“You Ain’t a Person, and We’ll Keep It That Way”: A Reply to Berkich

Abstract

Don Berkich has argued that the so-called Trajectory Argument for the moral impermissibility of abortion falls short because it fails to establish that an embryo that never becomes a person has the same rights as an embryo that becomes a person. I argue that Berkich’s argument fails to be convincing, since (1) aborting a particular embryo itself causes the embryo not to become a person, and (2) the premise that abortion would be wrong if it were done with the intention of preventing a particular person’s existence assumes that arbitrary killings are somehow better than targeted ones, which is implausible.