ç Abortion Revisited: Toward an Understanding of theV Nature of the Woman-Fetus Relationship

The abortion debate, as presented by the prolife and prochoice perspectives, should end, as it leads neither to solution nor to compromise. Rather, we need to reconsider how to understand the moral issues involved in this controversy for they touch on how we understand ourselves as a people, how we understand women’s experience of pregnancy, and how such understanding affects what is considered important to us as a community. We need to move away from the “rights ” perspective (from both fetal and maternal rights) in order to open other possibilities of understanding this issue. Ipropose that a more informed under standing of the nature of pregnancy itself can give a way to revisit this difficult and seemingly intractable moral controver sy and begin a more fruitful dialogue. The Inadequacy of the Rights Approach for Abortion First, I suggest that, although there are certain appeals, the rights approach has a number of limitations. The rights ap proach takes a relatively simplistic, linear view of pregnancy, with the view of fetus and woman as distinct beings. It argues for personhood of the fetus in the prolife camp and right of privacy and against the obligation of women to use their bodies to support fetal life in the prochoice camp (Meilaender, 1989). The rights approach is simplistic in that it ignores the com plexity of the woman-fetus relationship and supports the belief that taking sides for either the woman or the fetus will solve the problem. Second, the notion that an unwanted pregnancy is a problem to be solved is also questionable. Undergirding the problem solving approach is a technological attitude, an attitude that values diagnosis of specific causes in order to provide intervention which may alter or correct the problem. Such an approach is appropriate and necessary for problems that are technical in nature (Braine & Lesser, 1988). The unwanted pregnancy, how ever, is not such a situation. The unwanted pregnancy, as em bodied by the woman, is a situation filled with personal physica