The landmark Roe v. Wade decision, handed down by the United States Supreme Court in 1973, touched off a divide deep within the American culture that shows little signs of healing. The reason is not necessarily that people have intransigent views when it comes to abortion. Instead, the issue is genuinely hard to grapple with, even from a moral standpoint, as Harvard Law Professor and bioethicist Glenn Cohen explains.
The first question we face when deciding whether abortion is immoral is this: are fetuses persons? That may seem like a straightforward question, but determining personhood requires understanding the distinction between a person, a human being, and being alive.
Certainly not all things that are alive are persons. A dog, for example, is very much alive and very lovable indeed, but not a person. As simple as this distinction seems, it has its detractors. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, says that distinguishing between what is human life and inhuman life is an example of speciation — an act of discrimination that is ultimately logically untenable (and we should therefore abandon it).
According to Cohen, some scholars say that stem cells and embryos are human beings, but not persons. They are made of human being stuff but they do not have the moral and legal rights — namely, the right of inviolability — that we accord to individual persons.
Those who believe the granting of rights is more a political act than a natural one may look toward what Cohen calls a "capacity 'x'," i.e. some other quality that more accurately defines what a person truly is. Examples of such a capacity 'x' include experiencing a continuity of identity, or possessing self-knowledge. While these qualities form more naturally than the granting of political rights, they open the door to difficult-to-justify actions like infanticide (since the infant brain is insufficiently developed to have the concept of an identity, or to articulate self-knowledge).
If one decides to stick with a definition of "person" that is determined by the existence of moral and legal rights, thinkers such as Judith Jarvis Thomson point out that the rights of a mother countervail — she is a person, too, after all. Thomson's famous thought experiment, "the famous violinist" has become perhaps the most recognizable philosophical defense of abortion.
Glenn Cohen's book is Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.

Barbara Amaya ran away at the age of 12 after being abused by family members. She was taken in on the streets of Washington, DC by a couple who seemed nice, but ended up selling her into human trafficking. She was used for months and then sold to a man named Moses who took her to New York and continued to traffic her for many years. Now Barbara fights for other victims of human trafficking and to change policies that treat victims as criminals.

Barbara is an anti-trafficking advocate, speaker, trainer, author and survivor leader in the movement to end modern-day slavery and human trafficking. She is Senior Technical Adviser, Policy, Programs and After Care Services at SeraphimGlobal, and has been actively raising awareness of the sexual exploitation of children and domestic sex trafficking since 2012.

I live in the Netherlands, where we have some pretty great trains. But there's a country in Europe that does trains better. Much better, in fact.

Switzerland has some of the best trains in the entire world - second, perhaps, only to Japan. What makes these trains so good? And what is it like to actually ride them?

Slavery didn’t start in 1492 when Columbus came to the New World. And it didn’t start in 1619 when the first slaves landed in Jamestown. It’s not a white phenomenon. The real story of slavery is long and complex. Candace Owens explains.