abortion violinist essay

Abortion: The Unconscious Violinist Argument Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defense of Abortion

But is abortion ethical.

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of judith jarvis thomson’s, “a defense of abortion”.

Thomson’s (T) imaginative examples and controversial conclusions have made “ A Defense of Abortion “ perhaps “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy.”

T does not think the conceptus (a neutral way of referring to the fetus) is a person from the moment of conception, any more than an acorn is an oak tree.  But, for the sake of argument, she will grant this claim and ask if the impermissibility of abortion follows.

Assuming the personhood of the fetus, the anti-abortionist argument proceeds thus:

Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

T responds with a thought experiment:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with a famous but unconscious violinist . A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own … [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

While it would be kind of you to let the violinist stay attached to your body, almost no one would think you are morally obligated to do so. This suggests that abortion is morally permissible in cases of rape (and also that the mere fact that the violinist is a person doesn’t preclude the permissibility of abortion.) Of course, strong opponents of abortion may still say that one has a right to life even if one is conceived as a result of rape or the mother’s life is in danger.  (T calls this “the extreme view.”)

Section 1 – How can we defend the anti-abortion position in cases where the mother will die if she brings the child to full term? We could say that abortion kills the innocent child, whereas the mother will merely be allowed to die . But T argues that cases of self-defense are clearly not murder. So abortion is justified in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.

The abortion debate often focuses on what a 3 rd party (a physician for example) may do when a woman asks for an abortion (since she probably can’t safely perform the procedure herself.) Now a 3 rd party may say they don’t want to kill a growing child trapped with you inside a tiny house in another of her thought experiments. But surely you have the right to self-defense in that situation. This shows the extreme anti-abortion view is false.

Section 2 – The anti-abortionist (AA) could change their argument and say that abortion is ok in cases of self-defense but 3 rd parties shouldn’t perform them, only pregnant women should. But this is false as another thought experiment shows. If you own the house that the growing child is expanding in you have more right to that house (your body) than he/she does. 3 rd parties should recognize this just as they would recognize the owner of a coat has a right to it.

You are justified in saying that you don’t want to get the coat back (perform the abortion) but you shouldn’t say that someone else shouldn’t kill a person who is threatening another’s life. Since T has vigorously defended abortion in cases of self-defense, she now turns to other possibilities.

Section 3 – Does having the right to life mean I have a right to the minimum that it takes to keep me alive? Suppose that the only thing that will keep me alive is if you give me one of your kidneys.  Does this mean you are obligated to share your kidney with me? No. Nobody has a right to your kidney unless you give them that right. It might be nice of you to share your kidney, but I don’t have the right to demand that you do.

Now suppose that the right to life means I have the right not to be killed. Even so, my right to life doesn’t give me the right to use your body unless you give me permission. Even if your life isn’t threatened by my using your kidneys for 9 months, you don’t have to give me permission to use your kidney—even if you know that your refusal will result in my death.

Section 4 – “In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly … [but] The right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly.”  You do not kill something unjustly if you kill it so you don’t have to share your kidneys with it. So the argument against abortion must show it is unjust killing. In the case of rape, no permission to use your body has been granted and thus the killing of the fetus is justified.

But what about the cases of voluntary sexual activity? In those cases, did the woman invite the fetus in and does the fetus now have a right to the woman’s body? And how do we determine the extent of this responsibility? If a woman opens her window or leaves her house knowing there are rapists in the world (or charming men) is she then responsible if she gets pregnant? Suppose she installs bars on her windows (contraception) and burglars (or charming men) get in anyway even though she took precautions against this happening. Is she responsible and does the fetus now have a right to her body?

Or suppose:

Peopleseeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the personplant who now develops have a right to the use of your house?

We can hardly expect you never to go outside or have a hysterectomy or only travel with an army to protect yourself.  Each of these cases is different but in some cases, abortion would be unjust killing and in some cases, it wouldn’t. (Imagine a continuum with “you never leave home at one end” and “you sell yourself on the street to get pregnant so you can have an abortion” at the other end. So as your responsibility for becoming pregnant increases so too does your obligation to carry to full term. But your responsibility is not the only factor to consider. We must also consider how much you are inconvenienced.)

Section 5 – Suppose you were kidnapped by the violinist (raped) but he only needed one hour at no risk to your health. In such cases, you ought not to abort. But this doesn’t mean the violinist has a right to use your kidney. Consider an analogy. It may be nice of me to share my chocolates with you, but that doesn’t mean that you have a right to them. Even if I only need your kiss to save my life, I have no right to your kiss, even though it would be nice of you to kiss me. So even if only an hour of the mother’s body is needed to save a life—the mother is not morally required to share their body.

Section 6 – “We have in fact to distinguish between the two kinds of Samaritans: the Good Samaritan (GS) and what we might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan.” (MDS) (In the above example a GS would share their body but a MDS wouldn’t be morally required to do so.) The law never requires that we be even MDS but “in most states in this country women are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them.” To be consistent then, anti-abortionists should work for GS laws. (Imagine if you were required to be GS. You might go to jail for not giving large amounts of money to every homeless person you pass by.) However, if I don’t want to be a GS (not remain pregnant), shouldn’t you help me? After all, I don’t want to be in bed with the violinist for 9 months.

