ssible even it means killing the fetus and offered a number of analogies and/or hypothetical situations to demonstrate her point. Some of her analogies border on the absurd such as attempting to compare a young boy who does not want to share his box of candy with his younger brother to a pregnant woman who does not want to share her body with this unwanted fetus. It is simply not a rational comparison. Equally absurd would be to counterargue that the little brother is already living, the aborted fetus has not been given the opportunity to live. Ronald Dworkin argued that the law should not call abortion murder. For him, this is a First Amendment issue that deals with the separation of church and state. Dworkin's rationale focused on the fact that most religions do not agree on when life actually begins - at conception, as a four-month fetus or at birth. He alleged that abortion was a religious decision and as such should not be restricted by the law. Pope John Paul II, on the other hand, left no question about abortion in the Catholic Church. The Pope has often argued vigorously that abortion is murder and condemns laws that permit abortion as being "intrinsically unjust," "lacking in authentic juridical validity," and not being "morally binding" (Thomson, 1996; p. htm).Dworkin said that there should be an agreement on the sanctity of life, that there is an intrinsic value of life regardless of how it was conceived. But, Dworkin also promotes a "metric of disrespect" which allows him to distinguish between "better" and "worse" abortions and to justify some of the most accepted exceptions to a moral objection to abortion, such as in the cases of incest and rape. In other words, Dworkin does not take a legal stand. He does, however, take a religious stand and bases his arguments from that point of view. He also allows himself a comfortable escape from addressing the morality of abortion by giving exceptions -- his metric of disrespect whi...
