The economic efficiency and equity of abortion

"This essay...examines the abortion option [using] two standard economic welfare criteria, efficiency and equity, to evaluate different distributions of property rights." The author critically examines a 1971 article by Judith Jarvis Thomson concerning fetal personhood and the maternal right to privacy. He asserts that "the efficiency of different output allocations and even output and wealth as such are neither ethically neutral nor ordinally invariant but depend on the range of property rights and distributions, wealth-constrained valuations, and populations considered. The results suggest that, insofar as claims of efficiency and equity are met or accepted as appropriate, economic criteria may affect the constitution of justice and behavior as legal and normative constraints."