Abortion Seminar

3 Credit Hours

Abortion raises both legal and moral issues. Questions of individual rights and equality interact, in complex ways, with questions about the boundaries of personhood. The aim of the class is to help students develop an appreciation of the complexity of the issue, and so to develop experience that will help them construct arguments addressing other, similarly complex legal issues. This seminar will survey the legal and philosophical literature and consider their interaction. It will explore three different literatures: the Supreme Court case law, from Roe v. Wade to the present; the academic literature on the constitutional right to abortion; and the philosophical literature.