Considering the Mother

In this post I am going to argue against Marquis's anti-abortion ideas. His main argument is that killing a fetus is wrong because it takes away the potential future for the fetus which he believes is the victim. He quickly dismisses the thought that the killing is wrong having anything to do with the person committing the "killing". He says that we shouldn't care about the person doing the act because it brutalizes the person as being the reason for wrongness, but this is all he acknowledges in regard to the person making the choice of having an abortion. I think that there is so much more than just the mother choosing to have an abortion and killing the fetus as the victim. During pregnancy, the fetus is an extension of the mother and therefore I believe the argument cannot be structured as just the mother being the perpetrator and the fetus being the victim because the two are in a very physical sense connected. Therefore I believe that the pregnant women can be viewed as just as much of a victim to the act or not of an abortion in addition to the fetus. She has just as much of a future that is worth valuing and considering the rightness or wrongness of an abortion as the fetus does. I am going to try to clarify this stance with an example. 

Suppose there is a young woman about to pursue her lifelong dream of doing intensive field research in a rainforest. She is bright and has the potential to make groundbreaking discoveries and fulfill her passions. She is in a relationship and she and her partner agree they do not want children and she takes birth control. However, in a rare case her birth control fails and she becomes pregnant anyway despite taking proper contraceptive measures. If she has the child she will have to give up her dreams and may very well resent the child and her partner as a result. While the future that the fetus is still something to seriously consider, she decides that because it is her body that the fetus will be affecting and she has dreams that do not involve motherhood, she chooses to abort it. I believe that this is justifiable because in a case like this, it is not clear cut that there is a victim and a perpetrator because as I stated previously, the fetus is physically an extension of the pregnant woman. The future-value argument that Marquis uses therefore wrongfully separates the mother and the fetus and in order for it to be sound it should consider the future of the pregnant woman as well, which in circumstances, can be more important than that of the fetus. This is not saying that the fetus has absolutely no worth and I am not objecting that there are important considerations to having an abortion for the future of the fetus, but that this is not the sole or necessarily most important consideration to make.