he exclusion of the unbornfrom the sphere of rights and protection, Callahan argues, is
analogous to the exclusion of women in unjust, patriarchal
systems where “lesser orders of human life are granted rightsonly when wanted, chosen, or invested with value by the
powerful” (Callahan, p. 368). Moreover, to grant a right to
abortion in the name of women’s privacy or autonomy
validates the view that pregnancy and child-rearing are the
sole responsibility of individual women, relieving men and
the community from any responsibility. Thus “women will
never climb to equality and social empowerment over mounds
of dead fetuses …” (Callahan, p. 371). To exercise moral
autonomy, Callahan argues, requires responsiveness and
responsibility not only to what is wanted or chosen, but to
what is unwanted and unchosen as well. Callahan makes no
exceptions for pregnancy due to rape, arguing that even the
involuntarily pregnant woman has “a moral obligation to
the now-existing, dependent fetus whether she explicitly
consented to its existence or not” (Callahan, p. 370).
Margaret Olivia Little argues that the literature on
abortion deeply undersells the moral complexity of abortion,
focusing too much on a thin moral assessment of its
permissibility. She proposes that what is needed in the moral
discussion of abortion is an ethics of gestation that addresses
questions of “what it means to play a role in creating a
person, how to assess responsibilities that involve sharing,
not just risking, one’s body and life, what follows from the
fact that the entity in question is or would be one’s child.”
(Little, p. 493). A more complex moral interpretation must
move beyond questions of metaphysical and moral statusand
permissibility to consider abortion’s “placement on the
scales of decency, respectfulness, and responsibility”
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