Section 7 – Furthermore, even if the fetus is a person the impermissibility of abortion doesn’t follow.  (In many cases we claim to justify killing persons—war, capital punishment, self-defense.) But maybe the fact that the fetus “is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother” makes abortion immoral. Here we must distinguish between cases in which parents didn’t try to avoid pregnancy and thus are responsible, from cases in which they tried not to conceive. In some cases, abortion would be justified and in others, it wouldn’t. (Each case is different.)

Section 8 – However if pregnancy only requires being a MDS, then one should not abort. In other cases, one should abort. But the mother has no right to insist on the death of the fetus if it can survive. (Hence the importance of viability.)

T concludes by noting that she has assumed a fetus is a person, even though this is conceptually problematic if not outright false. (Acorns aren’t oak trees.) But even granting this assumption early abortions are often morally acceptable.

(For more on the abortion issue see: “ Ethicists Generally Agree: The Pro-Life Arguments Are Worthless “ )

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3 thoughts on “ summary of judith jarvis thomson’s, “a defense of abortion” ”.

A child is born at delivery when the cord is removed and the baby can live on its own outside the womb. At that time a birth certificate proves life and after that event the child is a person subject to the laws of the land. While it is attached inside tangled the mother can still offer nourishment probably cause a breach birth and the baby is oxygenated to live my premise would apply. Sever the cord in the womb the fetus is stillborn and would not be a live birth subject to the issuance of a birth certificate with rights. For burial purposes and the census States do require a medical statement from the attending physician. Families normally have a small funeral. Life begins at a live delivery. Abortion is similar to removal of an appendix which is medically necessary and not defined as murder. You cannot leave a dead object in the mothers body.

Just wondering, if I have a heart beat and my brain function is in order, but I am connected to an artificial lung and being fed through a tube, am I alive or am I dead?

a conceptus is not an adult human, it is an earlier stage of a human; just as an acorn isn’t an adult quercus robur, it is an earlier stage of an oak.

the analogies in thompson’s thought experiments are so divorced from the situation she’s trying to model that the are best termed fallacies. any number of scenarios can be imagined to invoke emotive responses in hopes of overcoming logic. instead of the comatose violinist, make the analogy stronger by using a newborn; make the situation more plausible. here’s a real life situation, from china; a mother carrying a child up an escalator steps off the top, falls into an open panel and is chewed to death by the mechanism. she tosses the infant to a stranger. thompson’s reasoining may call this an assault which could injure the catcher, point out the catcher did not invite the toss, and morally allow the child to fall into the machine as well.

science has granted insight. a human individual is formed at conception; we all develop in incremental overlapping fashion till death, at least

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The Unconscious Violinist – 50 Years On

By Matthew John Minehan.

2021 marks 50 years since the publication of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal paper, ‘A defense of abortion’ , in which she introduced the world to a very famous and very unconscious violinist. It also marks mere months since Thomson’s passing in November 2020 . For both these reasons, a fresh look at her argument is timely.

For readers unfamiliar with Thomson’s thought experiment, here is a very brief summary: Imagine you wake up one morning connected to an unconscious violinist whose survival depends on the use of your kidneys for nine months. Is it morally permissible to disconnect from him? Despite the fact the violinist is a person with a right to life, Thomson believed it would be an act of kindness, not obligation, to stay connected.

For Thomson, the lesson is that if the violinist’s personhood and right to life do not give him a right to the use of your body, then nor should a fetus’s hypothetical personhood and right to life give it a right to the use of its mother’s body.

In my new paper , I accept Thomson’s for-the-sake-of-argument premise that fetuses have a right to life, but I challenge her argument in two main ways:

Firstly, by reframing the violinist scenario so that it is no longer presented from the perspective of the co-opted kidney surrogate, but from the perspective of someone operating behind a veil of ignorance: ‘Imagine that one morning you are back to back in bed with another person. One of you is conscious and the other unconscious. You do not know which one you are.’ What rule is it rational to develop in this case? From a contractarian perspective, I suggest, it is rational to require the surrogate to remain connected to the violinist.

Secondly, I develop my own novel thought-experiment: The self-aborting fetus. My motive was to come up with a situation where person A depends on person B in much the same way that a regular fetus depends on its mother and the violinist depends on his kidney surrogate, but where the mother is now the dependent party rather than the life-sustainer. By developing a scenario where the mother is the person in need, I hope to identify any biases we might have in favour of the mother.

In short, I ask my readers to imagine a world where some fetuses develop at a faster than usual pace and can self-abort (i.e. give birth to themselves) after three months of pregnancy. The downside of a self-abortion is that the mother will die from a nutritional deficiency, however she can take medicine to override the self-abortion. If she overrides the self-abortion, both she and the fetus will live, however the fetus will experience six months of discomfort until it is born at a normal time.

