Midterm Paper Term Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Midterm - Term Paper ExamplePro-choice According to consequentialist theory, the results or consequences of actions (i.e. pain versus pleasure) be the primary relevant feature in evaluating actions. Consequentialist defending abortion rights typically argue that without the opportunity to decide independently issues essential to ones being and existence, such as reproduction, ones critical faculties and moral enlightenment atomic number 18 compromised. Reproductive choice is a freedom so fundamental to ones being that to withhold it from women is also to threaten their personhood by suppressing precisely those abilities that make one compassionate the conscience and the intellect (Luker 77). Put another way, denying women reproductive choice--turning the fact that women can take in children into the assumption that they (legally or quasi legally) should--will make them in some prevention less human by essentially turning off their intellect and moral faculties, the sine qua non of humanness. In Beauvoirs terms, a capable actor is one feature of moral and intellectual freedoms. Without these freedoms, political participation, democracys modus operandi, is either hampered by a diminished quality of participation, as certain disadvantaged groups participate less effectively, or is raw impaired, as these groups are so reduced in their humanity as to feel incapable, or excluded or alienated from the process. Without reproductive rights, including the right to choose or not choose abortion, individuals are denied freedoms so fundamental to their humanity, their intellect and morality, as to be ill-served to undertake any effective political and social engagement. The control of ones frame denied by abortion prohibitions is the most basic civil right in democratic society, with deep roots in American political sustenance. In 1891, the motor lodge stated The right to ones person may be said to be a right of complete immunity to be let alone (Union Pacific, R. R. v. Botsford, 251). In her exhaustive analysis of abortion rights, Christine Luker borrows from Herbert Marcuse to argue that control of ones clay is a precondition of conscious engagement in social life (Christine 74). Marcuse posits that a connectedness with ones body is a precondition for the development of personality and the participation of individuals in social life (Herbert 72-78). Luker writes, drawing on Marcuses theory of the body and political activity, that control over ones body is a fundamental aspect of this immediacy, this receptivity that is open and that opens itself to experience , which is a requirement of being a person and attractive in conscious activity (Luker 4). Thus the right to chart ones reproductive destiny helps to ensure that womens humanity comprising their feelings, intellect, and spiritual nature is not being suppressed, that they are not being relegated to the status of other where they languish in immanence and stagnation. In being denied t he right to make the choice of whether or not to bear a child by being deprived of a right to abortion, women are not only denied the right to undertake the complicated moral reason and critical thought necessary for a decision in this important matter, but they are, more fundamentally, diminished as people. The reproductive choice is left, entirely in the hands of doctors (who decide as they see fit whether or not bearing a child will harm the pregnant woman). For this