Moral dilemmas and abortion decision-making: Lessons learnt from abortion research in England and Wales

ABSTRACT

This paper scrutinises the concepts of moral reasoning and personal reasoning, problematising the binary model by looking at young women’s pregnancy decision-making. Data from two UK empirical studies are subjected to theoretically driven qualitative secondary analysis, and illustrative cases show how complex decision-making is characterised by an intertwining of the personal and the moral, and is thus best understood by drawing on moral relativism.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• moral dilemmas
• reproductive control
• moral agency
• decision-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Lesley Hoggart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4786-7950

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Government Office for London; Marie Stopes International.