It seems to me that most of us would think it was reasonable for the mother to suppress a self-abortion in order to save her own life. After all, this will ensure both of them keep their lives, and it will only inconvenience the fetus for a matter of months. Yet doing so would violate Thomson’s principle that no one has a right to the use of another person’s body against that person’s wishes. In short, I suggest that if it is justifiable to override a self-abortion and compel a fetus to remain in the womb, then it should likewise be justifiable to compel a kidney surrogate to remain connected to a violinist.

Thomson showed how creative examples such as the unconscious violinist and also the rapidly growing child can produce insights into the real-world problem of abortion. My hope is that the self-aborting fetus example is a useful addition to the long line of thought experiments inspired by Thomson.

Not many philosophers still have a single paper routinely debated fifty years after it was published. Vale Judith Jarvis Thomson.

Paper title: Moral status of the fetus and the permissibility of abortion: a contractarian response to Thomson’s violinist thought experiment

Author: Matthew John Minehan

Affiliations: Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University

Competing interests: Nil

Social media accounts of post author(s):

• linkedin.com/in/MatthewJohnMinehan
• https://www.facebook.com/MatthewJohnMinehan

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On Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A defence of abortion"

Dagmar Wilhelm

This is a specially written essay by Dagmar Wilhelm  who lectures in philosophy at Keele University .

Part 1: A Defence of Abortion

The "famous violinist", "people seeds" and the chocolate example are three of a series of thought experiments in philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article " A defence of abortion ".

As the title suggests the article aims to defend abortion – at least in some cases. Thomson’s approach here is relatively novel. Rather than engaging in the usual debate about the moral status of foetuses (are they the kind of beings that have rights?) she explicitly assumes - "for the sake of the argument" - that foetuses have a right to life but argues that this right to life does not necessarily extend to a right to the mother’s body.

The "famous violinist" helps Thomson to make this point. The scenario is very much like the famous soccer scenario, we are kidnapped and attached to a famous violinist with a fatal kidney problem, whose survival depends on his staying attached to our circulatory system. The violinist uncontroversially has a right to life (and this may or may not imply that no third party has a right to unplug the violinist) yet, Thomson hopes we would agree, he does not have a right to the use of our body and hence we have a right to unplug ourselves.

While "the famous violinist" is a powerful scenario and tends to elicit the desired response, it is quite limited in scope. It is plausible to assume that the audience feels they have the right to unplug themselves because they had been kidnapped and attached to this stranger without their consent. Translated to the ethics of abortion, Thomson manages at most to establish that pregnancies resulting from rape can be legitimately terminated.

"People seeds" are the thought experiment employed to consider pregnancies resulting from consensual sex. Here we are asked to imagine living in a world where people seeds fly around; if they get into your house they nest in carpets and upholstery. Because you know of these people seeds you have protective screens in front of your windows. In the heat you sometimes open these windows and very rarely people seeds find holes in the screens and end up in your house.

Thomson would assume that people would not consider themselves to be under any obligation to allow these people seeds use of their house for nine months or years (though it would be terribly nice of you to welcome them). So, by analogy, Thomson would hold that pregnancies resulting from consensual sexual acts (opening windows in the heat) with faulty contraceptives (holes in the screens) can also be legitimately terminated.

Having shown that at least in two cases the foetus’ right to life does not outweigh the woman’s right to control over her own body, the chocolate examples aims to show that we might still think that while the woman is under no moral obligation to do so she still ought to refrain from termination. In the (relevant variation of the) chocolate example the older of two brothers is given chocolate. This chocolate is given only to him, i.e. he is not told to share it with his brother. The younger brother demands some of the chocolate. Thomson wants to claim that the older boy is under no obligation to share the chocolate. More precisely: because the older boy was given the chocolate just for himself the younger boy does not have a right to the chocolate. If he does not have a right, withholding the chocolate is not a violation of a right and if it isn’t a violation of a right it is not unjust. If it is not unjust it isn’t morally wrong. If not sharing the chocolate is not morally wrong then the older boy cannot have a moral obligation to share. Yet, we would still think that he ought to share. This ought is much weaker than a moral obligation. It is desirable (or possibly admirable) that the older brother shares but it is beyond the call of duty. The distinction is familiar in everyday life: we might think that people sometimes ought to forgive each other but we have no right claim to forgiveness.

Part 2: Why Violinists, People Seeds and Chocolate?

Really Deep Thought

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Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020)

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Judith Jarvis Thomson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Her justly famous essay in defense of abortion rights is a model for how to combine philosophical rigor with political engagement in the real world.

Judith Jarvis Thompson. (Berkeley Graduate Division Videos / YouTube)

A fan-favorite episode of NBC’s The Good Place is called “The Trolley Problem.” If you’ve watched it, or if you’re one of the quarter of a million people who follow the “Trolley problem memes” page on Facebook, you know at least a little bit about Judith Jarvis Thomson’s work — even if you’ve never heard her name.

