Abortion, Moral Justification, and Argumentation. Some Answers to Héctor Hernández

Abstract

A couple of years ago I published a brief paper at Erasmus, an Argentinean philosophical journal, trying to defend a position to offer a justification, given certain conceptual and normative conditions for the woman abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Several of the arguments offered in this work were challenged by Hector Hernandez. In his review, Hernandez shows an interest in the plausibility or validity of several of my arguments. But it seems to show no interest in the substantive issue of whether it is morally right or not to allow abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. In this paper, I attempt to answer his criticisms. To this purpose, I show some of the links that can be established between the substantive issue of abortion as a moral issue, and the need for setting a rational arguments that allow us to justify an answer on whether it is morally permissible or not allow abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.