ABSTRACT
From numerous conversations over the years with colleagues, students, and friends as well as the consistent results of opinion polls over the last two decades, it seems clear that most people, if only at an intuitive level, experience a deep sense of moral ambiguity about the issue of abortion. They express genuine moral qualms about the current regime of abortion virtually on demand because of the high rate of abortions it annually produces. Yet, at the same time, they do not favor the abolition of legal abortion in toto because it appears to them that in some circumstances recourse to abortion is warranted. They balk at counterintuitive claims from the pro-life camp that a zygote, embryo, or undeveloped fetus is already a full-fledged “person” such that its destruction constitutes an act of murder. But their common moral sense also leads them to reject the cavalier dismissal of the value of prenatal life emanating from pro-choice quarters. As a result, they cannot bring themselves to view even early abortions as just another surgical procedure to remove some bodily tissue. They find later abortions, when the fetus has already developed an undeniably human form, particularly troubling.
