The right to end an unwanted pregnancy as an integral part of the full citizenship of women has been influenced, reinfluenced, and questioned by different actors in the Czech Republic since the 1950s. Until 1986 the right to abortion was not viewed as a woman’s personal right, but depended upon the decision of abortion commissions and was influenced by the current demographic and political situation. The decision-making process was a very embarrassing experience for many women, who in fact had no other means of contraception available to them. In this paper, I analyse the legal and political regulation of abortion from the perspective of Foucault´s theory of governmentality and biopower. Abortion regulation is an example of how state power influences and disciplines the bodies of its subjects, how it regulates the population and shapes it according to the government’s needs. Through the regulation of abortion, the state not only attempted to restrict a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, but also defined which of its citizens should or should not become a parent and under what circumstances, and who should or should not have the right to be born. In the text I first present the theory of governmentality, then I analyse the periods of the regulation of abortion in socialist Czechoslovakia, and finally I show how this regulation can be understood as an instrument of a specific form of governmentality typical of totalitarian communist regime., Radka Dudová., Obsahuje bibliografii, and Anglické resumé
The work analyzes two competing arguments in the issue of abortion and shows that each requires a different theory of personal identity. Further, I analyze those theories and show what moral premises they are compatible with and what implications there are for the abortion debate., Práce analyzuje dva protichůdné argumenty v problematice potratů a ukazuje, že každá z nich vyžaduje jinou teorii osobní identity. Dále analyzuji tyto teorie a ukážu, jaké morální podmínky jsou slučitelné a jaké jsou důsledky pro diskusi o potratech., and Radim Bělohrad
The concept of personal identity has recently come to play an increasingly important role in bioethical discussion concerning the beginning and end of human life. This study does not aim to represent the whole range of applications of theories of personal identity to bioethics. It focuses only on the beginning of human life, namely on the question of the moral acceptability of abortion. The author begins by describing an argument rejecting the acceptability of abortions which has been advanced by P. Lee, and it is shown that the validity of this argument depends on a certain conception of personal identity. Then the author briefly defines the psychological approach to personal identity, and he points to its weaknesses. There follows a discussion of the theory of animalism which claims that our persistence in time does not comprise any psychological factors. The conclusion of the article deals with various theories of moral status and indicates the inadequacy of functional criteria in accounting for the moral point of view. The article finishes by stating that the moral status of human beings should be founded on the concept of human dignity. If the considerations in the study have been set out correctly then they justify the following conclusion: abortions are morally unacceptable., David Černý., and Obsahuje poznámky a bibliografii
Much of the recent debate over the moral permissibility of abortion focuses on the question of whether the foetus is or is not a person, i.e. the only entity endowed with moral rights including the right to life. The article traces this line of thought in several key figures in the debate (Thomson, Tooley, Warren and Brody). However, I consider this way of argumentation as both inappropriate and misleading; in the second half of the article I offer arguments against using the concept of person in this debate., Jakub Jirsa., and Obsahuje poznámky a bibliografii
The aim of this review is to summarize main aspects of the book Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights. and Tento příspěvek je recenzí publikace Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights, která vyšla v roce 2016.