The morality of abortion and the deprivation of futures

In an influential essay entitled Why abortion is wrong, Donald Marquis argu es that killing actual persons is wrong because it unjustly deprives victim s of their future; that the fetus has a future similar in morally relevant respects to the future lost by competent adult homicide victims, and that, as consequence, abortion is justaable only in the same circumstances in whi ch Killing competent adult human beings is justifiable.(1) The metaphysical claim implicit in the first premise, that actual persons have a future of value, is ambiguous. The Future Like Ours argument (FLO) would be valid if "future of value" were used consistently to mean either "potential future o f value" or "self-represented future of value", and FLO would be sound if o ne or the other interpretation supported both the moral claim and the metap hysical claim, but if, as I argue, any interpretation which makes the argum ent valid renders it unsound, then FLO must be rejected. Its apparent stren gth derives from equivocation on the concept of "a future of value".