Anyone who has followed the debate about abortion over the last forty years or so will know how hard it is to say anything genuinely new about the issue. Nor, at least in my judgment, has James Mumford quite managed to do so in his book Ethics at the Beginning of Life. But Mumford, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, has managed to think through the central issues of the abortion debate in ways that are unusually perceptive and helpful. To read his argument with care is to have one’s judgment sharpened and illumined. (What a shame, then, that Oxford University Press should charge a discouraging $110 for the book!)
Although it is evident from the concluding chapter that Mumford has significant theological interests and learning (and his book does, after all, appear in the “Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics” series), the work primarily takes up the topic of abortion from a philosophical rather than a theological perspective. It offers, as he puts it, “an immanent philosophical critique of beginning-of-life ethics,” because “the primary challenge to reigning ‘liberal’ moral and political conclusions comes not from religion but from a rival philosophical tradition.” That rival tradition, which grounds Mumford’s evaluation of the standard arguments in support of abortion, is phenomenology.
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