Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life

In Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life, Jeffrey Reiman argues that an overlooked clue to the solution of the moral problem of abortion lies in the unusual way in which we value the lives of individual human beings_namely, that we value them irreplaceably. We think it is not only wrong to kill an innocent child or adult, but that it would not be made right by replacing the dead one with another living one, or even several. Reiman argues that there are only a limited number of facts that could justify such valuing, with the result that human children and adults have the fullest right to protection of their lives, infants have a lesser but substantial right to such protection, and fetuses do not qualify at all. Leading up to this argument, Reiman presents a survey of Western attitudes and laws about abortion from Hammurabi's Code to Roe v. Wade, and a critical analysis of all the major philosophical arguments on the issue, pro and con. The book is written in straightforward, jargon-free language that makes it accessible to college students at all levels and to the educated lay reader as well.

Jeffrey Reiman is William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at the American University and the author of many books, including Critical Moral Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) and The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. He is coauthor, with Louis Pojman, of The Death Penalty: For and Against (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).