termination of pregnancy

Abortion raises subtle problems for private conscience, public policy, and constitutional law. Most of these problems are essentially philosophical, requiring a degree of clarity about basic concepts that is seldom achieved in legislative debates and letters to newspapers (Feinberg 1984: 1).
The above quote is taken from The Problem of Abortion, an important anthology of articles for anyone with an interest in this particular moral issue. In this paper, I intend to examine the views of two leading philosophical figures in the abortion debate. The emergence of abortion as an ethical issue went hand in hand with the introduction of practical ethics in the 1960s. Indeed as L.W. Sumner pointed out in his book, Abortion and Moral Theory:
As late as two decades ago abortion was nowhere a prominent public issue. In virtually every nation of the world, performing an abortion was, under all but the rarest of circumstances, a criminal act... An organised women’s movement was non-existen...