Episode Details

** We’re talking about abortion in this episode, and occasionally we mention sexual abuse and violence. Nothing graphic, we promise. But some listeners may find what follows distressing. Be safe. **

We're weighing up the arguments of the Pro Choice and Pro Life movements. Perhaps we can convince you that the case against abortion - the pro-life case - isn’t as dumb and mean as it's often portrayed to be, and nor does it depend on religious dogma.

This episode is sponsored by Zondervan's new book The Global Church: The First Eight Centuries by Donald Fairbairn.

LINKS

• Read Judith Jarvis Johnson's groundbreaking article about abortion, where she offered the violinist thought experiment as a way to illustrate bodily autonomy: A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Autumn, 1971), pp 47-66. 
• Get to know our guest, Professor Margaret Somerville.
  • Read Somerville's book that first introduced her to John, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit
• Say hi to our guest, Dr Emma Wood.
• Here's some more info on Professor Michael Tooley, Emma mentions as we speak with her. He wrote a very influential book called Abortion and Infanticide in the 1980s, where he argues that an entity can't possess a right to life unless it has the capacity to desire its continued existence. 
• Here's the article called 'Reasons why women have induced abortions: a synthesis of findings from 14 countries', published in the journal, Contraception, in 2017.
• And here are the statistics on numbers of abortions worldwide, from the Guttmacher Institute
• Here's some more on Professor Peter Singer's argument in favour of abortion:
  "When a woman has an abortion, the fetus is alive, and it is undoubtedly human – in the sense that it is a member of the species homo sapiens. It isn't a dog or a chimpanzee ... But mere membership of our species doesn't settle the moral issue of whether it is wrong to end a life. As long as the abortion is carried out at less than 20 weeks of gestation – as almost all abortions are – the brain of the fetus has not developed to the point of making consciousness possible." He goes on: "Admittedly, birth is in some ways an arbitrary place to draw the line at which killing the developing human life ceases to be permissible, and instead becomes murder ... A prematurely born infant may be less developed than a late-term fetus. But the criminal law needs clear dividing lines and, in normal circumstances, birth is the best we have."
• Here's Don Marquis' article that we spend a lot of time on in the second half of this episode: "Why Abortion is Immoral", in the Journal of Philosophy vol.86, no.4 (April 1989), pages 183-202: "The claim that the primary wrong-making feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identica