The prehistory of this philosophical puzzle goes back to Philippa Foot. In an essay crammed with examples intended to illustrate the complexities of an obscure idea in moral philosophy called the “doctrine of double effect,” she introduces the “driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one track to another.” If he does nothing, he’ll kill five workers doing repairs on the track. If he steers onto an alternate track, he’ll only kill one. Foot thought it was obvious that “we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the unoccupied track.”

I’ve introduced dozens of introductory classes of students to this example over the course of the decade and a half that I’ve taught philosophy classes, usually illustrating it with crude stick figure drawings on the chalkboard. When I’ve asked for a show of hands, I’ve never had a class where more than two or three students didn’t share Foot’s intuition that this would be the right thing to do. If that was all there was to it, no one would think there was a “problem” about the runaway trolley.

The complication comes in a 1976 paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson, “ Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem .” As well as coining the phrase “the trolley problem,” she introduced the problem itself. It feels obvious that diverting the trolley would be the right thing to do, but what if we scrambled the example a bit? Add in a footbridge going over the trolley track and take away the alternate track with only one worker. Put two people on the footbridge. One of them, George, knows a lot about trolleys. (Perhaps he’s an engineer.) He knows the only way to stop a trolley in its tracks is with a sufficiently heavy weight. As luck would have it, the other man on the tracks is heavy enough to do the trick.

When I draw a new set of stick figures to illustrate that one on the board, hardly anyone raises their hand to agree that the right thing to do would be for George to push the man into the trolley’s path. The “problem” is the inconsistency between being willing to kill one to save five in the first version but viewing this as cold-blooded murder in the second.

People who only know “the trolley problem” from the vague impression left by memes and jokes, often exhibiting the kind of dark humor that marks the episode of The Good Place , sometimes end up thinking that the point of thinking about examples like this is to deaden our intuitive moral reactions and train us to make cold-blooded utilitarian calculations about the respective values of different lives as if we were all imperialist generals calmly talking about “collateral damage.” But Thomson’s point in context was exactly the opposite. She was laser-focused on the rights of the large man whose life would hypothetically be sacrificed — just as, in the area where she made the most lasting contribution, she was focused on the rights of pregnant women.

The Sick Violinist

If you have heard Thomson’s name, it’s almost certainly in connection with her essay “ A Defense of Abortion .” It was published in 1971, two years before the Roe v. Wade decision, and in the decades since, it’s become the most widely anthologized paper in all of contemporary philosophy. If you went to college and you took an “Intro to Ethics” or “Contemporary Moral Issues” class, you probably read Thomson’s article.

Traditionally, philosophical arguments about the ethics of abortion have focused on the metaphysical status of the fetus. Is a zygote a “person”? How about a second-trimester fetus that has started to develop a brain but doesn’t yet have a thalamus that would allow it to experience sensations? What are the conditions for counting as a “person,” anyway?

Thomson’s innovation was to shift the issue from the rights of the fetus to the rights of pregnant women. In the first page of the paper, she compares the idea that a fetus that will one day become a person is a person already to the idea that an acorn is already an oak tree, but she’s willing to grant the pro-lifers’ premise for the sake of argument. Even so, she insists, the mother’s right to control her own body comes first.

It’s easy to see why the right to bodily autonomy is important. As the great Marxist analytic philosopher G. A. Cohen memorably pointed out , if you require convincing on this point, imagine that future developments in medical technology made it easy to cure blindness by transplanting working eyes into the eye sockets of the blind and some future authoritarian government set up an “eyeball lottery.” Everyone who could see out of both eyes would be forced to register, and the unlucky winners would be forced to donate one of their eyeballs. If you think that redistributive taxation would be fine but that an eyeball lottery would be monstrously unjust, you must agree that our right to control the money in our bank accounts is a lot less important than our right to control our bodies.

Even if you nod along with all this, you might think that abortion is different. The right to bodily autonomy might be more important than the right to working eyeballs, but the right to life is surely the most important right of all.

Many people who took whatever class where they were assigned “A Defense of Abortion” years ago and don’t remember anything else about the paper, and might not even remember who wrote it, remember her response to this argument.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you — we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?

Thomson’s striking and imaginative scenarios certainly add to the pleasure of reading her work. She clearly had a flair for this kind of thing. Later in the paper, her refutation of the idea that consenting to sex amounts to consenting to pregnancy includes an example about a world where people don’t gestate in wombs but grow from “people seeds” that could come floating through an open window and take root in the carpet. But the part of the paper I’ve always found most compelling isn’t related to her vivid science-fiction examples, but the real-world case of Kitty Genovese.

In 1964, Genovese was stabbed to death outside of an apartment building in Queens. According to an article published in the New York Times at the time, thirty-eight people saw or heard what was happening and did nothing to help her. While contemporary journalists have cast doubt about the claim about bystanders in the original Times piece, it was widely believed at the time. Whatever may be true about how many people witnessed the murder and how many of those tried to help, the striking fact that Thomson calls our attention to is that “there is no law under which charges could be brought” against those bystanders who “didn’t even trouble to pick up a phone” to report what was happening to Genovese.

