NRS 413 Topic 2 DQ 2: moral status and fetal abnormality

Question two is the engine of this paper and it is also the one most often answered impressionistically. It names four people — Jessica, Marco, Maria and Dr Wilson — and asks which theory of moral status each is using, and crucially, **what in the case study leads you to believe it**. That second clause turns the question into a textual exercise: four separate determinations, each supported by something the character actually says or does. Answers that characterise them broadly, saying Maria is religious and Dr Wilson is scientific, have skipped the evidence requirement entirely. Go back to the case, find the line, and quote or paraphrase it beside your determination. Four short pieces of evidence do more work here than a page of characterisation. The four determinations also do not have to agree with each other in strength: one character may be explicit about their grounds while another only implies them, and saying which is which is itself analysis.

To do that you need the taxonomy in front of you, because the question presupposes a defined set rather than inviting you to invent categories. The theories in play are moral status conferred by cognitive properties, by moral agency, by sentience, by relationships, and by the divine image. They give genuinely different answers about a fetus, which is the point: on cognitive properties and moral agency a fetus has little or no status, on sentience the answer depends on developmental stage, on relationships it depends on who values it and how, and on the divine image it has full status from conception independent of anything it can do. Question one is asking which of these the Christian view is compatible with, and the answer the course is teaching is the last. Write the taxonomy out before you look at the characters, or you will fit theories to people you have already characterised.

Note that question one says *compatible with* rather than *is*, which is a weaker and more accurate claim worth honouring. It leaves room to say that a theological account of intrinsic dignity fits the divine image theory most naturally while not being reducible to it, and that is a more defensible sentence than asserting an identity. The rest of the question — how this relates to intrinsic human value and dignity — is asking you to explain the mechanism: status grounded in what a being *is* rather than in what it can currently do, which is why it does not vary with capacity, development, or usefulness to others. It also protects you against the flattest version of this answer, which asserts that human life is valuable without ever saying what makes it so, and therefore cannot explain why the other four theories disagree.

Question three moves from theory to action and is frequently answered as though it asked about belief. It asks how each theory determines or influences the characters' **recommendations for action** — and in this case study they recommend different things about the pregnancy. So the answer has a shape: this character holds this theory, which assigns the fetus this status, which makes this course of action permissible or required or forbidden for them. Running that chain explicitly for each person is what demonstrates you understand that a theory of moral status is not an opinion about babies but a premise that generates conclusions. Jessica, Marco, Maria and Dr Wilson do not disagree about the medical facts; they disagree about what those facts license, and the chain is what exposes that.

Question four is the personal turn and it has a consistency trap in it. Having said which theory you agree with, you must then say how it would determine your own recommendation — and that recommendation has to follow from the theory you just endorsed rather than from your general sympathies. If you endorse the divine image theory and then recommend the course of action that a sentience-based view supports, the paper contradicts itself in its final paragraph, which is the easiest inconsistency in the world for a marker to spot. Work out what your chosen theory actually commits you to before writing the last section. The professional dimension is worth one sentence here too: what you would recommend as a private person and what you would do in a nursing role are not automatically the same, and noticing the gap is a stronger close than pretending it does not exist.