Mary Anne Warrens The Abortion Issue Essay -- Abortion Issue Mary War

Mary Anne Warren’s â€Å"The Abortion Issue† In Mary Anne Warren’s â€Å"The Abortion Issue,† children are not persons in the empirical sense. Warren believes that prior to a certain point in a pregnancy, the child does not have â€Å"the capacity to understand† the ramifications of what an abortion would be, therefore the abortion does not infringe upon the rights of the unborn fetus. She states that: â€Å"†¦in the ways that matter from a moral point of view, human fetuses are very unlike human persons, particularly in their early months of development†(152). In essence, personhood as defined by Warren can only come after the first trimester. Before that time, the fetus does not have the sentience that would make it a person. Warren’s main criteria for what makes a person will be considered first, then we will move on to her argument on sentience, and the differences she notes between a fetus and an infant. As she states in her paper, there are five main categories that empirically place something as a person. They include sentience, or conscious behavior, such as awareness of our surroundings, rationality: the ability to respond according to what affects us, self-concept: the ability to understand what we are, self-motivated behavior: the planning and carrying out of our own beliefs and thoughts beyond how we are externally affected, and linguistic capacity, or the use of a system to convey messages. Warren does not raise the answers to already obvious arguments when considering these ...