Thinking through abortion ethics in the classroom
What if we began with character, my students and I asked, rather than rights?
This fall I taught a class on abortion, after 15 years of giving it a single week in my bioethics class. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade presented an opportunity to wade through the waters of what is arguably America’s most intense moral debate.
Our society tends to make abortion all about rights. Is there a basic right to abortion, and how does a woman’s right to her body relate to a fetus’s right to life? Roe decided that the mother’s rights trumped those of the fetus based on a constitutional right to privacy.
Around the same time, philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote the influential essay “A Defense of Abortion.” She used a series of thought experiments to lead readers to the conclusion, “If a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body.” Thomson’s exasperation spoke for many: “Women have said again and again ‘This is my body!’ and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind.” Dorothy Roberts’s book Killing the Black Body showed how the disregard piled up disproportionately for women of color, lending further moral weight to Roe’s legal rights.
