In Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part I, I noted that a defender of the permissibility of feticide, who does not also want to endorse infanticide and who defends the sentience criterion, must “identify a reason for holding that the potential of a human brain is morally relevant after” the fetus acquires [...]

This two-part series was originally published as: Matthew Flannagan “Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique” Ethics and Medicine – An International Journal of Bioethics Vol 25:2 (Summer 2009) 95-106. It is reproduced on this blog with permission.
Abstract
Defenders of the permissibility of feticide commonly argue that killing an organism is not [...]