Maybe there should be such laws. There are in some countries. While it might be unreasonable to legally require anyone to endanger their own life by rushing into the street to help a stabbing victim, a case could probably be made for legally requiring people watching from their apartments to at least pick up the phone and call 911. As Thomson puts it, the former would require a bystander to be a Good Samaritan while the latter would only require them to be a “Minimally Decent Samaritan.”

Whatever you make of the idea that we should have Minimally Decent Samaritan laws, Thomson’s point is that legally forcing anyone to keep a fetus alive by gestating it in her womb goes absurdly further than what a bystander would have had to do to keep Genovese alive. A society that wouldn’t normally force a person to even pick up a phone forcing a pregnant woman to share her body with another being against her will for nine months is one that treats pregnant women less like full persons than walking incubators.

A Model for Debunking the Right

A fact mentioned in passing in online biographies of Thomson is that her parents met at a “socialist summer camp.” Her father Theodore Jarvis (formerly Theodore Jarvitz) grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. He was the descendant of a long line of Eastern European rabbis, including famous luminaries like Hayyim Eliezer Wachs. Thomson’s mother Helen Jarvis (formerly Helen Vostrey) was descended from Czech Catholics. I’ve been told that the marriage was a minor scandal in both families.

Helen died when Judith was six. I don’t know if Theodore’s interest in socialist politics persisted long enough to have played any role in his daughter’s life. While Thomson wrote about “applied ethics” issues like abortion rights or affirmative action — which she supported with some qualifications — she wasn’t a specialist in “political philosophy” as that’s usually understood. I don’t think she ever wrote about capitalism and socialism or the ethics of economic redistribution or the rights of workers. As far as I can tell, her overall political worldview was probably the fairly conventional liberalism of most academics of her generation.

Even so, in my own efforts to debunk the Right, I’ve always seen her as an important model — and not just because her argument in “A Defense of Abortion” is brilliant. Her essays combined several important virtues.

The creator of “the trolley problem” certainly can’t be faulted for any lack of philosophical rigor. But even in essays where she’s parsing vastly more esoteric issues, her writing was always extremely clear — and often extremely charming. In an essay on complex metaphysical issues that I read as part of a brief stint as a research assistant for an old professor at the University of Miami, she illustrates the metaphysical complexities with an example about knitting someone a sweater. It’s been a decade since that project ended, but the example has always stuck in my memory.

Her writing was never purple or pretentious, but she put a tremendous amount of effort into it, and it shows. When Claudia Mills introduced Thomson’s keynote address at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference in 2009, as well as praising “her warmth and generosity as a mentor to a young woman about to enter in the mid-1970s into the male-dominated world of philosophy,” she went on at length about how Thomson made her a better writer. She was such a demanding critic that Mills was overjoyed when she “finally wrote a sentence that pleased her” in one of her papers.

“You just like it because it’s short,” I told her, as I knew she had disliked my long, flowery, dare I say eloquent, sentences. “I don’t just like its length,” she told me. “I like IT!” That was a wonderful moment that I’ve carried with me for thirty-four years. I wrote a sentence that Judith Jarvis Thomson admired.

Her line of thought in “A Defense of Abortion” doesn’t spare any complication in following the twists and turns of various possible arguments and counterarguments, but it’s written in such a clear and direct way that you don’t have to spend a single day in a philosophy classroom to read and understand it. She never “dumbed it down,” but, more importantly, she proved that you don’t have to do that to reach a wide audience. In the decades when the essay has been more widely anthologized and assigned to undergraduates than anything else that’s ever been published in a professional philosophy journal, millions of people have read and had their thinking about a politically urgent issue influenced by her arguments.

I always tell my students that the point of philosophy classes isn’t to propagandize any particular point of view on any of the issues we discuss but to expose them to a variety of points of view and give them the tools to reason better about these issues so they can decide what they think. When I say this, I really mean it. I go through a lot of effort to sympathetically unpack the arguments of authors whose conclusions I hate. If I haven’t given Robert Nozick’s case for libertarianism a fair chance, I haven’t done my job.

That said, I’ve always been curious about how hard or easy it is to persuade people to drop deeply felt beliefs, and sometimes at the end of the semester, I’ll ask students if they changed their minds about any of the topics we read about because of any of the arguments made in the readings or discussed in class. The most common answer (at least in ethics classes) is also one of the ones I’m happiest to read: “I used to be against abortion. I changed my mind because I read Judith Jarvis Thomson.”

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Destringing Thompson’s Violinist

Thanks to advances in radiology, neonatology, and other medical technologies, we are able to observe, treat, and deliver babies much earlier than ever before. With these advances, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the fetus is anything but a living human person, leaving pro-choice advocates with little room to make their case. From the moment of conception, the embryo is a unique, self-integrated organism, directing its own development on a continuous, uninterrupted path toward infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Science settles the question at the heart of the abortion debate—that of fetal personhood—in favor of the unborn.

