title: 'To arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time': Heidegger, phenomenology, the way human beings first appear in the world, and fresh perspectives on the abortion debate.
abstract: Intellectual stalemate in the abortion debate can be traced in part to its being framed as a standoff between religion and secular philosophy. While the former is thought to generate a broadly 'pro-life' position, the latter is associated with more 'pro-choice' thinking. This essay attempts to break free of this framing by criticising the philosophy informing 'pro-choice' positions, but not by resorting immediately to religious arguments but rather by drawing upon a rival philosophical tradition--the movement within twentieth and twenty-first Continental philosophy which was and is phenomenology. A phenomenological approach to human 'emergence', and in particular an application of the framework Heidegger developed in Being and Time (1927), leads to a radical questioning of whether contemporary English-speaking beginning-of-life ethics have adequately taken into account the way human beings come forth in the world.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mumford
mesh_terms: D000028:Abortion, Induced / Q000941:ethics*; D000022:Abortion, Spontaneous; D033421:Beginning of Human Life / Q000941:ethics*; D028663:Ethical Theory; D005086:Existentialism; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D010684:Philosophy; D011247:Pregnancy; D012068:Religion and Medicine