766780
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.3 x 1 x 6.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,678,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #476 in Right to Die Family & Health Law
- #515 in Living Wills
- #22,937 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2022
- Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2024Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, you should read this book. I became aware of it by Ezra Klein's interview with the author. Because Kate Greasley was articulate and handled the topic with considerable charity and tact (despite Klein's awkward inability to follow her reasoning), I was impressed enough to purchase the book.
I am by no means an expert on the topic of abortion, but I have read a handful of academic books on the subject (for and against), specifically this book by Greasley, Boonin's _A Defense of Abortion_, Beckwith's _Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice_, and George & Tollefsen's _Embryo: A Defense of Human Life_. Eventually I will read Kaczor's book, _The Ethics of Abortion_, which I have heard is one of the best treatments. Of the books I have read, Greasley's is the best defense of abortion and probably the highest quality work over all. But it is comparable to the other books mentioned, so if you can follow those works, you will have no problem reading this one.
I gave this book 4 stars (even though I am pro-life) because it is a well-researched and well-written. Unfortunately, it does not merit a 5-star score because the author fails to prove her thesis that personhood is ontically vague and therefore abortion is permissible. This is a glaring omission in the book which frankly I cannot explain.
Greasley distinguishes between arguments for abortion which are predicated on the fetus not being a human, on the one hand, and arguments which are not so predicated, on the other. She defends the former class of arguments. In other words, she thinks that abortion, to be morally justified, cannot be the deliberate destruction of a human person. In order to defend this approach, she must answer authors like Thompson and Boonin who argue that abortion would be morally justified even if the fetus is a person (think: the violinist thought experiment). Her response to Boonin is extremely thorough and convincing--worth the price of the book in itself. Because Greasley is competent in both philosophy and Anglo-American law, she is uniquely qualified to approach the subject in a comprehensive way. Seemingly without knowing it, Greasley independently depends something approximating Roman Catholic moral-theological distinctions between "ordinary" and "extraordinary" medical care, "killing" and "letting die," and so on. (At least, it seems to me that that is what she was doing.) She rejects violinist style arguments unequivocally:
"The GST [Good Samaritan Thesis] claims that, if anything, the duty not to abort is the duty to render positive assistance to another--the duty to help rather than to refrain from harming--but that no such duty is owed to a human fetus by a pregnant woman. The thesis will therefore appear to be wrong if either one of two things is true: 1. There is almost always a positive obligation on a pregnant woman to continue to gestate a fetus-person through to birth, or 2. Aborting the fetus is not an omission, a failure to save the fetus, but an act of killing, in prima facie breach of the negative obligation to refrain from seriously harming others. If either of these propositions were true, continuing an unwanted pregnancy would not be an act of good samaritanism. It is my contention here that the second proposition is true--that is, that abortion is not the mere failure to save a fetus but the positive act of terminating its life. If this is right, it will be enough on its own to refute the GST without needing to establish any positive obligation on the part of a pregnant woman to aid her fetus by gestating it."
In my opinion, the author does a good job defending her claim.
She also spends some time critiquing Dworkin's defense of abortion. This part of the book was particularly interesting for me, an American reader with interest in the Supreme Court. To make a long story short, the author makes Dworkin look rather foolish.
The book is less convincing, however, when it turns to the question of personhood. Greasley is compelled to argue that in most abortions, the fetus is not a person. To do this, she argues against what she calls "punctualism," which is the notion that personhood comes into existence in an instant, rather than gradually. Her own thesis is therefore not surprisingly called "gradualism." Despite the clarity and rigor of the previous parts of the book, this (crucial) part was utterly unconvincing. If I were to summarize Greasley's argument in my own terms, it would go like this: If it is possible to construct a sorites paradox for some property P, then ontic vagueness is true for P. Then she presents sorites-style spectrums for the property of personhood to disprove punctualism. This requires some explanation. As background, consider the famous sorites problem of the heap. Suppose you have only one grain of sand. Clearly that is not a "heap." What about two grains? Still not a heap. What about 10,000 grains? Well, clearly you have a heap at that point. But where is the cut-off point between non-heapness and heapness? These are well-known problems in the history of philosophy, and philosophers generally fall into two camps: ontological or epistemological. If you believe that heapness is ontically vague, you will deny that there is some number N such that N-1 grains of sand is not a heap but N grains of sand is a heap. In other words, there are extramental vague properties, and heapness is one of them. But if you take an *epistemic* approach, you will say there really is some number N which makes a heap, so that the property of heapness is only vague owing to limits of human cognition. In short, defenders of epistemic vagueness would say "there is an N, we just don't know what it is," whereas defenders of ontic vagueness would say, "there is no N."
Anyone familiar with the controvery over vagueness knows that it would be unwarranted to conclude from the mere fact that a sorites-style spectrum can be made for personhood that personhood is therefore ontically vague. But this unwarranted leap is exactly what the author does. Having read Williamson's treatment of vagueness (which is considered one of the best in the literature), I was shocked that she didn't defend herself better. She apparently assumes that since personhood is a vague property, it must be ontically vague rather than epistemically vague. Without argument, this amounts to bare assertion, especially when many philosophers are convinced that ontic vagueness is impossible to defend (see Williamson). It is perhaps difficult to see that her argument is this weak because it is wrapped in lengthy analogies with the famous brain-cell and species-membership sorites paradoxes. "What the spectrum shows us," she writes, "is that [...] punctualism is nonetheless difficult to defend, since it seems clearly to be the case both that there are examples of persons and non-persons along the spectrum, and that no individual variation marks that difference." My own paraphrase of that reasoning: "If there is a sorites-style spectrum for personhood, then personhood is vague with ontic vagueness." Confirming my interpretation of her arguments, she later says this:
"If we really believed that there is a sharp borderline between human material and persons, we could comfortably claim that *if* any of these hypothetical continuums were possible, there would be a precise variation with which personhood begins, even if we cannot say for sure which it is. But it is exactly this claim that the spectrum thought-experiments show to be implausible, for there is simply no reason to believe that a sharp borderline exists between any two neighbouring variations on any of the spectrums."
Replace "persons" with the word "heaps" in that argument, and you can see just how vacuous it is. It's frankly not a serious philosophical argument. Actually, it begs every major question in the literature on vagueness and is accordingly a flimsy foundation on which to base the legal right to abortion. The author has merely *restated* the sorites paradox; she hasn't solved it. Besides, there are many "meta" reasons--based on the logical problems with any attempt to account for ontic vagueness formally--for rejecting ontic vaguenes for any property.
In conclusion, this book has actually done a service to the pro-life cause. It effectively refutes every major defense of abortion in the literature, and also convincingly shows that if fetuses are persons, then abortion is unethical. But when it comes to proving that the fetus is not a person, the author simply begs the question of ontic vagueness, which is to say she leaves no pro-abortion argument standing in the end.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2019Decent book. Some arguments are better than others, e.g. her arguments against Thomson's 'famous violinist' were quite good. However, her argument for the vagueness of the concept of personhood was underwhelming at best. The section on law was pretty solid overall as well.
I suggest bypassing this book and reading her debate book with Christopher Kaczor "Abortion Rights: For and Against." You get the same arguments, but more succinct. Plus, you get to see some interesting interaction between the two.