Consent, Sex, and the Prenatal Rapist: A Brief Reply to McDonaghs’s Suggested Revision of Roe v. Wade

The abortion debate is often understood to hinge on the question of whether or not the fetus is a full-fledged member of the moral community of persons and/or possesses a property or properties that make it the sort of being that it is prima facie wrong to kill. This is the position taken by Justice Harry A. Blackmun in Roe v. Wade as well aspartisans on all sides of the debate. However, over the years, legal and constitutional theorists such as Judith Jarvis Thomson have put forth arguments by which they attempt to make the case that what is doing the moral work in the question of abortion is not fetal personhood but rather the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman.

Volume 17, Number 3 (2003)