of the family. But, according to Warren we don’t have to do that. We’re under no obligation to feed them or care for them once we’ve taken them in. We could abuse them, abandon them, murder them for absolutely no reason if we wanted because they have no moral status and no right to be treated as part of the moral community. It would be completely moral to do all of this. Then there is the last problem I have with her argument, that of where she contradicts herself. When she is responding to the fact that her logic leads to a justification of infanticide she says this is not so because if we killed our babies we would be depriving other people of happiness. There are other couples that would readily raise our children, and if we murdered them than we would be taking away the joy that our baby could possibly bring other parents, and we have no right to do this. In raising this issue she raises many other questions of her argument. If our unwanted child could bring happiness to others and it’s wrong to deprive others of happiness than instead of ever having an abortion why don’t we just give the baby up for adoption? As she said, we don’t want to see them murdered, that’s why we pay for orphanages. Her response to this is that before the fetus was violating the mother’s bodily integrity, so the mother had the right to abort it, but now that the baby is no longer in the mother she doesn’t have a right to kill it. (In Class Notes, Oct. 18th) This is an interesting contraction of a statement earlier in her article where she says that we don’t have a right to kill the fetus simply because it is in us, and she even goes so far as to call this defense of abortion “at best a rather feeble argument… Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property…” (The Monist, pg. 44) Not only does she simply state this, but in...
