Footnotes

• Contributors PH wrote the whole paper.

• Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

• Competing interests None declared.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

• ↵Most of this article addresses Boonin’s argument, since it is more developed and recent than Thomson’s.

• ↵Though, see refs. 6–8 for arguments about abortion that do not concern the moral status of the fetus.

• ↵See ref. 9 for a recent challenge to Thomson.

• ↵While Boonin refers both to ‘persons’ and those with a ‘right to life,’ I will simply take a person to be a thing that has a right to life. Nothing hinges on this point.

• ↵Boonin2 thinks that this strategy is sufficient to undermine his argument, though, he is sceptical about finding such a case. I will (hopefully) show below that his scepticism is unwarranted.

• ↵This is because I do not know what the property (or properties) are.

• ↵Here, I understand X to coerce Y to R if (roughly) X will harm (broadly construed) Y if Y does not R. E.g. the U.S. coerces those with cars to purchase license plate tabs—if one is caught driving without (or with expired) tabs, she will be subject to a fine.

• ↵You can find the details of this case here: https://ktvo.com/news/local/se-iowa-mother-convicted-of-starving-son-to-death-gets-10-years

• ↵I ignore fathers for the sake of simplicity. But, obviously, fathers can be, should be, and are arrested for starving their infants as well.

• ↵By ‘unwilling mother,’ I just mean a mother that does not want to take care of her infant.

• ↵More exactly, she must give up the infant or feed it. I suppose here that she has not given it up and also does not want to feed it.

• ↵By this I mean that the mother would have to breastfeed her infant for her infant to get the breastmilk, not just that she has a bottle of breastmilk available.

• ↵Of course, this is an empirical question to which no survey has (to my knowledge) been conducted. For whatever it is worth, anecdotally, the vast majority that I have asked about CASE 2 have agreed with it.

• ↵For example, some argue that mothers are responsible for the care of their fetuses (in typical cases) in which the pregnancy is unwanted. See refs. 10 11

• ↵The qualification ‘only’ here entails that the infant is not able to be transferred to someone else to be fed.

• ↵Of course, in this case, the infant is dead, so the state cannot coerce her into feeding her infant after she is taken from the cabin. My point is the state would be right in enacting a law that generally punished those who let their infants starve when there was food available. If there were such a law, the state would be coercing Sally into feeding her infant.

• ↵How might the government coerce Sally? One way would be to have laws that dictate that she be fined or imprisoned if she were to starve her infant in such a case.

• ↵Indeed, if one accepts Boonin’s view that McFall does not have the right to use Shimp’s body, then being a person is not sufficient for having a right to use another’s body. So, in the case of abortion and infant starvation, some other property (or conjunction of properties) is what gives the fetus the right to its mother’s body.

• ↵Hereafter, I will omit the qualification ‘given fetal personhood’ for the sake of readability. However, it should be clear that my discussion is following Boonin and Thomson in assuming fetal personhood.

• ↵Indeed, a referee points out that if McFall versus Shimp is to be made analogous to pregnancy/abortion, then, first, we would need to assume that Shimp had been giving McFall bone marrow (but not given him a sufficient amount). And, second, we would need to assume that to stop giving bone marrow to McFall, Shimp would have to actively kill him in some way (for a defence of abortion as killing, see ref. 4). In that case, it is not clear that McFall should not be coerced into giving more bone marrow to Shimp, and therefore not clear whether McFall versus Shimp supports Boonin’s position.

• ↵It is equally true that not all ethically permissible actions should be legal (e.g., slightly exceeding the speed limit on a road should not be legal).

• ↵Of course, this does not mean that anything goes—there will be heavy restrictions on what the government can/should do here.

• ↵Think of the popularity (in certain parts of the world) of governmental healthcare.

• ↵It is worth noting that there are some legal cases that offer support for CASE 2*. For example, Beckwith considers a case in American tort law in,12 pages 196–197, which arguably supports the conclusion of this section. I do not consider a such rulings in this piece partly because there are bound to be cases that support both sides and partly because I think we can see, independent of prior rulings, that CASE 2* is right.