Utilitarianism is concerned with pleasure and pain. Therefore, one should be concerned with the amounts of pleasure and pain in situations where abortion is permitted as opposed to the amounts of pleasure and pain where abortion is forbidden. It is usually suggested that the main consideration would be the interests of the fetus. Not only can its future life be expectedly happy, it might also be the case that the abortion itself is painful, particularly if it occurs later in the pregnancy. However, this focus on the fetus is unwarranted since any suffering involved in th

Although pro-life suggests that a fetus is just an earlier stage of a human being, science suggests that from 0-18 months, the fetus is not conscious and is in a vegetative state. Like Singer suggests: “If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent to ‘person’ asserting that the fetus is a human being is false. This is because one cannot argue that a fetus is either rational or self-conscious. If on the other hand, ‘human’ is taken to mean no more than member of the species Homo sapiens, then the defense of the life of the fetus is based on a characteristic, lacking moral significance." Since a fetus is not a person, it does not have the same claim to life as a person."

e abortion itself can be avoided by simply aborting the pregnancy sooner (before the fetus has even developed the capability of suffering), or with painless techniques.

In terms of utility, the actual act of abortion is not a particularly significant one. A brief mention must be made of why it is that the relative effects on the community at large are dominant in this issue, and why the other considerations are not. It must be remembered that the raising of a child in a modern developed country has a very large cost in financial terms, which is highly significant. It is well known that the amount required to raise one child in a developed country could probably raise many more in a poorer part of the world. So if increasing the human population is the aim, this can be achieved more effectively elsewhere. However in these days of increasing environmental pressure and terrible inequality, increasing the human population is not what we should be aiming for.

A more significant consideration exists if we assume that the future life of the fetus involves a balance of happiness over suffering. This would seem to be a definite point against abortion, though not a dominant one. The second thing that we should consider are the parents and other family, and guardians if the alternative to abortion is adoption. According to some studies, having a baby appears to decrease the happiness in a relationship - even in those cases where the pregnancy is desired. But again, this need not be considered too much, since it is not a dominant consideration.

Much has been written on the issue of abortion both in the popula

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