Research Resources & For Further Reading

Below are some research resources to learn more about issues and arguments related to abortion. Some are available to anyone; others you need a subscription or can often access from a library, often a college or university library. Also below is the "For Further Reading" section of the book. 

General research:

• Google Scholar is a great general scholarly and academic research tool: https://scholar.google.com

Philosophy:

• PhilPapers (freely available)
• The Philosophers' Index (subscription needed; check with a library)
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on abortion. 

Law:

• The Wikipedia pages of the relevant US course cases, which have links to the case materials:
• Roe v. Wade (1973)
• McFall v. Shimp (1978)
• Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network). Not just legal research, but often a good source for legal scholarship. www.ssrn.com
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute: www.law.cornell.edu
• George Mason's Free Legal Research page: www.law.gmu.edu/library/freelegalresearch
• LexisNexis (subscription needed; check with a library)

Medicine and science:

• US National Library of Medicine: PubMed.gov
• Jen Gunter, MD on abortion. 

For Further Reading

These three widely-reprinted articles are the seminal philosophical writings on abortion:

• Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47-66.
• Warren, Mary Anne. “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” The Monist (1973): 43-61.
• Marquis, Don. “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 4 (1989): 183-202.

David Boonin’s A Defense of Abortion provides a comprehensive and systematic critical overview of many arguments about abortion, and argues in defense of abortion:

• Boonin, David. A Defense of Abortion. Cambridge University Press, 2003

And see his more recent book on abortion:

• Boonin, David. Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal—Even if the Fetus is a Person. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Richard Feldman’s Reason & Argument is the best “critical thinking” and argument identification and analysis text available:

• Feldman, Richard. Reason & Argument, 2nd edition. Pearson / Prentice Hall, 1998.

And here are some other introductory readings by Nathan Nobis (and Nathan Nobis with Kristina Grob) on abortion:

• “Ethics and Abortion” at 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology (1000WordPhilosophy.com).
• “Early and Later Abortions: Ethics and Law” in Bob Fischer’s Ethics: Left and Right (Oxford University Press, forthcoming): this is, basically, a shorter, earlier version of this book.
• “Thinking Critically About Abortion” at Decaturish.com (2019): a philosophical letter to the editor for a Georgia newspaper.
• “Common Arguments about Abortion” and “Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion,” by Nathan Nobis and Kristina Grob, in Noah Levin, ed.,  Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource  (NGE Far Press, 2019) [both chapters]. This book is a development and expansion of these chapters.