Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 12:30pm to Friday, October 23, 2015 - 1:55pm
Location: 
Room FA3, Falconer Hall, 84 Queen's Park

PLEASE NOTE LOCATION

HEALTH LAW, ETHICS & POLICY SEMINAR SERIES 

presents 

Kate Greasley
Stowell Junior Research Fellow in Law
University of Oxford 

Abortion, Feminism, and ‘Traditional’ Moral Philosophy 

Commentator:
Rebecca J. Cook, C.M., M.P.A., J.D., J.S.D., F.R.S.C.
Professor Emerita, Faculty Chair in International Human Rights
& Co-Director, International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme
Faculty of Law, Faculty of Medicine, and Joint Centre for Bioethics
University of Toronto 

12:30 – 2:00
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Room FA3 – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park 

A certain strain of feminist ethics has long been critical of the way that ‘traditional’ moral philosophy has approached the abortion problem. Among other things, discussions of abortion in mainstream philosophy have been criticised for paying inadequate attention to the unique features of pregnancy and to the ‘context’ in which abortion occurs. This paper begins by offering an apologetic for mainstream philosophical approaches to abortion, arguing that the feminist ethics critique of its methodology is misplaced. From there I set out to appraise the main substantive argument about abortion morality found in feminist contributions. This is the argument that abortion rights are morally defensible, and essential as a matter of justice, because women’s reproductive control is necessary for the furtherance of sex equality. I make the rather strong claims that the sex equality argument is neither necessary nor sufficient for a philosophical defence of abortion. However, this does not mean that sex equality is unimportant in abortion analysis. In the last part of the paper, I provide a few reasons why the sex equality argument still matters, particularly for legal defences of abortion rights, even if it is unnecessary and insufficient for justifying abortion morally.

 

A light lunch will be served. 

 

For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca