This paper examines the ethical and moral dimensions of partial-birth (late-term) abortion, using the case of Tammy Watts — a woman who sought an intact dilation and extraction procedure after learning her fetus had trisomy 13 — as a central decision scenario. The paper reviews the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, analyzing the competing ethical arguments both for and against the Court's decision. It considers charges of political and religious bias among the majority justices, pro-life arguments characterizing the procedure as infanticide, and pro-choice arguments grounded in physician autonomy and women's rights. The paper concludes by recommending a moral framework based on the Principle of Respect for Autonomy and the Principle of Least Harm.
The paper demonstrates applied ethical reasoning by mapping a live legal and political controversy onto established moral principles. Rather than simply reporting competing opinions, it evaluates each position's internal logic — for example, noting that Koukl's infanticide argument fails to account for cases where the mother's life is at risk — and then derives a normative recommendation grounded in bioethical theory.
The paper is organized around a series of guiding questions that progress logically: it opens with the ethical problem, introduces the case scenario, reviews the court ruling, maps competing ethical positions, and closes with a moral recommendation. This question-driven structure suits an applied ethics paper and helps readers follow the argument's development step by step. The Works Cited section follows standard academic documentation practice.
When a pregnant woman learns that her baby is dying inside her — and that this may put her own life in the balance — even if that discovery was not made until her eighth month of pregnancy, is it ethical or moral for her to have an abortion? Conversely, does the government (state, federal, regional, or local) have the moral authority to tell a pregnant woman she cannot have a late-term abortion, even though she may die without one? These questions, and others related to partial-birth (or late-term) abortion, are reviewed and critiqued in this paper. Both sides of the issue are presented.
Tammy Watts learned during her eighth month of pregnancy that her baby had trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that causes severe deformities with no hope that the child would survive birth. The procedure she sought was technically termed "intact dilation and extraction," also known as the partial-birth abortion procedure. Watts and other women who had undergone partial-birth abortions due to life-and-death circumstances testified before Congress that they may have died had they not gone through with their late-term abortions. One of those women, Vikki Stella, stated: "No women have these procedures for trivial reasons… they have them because it's their own choice."
The Court acknowledged that women have a constitutional right to choose abortion, but it also asserted that the government "has a legitimate interest in protecting potential human life." This tension was the heart of the 2007 ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart. When PBS anchor Bob Abernethy noted that the five justices in the majority are Roman Catholic and asked what they would say about the relationship between their religious ethics and this ruling, the response was that religion had nothing to do with the decision — that the justices were simply interpreting the Constitution.
Many pro-choice leaders were upset with the Court's 2007 decision in part because, just a few years earlier, the Court had rejected a similar ban on a 5-4 vote. What changed in the interim was that President George W. Bush appointed two conservatives to the High Court as two other justices retired, shifting the balance of the majority.
The case in question — Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) — was viewed by many observers as a political statement by the five Republican justices, who also happen to be Roman Catholic, representing the majority on the Court. President George W. Bush, elected in large part with the support of conservative Christians, placed two of the five majority members on the bench. Both Catholics and Republicans tend to find abortion in any form objectionable.
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