This is where the debate has its natural conclusion. However, some wish to continue the abortion debate as an issue of “bodily autonomy.” These individuals hold up Judith Thompson’s violinist thought experiment as proof that abortion is morally justifiable, even if the fetus is a human person. Thompson begins by postulating that the fetus is a human, thus declaring common ground with pro-lifers in an attempt to undermine their position. She draws an analogy between pregnancy and the situation of a woman whose vitals were attached in her sleep to those of a dying violinist. When she wakes up, Thompson asks, does the patient have the right to unhook the violinist and end his life? Thompson asserts that she does on the grounds that he "threatens her bodily autonomy.” She further concludes that a pregnant woman has a similar right to “unhook” herself from her unborn child. However, even if the woman’s right to kill the violinist is accepted, this analogy is deeply flawed and does not justify a right to abortion.

The first shortcoming of Thompson’s theory is the false parallel made between having sex and being hooked up to a violinist in the middle of the night. Women don’t just wake up pregnant; pregnancy almost always is a natural consequence of deliberate actions on the part of the mother, a consequence for which she must bear some moral responsibility. The only exceptions would be the small fraction of pregnancies resulting from rape. Only in these cases, which make up about 1 percent of abortions in the U.S. each year, can Thompson’s imaginative scenario have any relationship to the circumstances of pregnancies, and even in these cases, her argument fails for other reasons.

Perhaps Thompson’s most egregious oversight is her failure to recognize the moral importance of the parent-child relationship. Parents have special responsibilities to their own children—an intuitive concept, enforced by American family law. Until their children reach adulthood, parents are legally and morally obligated to care for them. They must provide a safe and healthy environment for their children, whether they are adolescents, toddlers, infants, or still in the womb. A person who refuses to feed his own children breaks the law: He can and should be sentenced to time in prison. On the other hand, a person who does not feed someone else’s child commits no prosecutable crime. Thompson’s argument completely ignores this crucial distinction.

This flaw proves fatal to the violinist argument, as can be illustrated by modifying the original thought experiment. Suppose, for example, that the violinist were the patient’s own two-year-old daughter. The thought experiment would yield a very different outcome: No mother in her right mind would allow her own child to die, even if she were “threatening her autonomy.” Parenting requires personal sacrifice: All children limit bodily autonomy! This imposition does not justify the deliberate taking of a human life.

A third, philosophically broader failing of the violinist analogy involves the instrumentalization of the human person. In any given moral decision, a person can be treated as a means to an end or as an end in himself. Traditional morality holds that people should always be treated as ends in themselves, while the progressive view implicitly asserts that some people are to be treated as ends, others as simply means. That is, it allows those with power over others, such as the mother over her child or the patient over the violinist, to use that power to their own ends.

And so Thompson, champion of those who perceive the abortion debate as an issue of bodily autonomy, falls short of proving her point by presenting a situation absolutely without analogy to pregnancy. Her attempt to justify abortion despite fetal personhood reduces her argument to a poorly conceived notion of rights, one in which parents owe nothing to their children and in which some people have a basic human right to kill other people. If some people are means and others ends, who falls into which category? What’s to stop us from killing the old, the disabled, and any others who threaten our bodily autonomy? Such considerations return the debate to the question of fetal personhood, and proponents of abortion are left having to contend that a self-developing organism with a unique set of human DNA is something other than a nascent human person. With such an unviable position as this, is it any wonder Thompson and others have sought a way out?

Aurora C. Griffin ’14, a classics concentrator, lives in Pforzheimer House. She is a member of Harvard Right to Life. James P. McGlone ’15 lives in Grays Hall.  He is the Vice President of Community Impact for Harvard Right to Life.

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Thomson on Abortion

What is distinctive about Thomson’s essay is that she thinks she has an argument for abortion rights that sidesteps the familiar disagreements about the point in human development at which fetuses become persons. She says that there would be a right to abortion even if fetuses were persons with the same right to life that any person has.

The Violinist

Thomson’s argument turns on an example involving a violinist who is plugged into another person, “you.” The violinist has the right to life but, Thomson thinks, you could unplug yourself from him even if he needs to be plugged into your body to stay alive. The lesson she draws from this is that the right to life does not give anyone a right to use another person’s body. She thinks it follows that fetuses do not have rights to use their mother’s bodies even if they have the right to life.

More specifically, she thinks that the violinist example shows that there is something wrong with what she regards as a plausible sounding argument against abortion rights. Here is how that argument goes, assuming that fetuses are persons (Thomson 1971, 48) .

• Suppose that fetuses are people and so have a right to life.
• Women have rights to decide what happens in and to their bodies.
• But the right to life outweighs that right.
• So fetuses may not be killed and there is no right to abortion.

But here is how most people think of the violinist case (Thomson 1971, 48–49) .

• Suppose that violinists are people and so have a right to life.
• You have rights to decide what happens in and to your body.
• The right to life does not outweigh that right.
• So you have the right to unplug yourself from the violinist and the violinist may be killed.

Whether you think the argument is conclusive or not, you have to admit that it is frightfully clever.

The Main Question

The main question is what the right to life gives someone the right to have. Thomson engages directly with this question pretty late in the article, starting on page 55. Nonetheless, that is where I think she truly begins in earnest; I explain why I think that in the appendix at the end .

