【正文】
to her child begin at birth? Once the fetus is viable? Once she has decided to carry the pregnancy to term?Or even before she realizes she is pregnant? It is perhaps worthwhile to say something here about what this view might mean for the morality and politics of abortion. Briefly, my position is that the duty of care a women owes to her fetus does not rule out abortion as a morally acceptable choice in some circumstances and as a morally flawed but still allowable choice in others. Furthermore, the fact that abortions are not in all circumstances a morally acceptable way of managing one' s pregnancy does not in itself give the state either the authority or the responsibility to assure that the decisions women make about their pregnancies are morally correct. Working from these premises (which are, of course, eminently debatable themselves), I focus in this essay on the duties of care and governmental regulation appropriate when a woman decides (through not exercising her right to an abortion) to carry a pregnancy to term. I speak in this paper about a decision to bring a baby to term because,fortunately, most women in the United States have such a choice to make. However,the care owed to the fetus is not dependent on the availability of this choice (as if having no choice about going through with a pregnancy might lessen one ' s 6 responsibility to the child growing inside one). Because abortion remains, for at least some period of time, a morally acceptable option, discovering one is pregnant does not itself impose a duty of care to the fetus. Nor does a choice to continue the pregnancy. The ground of prenatal responsibility is rather the reasonable expectation (whether wele or not) that the pregnancy will result in a live birth and a child to be cared for. Given these disparate characterizations of an identical physical condition, it is perhaps hard to a