Personhood and the Ethics of Abortion in Nigerian Cultural and Philosophical Context

This study examines philosophical debates about personhood and the ethics of abortion, situating these debates within Nigerian cultural and legal contexts. Abortion is illegal in Nigeria except to save the life of the mother, and both the legal prohibition and widespread social opposition to abortion are grounded in philosophical and theological claims about the moral status of the human foetus. Using a descriptive philosophical design, the study engages with philosophical accounts of personhood from Don Marquis, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Mary Anne Warren, and Akan and Yoruba African philosophical perspectives on the beginning of life, supplemented by secondary literature published between 2020 and 2024. Structured interviews with 20 medical ethicists, women's health advocates, and philosophy academics in Ibadan and Benin City inform the primary data. Findings reveal significant divergence between different philosophical criteria for moral personhood, including sentience, rationality, and relational recognition, and that this divergence generates different but philosophically coherent conclusions about the permissibility of abortion across different gestational stages. The study argues that the current absolute prohibition is philosophically untenable given the complexity of the personhood question and recommends philosophically informed public deliberation. Keywords: personhood, abortion ethics, Nigerian law, moral status, feminist philosophy.