You could imagine a variety of answers to the question of what the right to life gives someone the right to have.

• The right to whatever you need to live.
• The right not to have whatever you need to live taken away.
• The right not to be killed.
• The right not to be killed, provided you are innocent and not threatening others.
• The right not to be killed unjustly.

Thomson thinks the violinist example rules out the first four. That leaves number five. What does it mean to say that you may not be killed unjustly?

One thing she thinks it does not mean is that you have a right to morally decent behavior. That is the lesson of the chocolates. It is selfish not to share, but it is not unjust not to share. The chocolates belong to the selfish kid, after all, and we can do all sorts of morally indecent things with our property without being unjust to others.

Voluntariness

What would Thomson regard as unjust behavior? She does not give an abstract statement about justice. Rather, she gives an example of it. Suppose you gave someone the right to use a resource and that person needs that resource in order to live. If you took the resource away, you would treat that person unjustly. To be more precise, she thinks that you will kill that person unjustly.

This leads us to an objection to the violinist case. In that case, the person who is hooked up, namely “you,” is kidnapped. There is no question that you did not give the violinist the right to use your body. But most, though not all, pregnancies do not start with anything like kidnapping. So that looks like an important difference between the two cases. Since Thomson’s argument relies on showing that the two cases are similar, this threatens her position.

Thomson will try to approach this objection by asking whether the pregnant person can be accurately described as giving the fetus rights to use her body.

We will want to talk about whether she is successful or not.

In our discussion, Max said that the violinist case would be closer to most cases of abortion, if you, the person hooked up to the violinist, had been aware of the risk that you might be hooked up. Maybe you signed a piece of paper acknowledging the risks when you bought tickets to a concert. Or maybe it’s normal in your society.

I said that I thought she was trying to make these cases fit the model of contract law when tort law seems more relevant. No one accidentally makes a promise or signs a contract; there is no risk in these cases, you either do or you don’t. But we talk about risks and negligence all the time when we are talking about accidents. If I negligently run over your garden statue with my car, I bear responsibility for replacing it. I think that is the better analogy.

Is there a right to abortion?

Here are two different questions.

Does a fetus have a right to life that trumps another person’s right to control her body?

Does a person have the right to abort a viable fetus?

Thomson believes the violinist example shows that the answer to the first question is “no.”

Suppose she is right about that. Would it follow that the answer to the second question is always “yes”?

I do not think so. There might be reasons why abortion is wrong that do not depend on the right to life. I think that is what the last third of the paper tacitly concedes. There, Thomson discusses questions about whether ending a pregnancy might be what she calls “indecent,” and that seems to have more to do with the person who is making the decision than it does with the rights of the fetus.

So we will have to talk about what else she would have to do to establish that there is a right to abortion. That, it seems to me, involves more than showing that the right to life is consistent with the right to abortion.

These are the points from today’s class that should be familiar to you.

• The violinist example.
• The difference between unjust behavior and morally indecent behavior

Appendix on Self-Defense

I greatly admire this essay and I have never written anything nearly this good myself. That said, I think that it was probably a mistake to start off with what she calls the extreme view, namely, that abortion is wrong even to save the life of the pregnant woman. By doing it this way, she has to cover the same territory twice.

I say this because, in my opinion, the real question is the one that is posed on page 55: what does the right to life give you a right to have? The extreme view gives one answer to that question and the less extreme views give other answers. The extreme view is a distraction, in my opinion. First, no one believes that the right to life is absolute. As Thomson will point out, we all think you can kill in self-defense. So she does not need to spend so much space showing that the right to life is not absolute. Second, by doing the extreme view first, she delays getting to the fundamental question and so has to repeat herself rather than moving forward.

In addition to these tactical points, I think she makes a substantive error here. Thomson describes the right to abortion in cases where the pregnant woman’s life is at risk as a right of self-defense. I would not put it that way.

The right of self-defense is usually thought of as a right to use force against someone who is aggressively threatening you. You are allowed to punch, kick, shove, or shoot someone who is trying to hurt you. Rights of self-defense do not usually cover competition for scarce resources. For example, the people who are lower on the list for organ transplants are not allowed to kill those who are higher up in self-defense even though that would improve their chances of getting an organ transplant that they need to live. The cases involving abortion look to me like ones that involve competition for a scarce resource: two people want to use one body to stay alive.

I do not think this hurts Thomson’s position. She has a pretty good argument that the mother should win this competition: it is her body after all (Thomson 1971, 53) . In fact, I think her presentation would much more straightforward if she skipped self-defense entirely. She would not have to have separate discussions of what a person may do in defense of her own life and what a third party may do. Plus she could dispense with the weird example of the baby that will burst out of the house (Thomson 1971, 52–54) .

• Corrections

Judith Jarvis Thomson: Does It Matter If a Fetus Is a Person?

What is the argument Judith Jarvis Thomson proposes in A Defence of Abortion (1971), and how does she argue that it is morally irrelevant whether a fetus is a person?

