Mary Anne Warren is one of the top advocates for keeping abortion legal without any restrictions on it. She states that the morality of abortion is dependent on the moral status of the baby, not simply on the rights of the mother. She criticizes those who defend abortion as the right to control one’s body: “it is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property…” (The Monist, pg. 44) Using this analogy she shows that just because the fetus is inside us it does mean we have a right to terminate it. She starts off her argument by defining the difference between a human being and a person. The first is part of genetic humanity and the latter is part of moral humanity. She says that genetic humanity is not sufficient for moral humanity. She suggests that the “moral community consists of all and only people, rather than all and only human beings.” (The Monist, pg. 54) If you are a person you have moral status and your rights should be respected, if you are not a person none of that applies to you. So, she says, all she has to do is prove that a fetus is not a person, and that will prove that abortion is in fact moral. But, the vital question is, if not all human beings are people, than how do we define “people”, or those that have moral status and a right to life? There are five characteristics that classify you as a person, those being: 1) consciousness (of objects and events external and or internal to the being), 2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems), 3) self-motivate activity (that which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control), 4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on in...
