Is Abortion Morally Wrong?
- Letters for Life
Is Abortion Morally Wrong?
By Tamlyn de Beer
In order to determine whether an act is morally wrong, we must begin with two basic questions:
- What is the act?
- What—or who—does the act target?
A further question naturally follows: is the thing being acted upon worthy of moral status?
In many cases, answering the first question already brings moral clarity. In others, it does not. Some acts carry their moral structure within their very description, while others require further clarification—particularly regarding who is affected and whether any harm is intended.
Consider a straightforward case: is knee surgery wrong?
What is the act? It is a medical procedure intended to restore function to a damaged knee. What does it target? A part of the body that is not functioning properly.
The act itself is ordered toward restoring the proper functioning of the body for the good of the person. Even when medical procedures involve the whole body, they are not acts of harm, but of healing. For this reason, knee surgery is not morally wrong.
Now consider a different kind of act: killing. Unlike knee surgery, killing is not morally self-explanatory. Saying that an act causes death does not yet tell us whether it is justified. To understand it, we must clarify both what kind of being is being killed and how the death relates to the intention of the act.
First, consider the kind of being. If someone fumigates a house and kills termites, the targets are termites. Termites do not have moral status, and so the act is morally unproblematic. This is not to say that animals have no moral value, only that they are not moral subjects in the same sense as human beings.
Second, consider intention. Suppose someone kills an attacker in order to stop being killed. Here, the target is a human being—a moral subject. Yet we often judge the act to be justified. Why? Because the aim is not to kill as an end in itself, but to stop an unjust threat. The death of the attacker is a foreseen but unintended side effect of preserving one’s own life.
From this, a key distinction emerges:
- The intentional killing of a being with moral status is unjustified.
- Killing as an unintended side effect, in a proportionate act such as self-defence, can be justified.
With this framework in place, we can now turn to abortion—specifically, elective abortion.
First: what is the act?
It is often described as a “medical procedure used to terminate a pregnancy.” But this description is incomplete. A pregnancy can be “terminated” in different ways. Childbirth, whether natural or via caesarean section, also ends a pregnancy.
Ending a pregnancy is not an abstract event—it occurs in one of two ways: either by delivering the child, or by ending the child’s life.
What makes abortion distinct is how the pregnancy ends.
In abortion, the pregnancy ends because the unborn is intentionally killed. The death is not incidental—it is the means by which the pregnancy is brought to an end.
A more precise definition, then, is this:
Abortion is the intentional killing of the unborn.
The pregnancy ends precisely because the life of the unborn—whose existence constitutes the pregnancy—is ended.
This clarifies what the act is. But it does not yet tell us whether it is morally wrong. For that, we must ask: what is the unborn?
We generally agree that it is wrong to intentionally kill a 30-year-old human being. Why? Because of what—and who—that being is.
So what about the unborn?
The unborn are:
- Distinct – they are not the same organism as the mother or the father.
- Living – they are biologically alive and actively developing.
- Whole – they are not a part of another body, but a complete organism internally directing their own development.
- Members of the human family – they arise from human parents and are, biologically, human organisms.
It is sometimes said that the unborn are “just cells.” But this is true of every living organism, including adult human beings. The relevant question is not whether something is made of cells, but what kind of organism those cells constitute. The unborn are not a random collection of cells, but a unified, self-developing human organism.
For some, establishing that the unborn is a human being is sufficient. Others argue that while the unborn is biologically human, it is not yet a person in the morally relevant sense.
This raises a deeper question: what is a person—and who decides?
There is no clear consensus. Some ground personhood in consciousness, others in sentience, others in viability, and others in a combination of traits. Even among those who appeal to consciousness, there is disagreement—whether it is actual consciousness that matters, or merely the capacity for it; whether degrees of consciousness affect moral status; and how to account for infants or those who are temporarily unconscious.
The difficulty is not just disagreement, but arbitrariness. If moral worth depends on traits that come in degrees, then it becomes unclear where the threshold lies—and who has the authority to set it. More fundamentally, traits do not exist on their own; they must belong to a subject. The question is not simply which traits matter, but what kind of being possesses moral worth such that those traits are relevant at all.
If moral status is grounded in variable characteristics, then it risks becoming variable itself. But we do not ordinarily think that human worth comes in degrees.
The alternative is to ground moral worth in what a being is, rather than in what it can currently do. On this view, a person is a being with a rational nature.
By rational nature, I mean the inherent capacity for reason and moral understanding that belongs to a being by virtue of what it is—even if that capacity is not yet developed or is temporarily not exercisable. A person, then, is not defined by the immediate exercise of rational abilities, but by the kind of being they are.
Human beings are the kind of beings that possess this nature. They do not come in and out of personhood as their abilities change. They are persons by virtue of what they are.
Grounding human worth in what a being is—rather than in variable traits—avoids the arbitrariness and exclusion that trait-based accounts face.
If the unborn are human beings—and human beings are persons by nature—then the unborn are persons.
If this account is correct, then the moral question of abortion does not turn primarily on circumstances, but on the nature of the act and the status of the being acted upon.
And if that is true, then abortion, as the intentional killing of an innocent moral subject, falls into the category of acts that are morally wrong.
A common objection at this point appeals to bodily autonomy. This is an important consideration, but it does not settle the question. The right to bodily autonomy does not ordinarily include the right to intentionally kill an innocent person. Even in cases like self-defence, the death of the other is not intended as a means. Abortion, by contrast, involves the intentional killing of the unborn as the means by which the pregnancy is ended.
Questions of autonomy, difficult circumstances, and competing rights deserve careful treatment. But they depend on first answering a more fundamental question: what is the unborn?
If the unborn is not a person, abortion may be permissible.
If the unborn is a person, then the moral landscape changes entirely.
And so we arrive at the conclusion:
Abortion is morally wrong because it is the intentional killing of a human person.