The Ethics of Abortion
About this episode
Klein interviews Oxford law professor and moral philosopher Kate Greasley about the ethics of abortion itself, rather than the law. Greasley, author of 'Arguments About Abortion,' lays out the core philosophical positions: when and why an embryo or fetus becomes a person, whether potentiality or actual capacities like consciousness matter, and how bodily-autonomy arguments interact with fetal moral status. The conversation works through Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous violinist analogy, the 'twinning' objection, late-term and selective abortions, the ethics of IVF and embryo selection, and the idea of moral status as a spectrum rather than an on-off switch. Greasley pushes back on both slogans — the fetus as mere tissue and the embryo as a person from conception — arguing that the hardest questions sit in the gray area in between, where most real abortions actually occur.