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In 1989, Don Marquis presented a non-religious argument supporting the view that abortion is wrong. 1 His strategy was to identify what makes it wrong to kill adult human beings and to ask whether that wrong-making feature is present when fetuses are killed. Marquis claimed that killing adults is wrong because it deprives them of the future experiences they would have had, which typically are valuable. He pointed out that fetuses have futures that are just like the futures of adults, given the natural process in which a fetus develops into an adult. As Marquis put it, killing a fetus deprives it of a "future like ours". According to Marquis, a killing that deprives any individual of a future like ours, also referred to as a "future of value", is seriously wrong and is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being. Marquis's original article was anthologised, 2 and he wrote updated versions that appeared in anthologies. 3 4 These articles resulted in a steady stream of commentary over the years. Several authors have praised Marquis's argument, describing it variously as "the strongest", "the most sophisticated", and "one of the best" secular arguments against abortion. 5 - 7
Although many objections have been raised to Marquis's argument, he has adeptly responded to them. For practically every objection, he has pointed out some type of serious problem. For example, some commentators have interpreted the future-like-ours argument as claiming that only rarely is abortion morally permissible, and based on this interpretation they assert that Marquis does not give enough weight to a woman's right to control her body. 8 - 11 In reply, Marquis has pointed out that the objection misinterprets his argument, which claims that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong, just as killing an adult is prima facie seriously wrong. He has clarified his position, stating that additional arguments are needed to establish that abortion is only rarely permissible (Marquis, p198) 12 and he has put forward such arguments (Marquis, pp235-6). 3 Thus, the objection in question does not undermine Marquis's basic argument.
Other objectors have claimed that an adult's future is not the future of the presentient fetus that preceded it, because the adult and the fetus are not the...