Re-defining pro-life: Why a consistent ethics of life should not oppose abortion.

摘要

This thesis seeks to establish a philosophical foundation on which to argue that actually, pro-choice and pro-life should be understood as complementary terms, rather than as opposing terms. It discusses different ways of situating the term life as ethically-significant, and develops a definition of an ethics of life that is independent of a pro-choice or anti-choice stance on abortion. Drawing upon the notion of a consistent ethics of life as a fruitful place to seek out a broader meaning of the term pro-life, it first considers two anti-choice attempts at constructing such an ethics. The first is a conservative Catholic ethics of life, as presented in John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae and in Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's seamless garment conception of ethics. The second is based in pro-life feminism, which argues that through abortion, women capitulate to a patriarchal logic that violates the biological orientation of women toward nurturing and relationality.;Both of these ethical programmes, this thesis argues, fulfill the minimum criteria necessary to be recognizable as an ethics of life. But despite their aspirations toward consistency, both nonetheless fail to offer an adequate ethics of life. First, they engage in feminine stereotyping, defining women as morally incompetent and limiting their self-determination by continually identifying women with motherhood. Second, they provide a distorted characterization of human life, in which the temporal context of that life, and its relationship to the lives of non-human species, are both occluded. Third, they engage in irresponsible optimism by assuming that it is always good to bring more life into the world. This consequences of this assumption include an unrealistic romanticization of motherhood and of childrearing, and an inability to honestly face up to such issues as overpopulation and environmental degradation.;Finally, this thesis offers an alternative to anti-choice attempts at constructing a consistent ethics of life. Drawing upon the work of Grace Jantzen and Hannah Arendt, it proposes an "ethics of flourishing" in which the natality of women, the embodied realities of women's lives, and women's status as a who instead of a what, are all fully acknowledged. Such acknowledgement, the thesis argues, ultimately requires a pro-choice stance if it is to be genuine.