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Frequent within the ethical debate on abortion and fraught with controversy, thought experiments prove challenging to proper evaluation. I begin here with a presentation of eight renowned thought experiments advanced in the abortion debate. I then discuss the significance of the ontological status of the imagined scenario. Firstly, I analyse certain thought experiments that make use of the analogy between real humans and other existing or imagined beings in order to revise certain intuitions that might be incompatible with our received ideas on abortion and to provide arguments for and against abortion. Secondly, I show that in other cases, such as Thomson's well-known violinist experiment and the experiment of complete ectogenesis, the purpose is to present an argument by taking advantage of the similarities between pregnancy and other real or imagined processes. I conclude the article with a brief discussion of the limits of the use of thought experiments in the abortion debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study examined attitudes towards and knowledge about abortion among undergraduate students doing eleven different subjects. The differences in attitudes and knowledge about abortion according to gender, religious and political affiliation, religiosity, sexual orientation, number of sex partners and previous sexual experience were also considered. Method: 1,025 undergraduate students (58.34% women and 41.66% men; mean age 20.18) completed the following instruments: an adaptation of the Abortion Attitudes Scale by Hill, and an adaptation of Abortion Knowledge Test by Esposito and Basow. Results: With attitudes ranging from 0 to 100, medicine, psychology and nursing students were in the anti-abortion range (55.93, 54.19 and 53.62, respectively) while history, philology and physics students were in the pro-abortion rights range (48.44, 48.49 and 50.12, respectively). Law, medicine and nursing students showed greater theoretical knowledge about abortion, while physics, engineering and philology students proved to be the least knowledgeable. Conclusions: Differences were found in students' attitudes towards abortion and in knowledge about abortion depending on their degree subject. As in previous reports, differences were found in students' attitudes towards abortion which reflected differences in religious affiliation, religiosity, political affiliation, and previous sexual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]