Tag: Abortion

Science can do many things. Since the scientific revolution, we increasingly get the feeling that science can do anything it sets its mind—or calibrates its microscopes—to do. But, of course, that’s not true. There are things that science simply cannot do. One of those things is settle the abortion...

Over the last two posts, I have discussed the suggestion, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics, that parents (or the state) should be able to kill their infants if they discover a defect or hardship that would have led them to have aborted the baby before birth. Much...

Yesterday I posted about the Journal of Medical Ethics' article about “post-birth abortions.” In this post I’d like to focus on one important aspect of that article: their definition of personhood. Few questions could be more important than this: what makes a person? The way we answer this question reveals...

The Journal of Medical Ethics recently published an article advocating “post-birth abortions.” Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, who wrote the article, argue that there are many cases where women have abortions because having a child would be physically, psychologically, or economically difficult for them. But what if these hardships...

As I mentioned some time ago, I love Freakonomics. Steven Levitt, an economics professor at Chicago University, and Stephen Dubner, a journalist, teamed up to write two books—Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics—which explore “the hidden side of everything.” Levitt brilliantly manipulates and interprets statistical data in order to find why things...