'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. Issue 2 (9th January 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mumford, James
• Is Part Of: New bioethics. Volume 19:Issue 2(2013)
• Page Start: 72
• Page End: 83
• Publication Date: 2014-01-09
• Subjects: abortion -- beginning of life -- ethics -- phenomenology -- philosophy; Bioethics -- Periodicals; Medical genetics -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Periodicals; 174.2
• DOI: 10.1179/2050287713Z.00000000029
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-2877

Abstract

Abstract : By permission of Oxford University Press (www.oup.com). Extract (3679w) from Ch. 3 'Context Neglected', (219w) from Ch. 4 'Grounds for Recognition' and (170w) 'Introduction' from Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A Phenomenological Critique by James Mumford (2013). Free permission: Author's own material. 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.