The Fatal Position

The Fatal Position « Public Discourse: Chris Meyers’ recent book, The Fetal Position: A Rational Approach to the Abortion Issue, seeks to lay out in the most charitable way all the chief arguments for and against the moral permissibility of abortion. Meyers addresses various aspects of the debate including ensoulment, the pregnant woman’s responsibility for the unborn child, the golden rule argument against abortion, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy. Meyers declines, both at the beginning and end of the volume, to explicitly state his own conclusions about the issue, but consistently the pro-choice perspective is presented as if it were the most rationally compelling.