Midterm Paper Term Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Midterm - Term Paper Example Pro-choice According to consequentialist theory, the results or consequences of actions (i.e. pain versus pleasure) are the primary relevant feature in evaluating actions. Consequentialist defending abortion rights typically argue that without the opportunity to decide independently issues essential to one's being and existence, such as reproduction, one's critical faculties and moral enlightenment are compromised. Reproductive choice is a freedom so fundamental to one's being that to withhold it from women is also to threaten their personhood by suppressing precisely those abilities that make one human: the conscience and the intellect (Luker 77). Put another way, denying women reproductive choice--turning the fact that women can bear children into the assumption that they (legally or quasi legally) should--will make them in some measure less human by essentially turning off their intellect and moral faculties, the sine qua non of humanness. In Beauvoir's terms, a capable actor is o ne possessed of moral and intellectual freedoms. Without these freedoms, political participation, democracy's modus operandi, is either hampered by a diminished quality of participation, as certain disadvantaged groups participate less effectively, or is altogether impaired, as these groups are so reduced in their humanity as to feel incapable, or excluded or alienated from the process. Without reproductive rights, including the right to choose or not choose abortion, individuals are denied freedoms so fundamental to their humanity, their intellect and morality, as to be ill-served to undertake any effective political and social engagement. The control of one's body denied by abortion prohibitions is the most basic civil right in democratic society, with deep roots in American political life. In 1891, the Court stated: "The right to one's person may be said to be a right of complete immunity: to be let alone" (Union Pacific, R. R. v. Botsford, 251). In her exhaustive analysis of abo rtion rights, Christine Luker borrows from Herbert Marcuse to argue that control of one’s body is a precondition of conscious engagement in social life (Christine 74). Marcuse posits that a connectedness with one's body is a precondition for the development of personality and the participation of individuals in social life (Herbert 72-78). Luker writes, drawing on Marcuse's theory of the body and political activity, that "control over one's body is a fundamental aspect of this immediacy, this receptivity [that is open and that opens itself to experience] ," which is a requirement of being a person and engaging in conscious activity (Luker 4). Thus the right to chart one's reproductive destiny helps to ensure that women's humanity comprising their feelings, intellect, and spiritual nature is not being suppressed, that they are not being relegated to the status of other where they languish in immanence and stagnation. In being denied the right to make the choice of whether or n ot to bear a child by being deprived of a right to abortion, women are not only denied the right to undertake the complicated moral reasoning and critical thought necessary for a decision in this important matter, but they are, more fundamentally, diminished as people. The reproductive choice is left, entirely in the hands of doctors (who decide as they see fit whether or not bearing a child will harm the pregnant woman). For this