'To arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time': Heidegger, phenomenology, the way human beings first appear in the world, and fresh perspectives on the abortion debate.

Intellectual stalemate in the abortion debate can be traced in part to its being framed as a standoff between religion and secular philosophy. While the former is thought to generate a broadly 'pro-life' position, the latter is associated with more 'pro-choice' thinking. This essay attempts to break free of this framing by criticising the philosophy informing 'pro-choice' positions, but not by resorting immediately to religious arguments but rather by drawing upon a rival philosophical tradition--the movement within twentieth and twenty-first Continental philosophy which was and is phenomenology. A phenomenological approach to human 'emergence', and in particular an application of the framework Heidegger developed in Being and Time (1927), leads to a radical questioning of whether contemporary English-speaking beginning-of-life ethics have adequately taken into account the way human beings come forth in the world.