Abortion and Rights

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the logical fallacies in George and Sheila Grant's 1986 article, "Abortion and Rights". Particularly, the paper looks at the Grants' use of a faulty premise, their use of ad hominem arguments and their appeals to the reader's sympathy, their use of the "slippery slope" argument and their use of appeals to antiquity and to authority.
In the end, the paper argues that these logical shortcomings diminish the force of their arguments even in the eyes of readers who are inclined to share their position.

From the Paper:

"To begin with, it may be said - even though this writer is sympathetic to the argument presented in many ways - that they (the Grants) are guilty of producing a faulty (or at least highly dubious) premise in one of the central arguments of her paper. For instance, when discussing the controversial 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, the Grants state that the High Court chose to resolve the case on the basis of individuals having inalienable rights within a democratic society. But, in settling the case in the manner it did, the Court essentially concluded that the mother has all of the rights and the fetus has no rights at all. As George and Sheila Grant argue, by negating the rights of the fetus - by making it non-existent - the Court is stating that the fetus has no right to continued existence. At this juncture, the authors become guilty of injecting their faulty premise into the proceedings. Specifically, they assert that, since the fetus is the same species as the mother, the fundamental question becomes the following: what is it about the mother (or any person) that makes it appropriate for her to have any rights herself (118)? The question is a faulty one inasmuch as there is no acknowledgement of the possibility that the fetus is not really "human" at all; in other words, if it cannot live independently outside the womb, if its basic organs are not sufficiently developed to allow it to live in the same environment that humans live in, and if it cannot "think" or excogitate in the way that human beings can, then perhaps the fetus is (as feminists often state) merely a bundle of cells. Naturally enough, if the fetus can be differentiated from the human family, then it can also be differentiated from the mother; to wit, just because a fetus does not have certain inalienable rights does not mean that the mother should not have certain inalienable rights. On this basis, the couple predicates their argument upon a premise that may very well not stand up to scrutiny. As an addendum, it could be argued that they commit a formal fallacy inasmuch as they compose a deductive argument - humans have rights; fetuses are human; therefore, fetuses must have rights - that is (maybe) probable, but certainly not "air-tight" because there is too much uncertainty over whether or not fetuses (at least in the early stages of pregnancy) really are human.
At the same time, a case can be made that the Grants commit the logical sins of engaging in ad hominem and "appeal to pity" arguments that do not server their paper well. For example, the ad hominem argument takes place - at least in the view of this writer - when the authors write about how history is riddled with terrible examples of persecution carried out by regimes that have decided to leave entire groups of people outside the scope of human rights. As they put it, "Mass murder comes when we forget what a human being is, and begin to regard people as accidental conglomerations of matter" (Grant & Grant, 119). Leaving aside the earlier doubts about the veracity of claiming that fetuses are human, the argument is compromised by the fact that the couple is implicitly associating those who have abortions (or those who carry them out) with mass-murderers who have exterminated (or tried to exterminate) whole classes of people. In this sense, they are launching an ad hominem attack of sorts insofar as they are focusing upon their adversaries and their perceived moral deficiencies and not upon the validity of their arguments."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Grant, George and Sheila Grant. "Abortion and rights." Technology and Justice. Ed. George Grant. Pp.117-130

More papers on Abortion and Rights:

• Article Review # 132691 : "Abortion and Rights" - An Article Review"
• Research Paper # 18395 : "Abortion and the Rights of Minors"
• Term Paper # 94257 : "Abortion and Ethics"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: