O valor das vidas: uma defesa moral do aborto

Abstract

Abortion is the act of ending the life of a fetus, which, under the best circumstances, could become an adult human life. It also involves the interruption of the lives of thousands of women annually in Brazil. This makes it an ethical dilemma. Unfortunately, years of Christian dominance over women's bodies have transformed the issue into a more religious than ethical discussion. The problem addressed in our research is precisely the centralization of the fetus in discussions about the value of life and the devaluation attributed to women. The hypothesis is that this occurs because religion has appropriated ethics and judges issues as if God were morality itself. Our morality in the West is constructed from a Christian perspective, which, therefore, ceases to be merely a religion and becomes cultural. From a Christian point of view, the fetus has a higher value attributed to it than the woman; therefore, women are left aside in the discussion, while they die as a result of clandestine abortions. The objective is to defend the morality of abortion, presenting it primarily as an ethical problem and defending an objective and autonomous ethic, centralizing the value of women's lives in the discussion. Therefore, it is necessary to reformulate the concepts present in the debate. We will begin by presenting three of the main anti-abortion arguments, which will comprise sections 1, 2, and 3 of the first chapter. The remainder of the work will integrate the counter-arguments to these arguments, with each section following the same order as the sections in the first chapter. The second chapter will be its classical philosophical counter-argument, and the third, the counter-argument with the concepts reformulated from a feminist philosophical perspective.