Beating hearts : abortion and animal rights / Sherry F. Colb and Michael C. Dorf.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How can someone who condemns hunting, animal farming, and animal experimentation also favor legal abortion, which is the deliberate destruction of a human fetus? The authors of Beating Hearts aim to reconcile this apparent conflict and examine the surprisingly similar strategic and tactical questions faced by activists in the pro-life and animal rights movements.

Beating Hearts maintains that sentience, or the ability to have subjective experiences, grounds a being's entitlement to moral concern. The authors argue that nearly all human exploitation of animals is unjustified. Early abortions do not contradict the sentience principle because they precede fetal sentience, and Beating Heart s explains why the mere potential for sentience does not create moral entitlements. Late abortions do raise serious moral questions, but forcing a woman to carry a child to term is problematic as a form of gender-based exploitation. These ethical explorations lead to a wider discussion of the strategies deployed by the pro-life and animal rights movements. Should legal reforms precede or follow attitudinal changes? Do gory images win over or alienate supporters? Is violence ever principled? By probing the connections between debates about abortion and animal rights, Beating Hearts uses each highly contested set of questions to shed light on the other.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Kolb and Dorf (both Cornell Univ.) compare the ethics and practice of the animal rights and pro-life movements. They argue that these movements arise from a single moral question: which criteria ought to ground rights? The first part of the book is dedicated to investigating the moral problems raised by human use of animals and by the termination of pregnancy. The authors make the case that it is ethically consistent to support both animal rights and a woman's right to choose. In the second part of the book, Kolb and Dorf compare the strategies and tactics of the movements in terms of their morality and their effectiveness. For example, should activists work for winnable reforms that require a compromise in principle? Because this book addresses the ethics and the practice of these movements, it will interest those studying moral and political philosophy and those studying modern social movements. Written by two law professors who self-identify as animal rights activists, the book will interest and be useful to practitioners as well. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. --Sarah Elizabeth Spengeman, Ohlone College