Due to personal reasons and to some of my friends' personal life experiences, I have been finding myself lately more and more engaged in thinking about abortion. A lot of material has been written about this subject, and I have personally studied it in University; I also find a lot of posts and links on Facebook, usually published by anti-Christian or anti-religious groups, and sometimes by representatives of the feminist movement ( I would like to clarify right away how I am NOT against feminist per se: in fact, I share a lot of their believes).
Abortion has been in use and illegal for many centuries, while in the last decades it has become a common and substantially accepted practice in most countries ( first of all, of course, in first world countries); certainly a change in the religious, sociological and juridical situation has had an enormous influence on the way we had discussed and looked at this practice in the last few years but, while a lot of attention has been given to the juridical aspect of the discussion, not enough has been given to the moral ( and with "moral" I certainly don't mean religious) aspect of abortion.
This is, obviously, the aspect of the debate that has raised in me the most problematic questions: what I mean is that what I am really interest in is to give an answer to the question: " Are there moral reasons that justify the possibility of abortion, independently from the existence or not of good reasons that make it in certain situations juridically acceptable?"
As much as I can I'll try to provide an overall summary of the late philosophical debate over this matter; I will examine different opinions and then try to get some conclusions out of this whole work.
I have always believed that we can be against or favorable to anything, but we are morally responsible to be able to give an explanation of our thoughts and opinions; I hope this series of posts will not be too boring, and that it will be able to get an interesting debate started.
Enjoy :-)
