Noonan is a professor of law at the University of California Berkeley. He has some persuasive points to state that abortion is
immoral. Most of the points are based on the view of theology.
Human always defined a person who is rational. In the words
of rational, theologian called ensoulment. Theologian can be analyzed as a
refusal to discriminate among human beings on the basis of their varying
potentialities. Once conceived, the being was recognized as man because he had
man’s potential. The criterion for humanity, thus, was simple and
all-embracing: if you are conceived by human parents, you are human.
The law in US stated that the abortion is illegal if the
fetus is older than 8 weeks. But mere length of life is not an exact measure. The
reason is different racial groups with different ages at which their fetuses
are viable. Some evidence, for example, suggests that Negro fetuses mature more
quickly than white fetuses. In additional, Humanity depends on formation by
experience. At an earlier stage the zygote is certainly alive and responding to
its environment. It is not clear why experience as such confers humanity.
Fetus has sentiments of adults. When movements in the woman
womb manifest a vigorous presence demanding joyful recognition by the parents.
Yet feeling is notoriously an insure guide to the humanity of others. Many
groups of humans have had difficulty in feeling that person of another tongue,
color, religion, sex, are as human as they. Nor can touch provide the test; a
being confined by sickness, out of touch with others, does not thereby seems to
lose his humanity.
Human defined that fetus does not have the social visible. Excluded
from the society of men, the fetus is excluded from the humanity of men. This
distinction is to be rejected. If humanity depends on social recognition,
individuals or whole groups may be dehumanized by being denied any status in
their society. For example, in the Roman empire, for example, condemnation to
slavery meant the practical denial of most human rights. In the Chinese
communist world, landlords have been classified as enemies of the people and so
treated as nonpersons by the state. Humanity does not depend on social
recognition, though often the failure of society to recognize the prisoner, the
alien, the heterodox as human has led to the destruction of human beings.
Anyone conceived by a man and a woman is human. Recognition of this condition
by society follows a real event in the objective order, however imperfect and
halting the recognition. Any attempt to limit humanity to exclude some group
runs the risk of furnishing authority and precedent for excluding other groups
in the name of the consciousness or perception of the controlling group in the
society.
Philosopher is to ask how he reasons about moral questions
without supposing that there is a sense in which he and the other to whom he
speaks are human. Second answer is to ask if he does not believe that there is
a right and wrong way of deciding moral questions. He stated that moral
judgments often rest on distinctions, but if the distinctions are not to appear
arbitrary fiat, they should relate to some real difference in probabilities.
The total inability of the fetus to speak
for itself and the fact that the right of the fetus regularly at stake is the
right to life itself. The principles of double effect was no
doctrine fallen from heaven, but a method of analysis appropriate where two
relative values were being compared.
In Catholic moral theology, as it developed,
life even of the innocent was not taken as an absolute. Judgments on acts
affecting life issued from a process of weighing. In the weighing, the fetus
was always given a value greater than zero, always a value separate and
independent from its parents. Even with
the fetus weighed as human, one interest could be weighed as equal or superior:
that of the mother in her own life.