Debates about abortion often hang on the question of whether the fetus is a person. Pro-lifers argue fetuses are people, making abortion akin to murder. Pro-choice advocates tend to deny both that fetuses are people and, therefore, that abortion is murder.

Judith Jarvis Thomson proposed a powerful argument in support of abortion in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion ; a key novelty of this argument is that it shows that the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant to the morality of abortion.

The Politics of Abortion

The question of the moral permissibility of abortion is rarely off the political agenda. In countries where it is still illegal (or heavily restricted) , we often see calls for reform from feminist activists and their allies, and conservative opposition aimed at maintaining the status quo. This is the case, for instance, in Poland, where abortion is only permissible if continuing with a pregnancy risks the life or health of the mother, if the pregnancy is the result of an illegal act, or if the fetus is likely to develop a severe and irreversible illness.

Lively disputes, however, aren’t limited to countries where abortion is still illegal (or where it has only recently been legalized).  Abortion is still a hot topic in countries where it has long been legal. This can be seen, for example, in the US, where Roe v Wade was recently overturned , reversing the achievements of second-wave feminist activists which culminated in the landmark ruling. In the UK, where abortion has been legal since 1967, clinics are still regular targets for “ pro-life” protests , leading MPs to consider laws creating “buffer-zones” that would prohibit protests around clinics providing abortions.

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Although there are many arguments made both for and against abortion, most arguments about abortion ultimately depend on the question of the moral status of the fetus. Opponents of abortion tend to argue that the fetus is a person, and, consequently, that abortion is tantamount to murder (Thomson, 1971, p. 47). Pro-choice advocates, on the other hand, often base their argument for the permissibility of abortion on the claim that the fetus is not a person. Assuming that the fetus isn’t a person, abortion is not comparable to murder.

Given that both sides of the argument disagree about such fundamental issues, it should be no surprise the parties are in deep conflict. Framed in this way, the dispute can seem irresolvable. As both parties’ arguments start from conflicting premises, it seems that there is no possibility of a middle ground.

A Defense of Abortion (1971) 

In her seminal 1971 essay A Defence of Abortion , Judith Jarvis Thomson takes a different tack, arguing that the permissibility of abortion does not depend exclusively on the truth or falsity of the claim that a fetus is a person. To do so, she aims to show that there are cases in which abortion would be permissible even if the fetus is, indeed, a person .

Thomson’s argument for abortion doesn’t challenge the pro-lifer’s belief that a fetus is a person (her argument simply assumes this is true). Instead, Thomson takes aim at the inference that a fetus being a person means that it cannot be killed.

Central to Thomson’s argument is the example of the sick violinist. Given that Thomson’s violinist example has become common currency in the philosophical debate, it is worth quoting in full:

“But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?” (Thomson, 1971, p. 49)

Thomson’s answer is that you do not have to accede to the request. Thomson argues that this is because having a right to life is not the same as having a right to be given all the things necessary for life. The violinist’s undoubtable right to life does not give him the right to use your kidneys without your consent.

Thomson’s argument is essentially an argument from analogy. Given that we wouldn’t say that you have to support the violinist in this case, we shouldn’t say that mothers have to support fetuses in abortion cases, because both cases are, from the moral point of view, identical.

Fetuses Aren’t Sick Violinists

At this point, one might object that this is all too quick. Surely there are many relevant dissimilarities between your average pregnancy and the act of abducting someone to sustain the life of a famous violinist.

First, in Thomson’s example, you have been kidnapped. If the violinist example is analogous to some pregnancies, it is analogous only to those in which the pregnancy is a result of rape.

Second, Thomson’s case focuses on what a third party (i.e., the doctor) may do, not what the kidnapped person themselves is entitled to do. Even if we accept it might be murder for the doctor to kill the violinist, if the kidnapped person unplugged themselves, the case seems closer to legitimate self-defense, which, unfortunately, results in death.

To deal with these sorts of complications, Judith Jarvis Thomson introduces a few further examples. To respond to the argument that third parties are not in a position to decide between two individuals’ right to life, Thomson provides the following case:

”If Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says “I cannot choose between you” when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and again “This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, ‘Of course it’s your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you and Jones who is to have it.’” (Thomson, 1971, p. 53)

To deal with the objection that the violinist case is only analogous to pregnancy resulting from rape, Thomson provides a second case that is more closely analogous to pregnancies resulting from consensual sex using birth control. Thomson’s aim is to show that, even if the sex was consensual (and the acceptance of the risk of pregnancy voluntary), this still doesn’t mean that the fetus has a right to use the mother’s body. The second case goes like this:

People-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not–despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. (Thomson, 1971, p. 59).

Together, all of these examples show that we can’t simply infer from the fact that the fetus is a person that it cannot be killed. There are some instances in which depriving the fetus (a person) of the use of the mother’s body (the resources it needs to survive) is not a violation of the fetus’ right to life.

Even though Thomson argues performing an abortion does not violate the rights of the fetus, she holds that there might be occasions in which having an abortion might be impermissible. Rights are not the only things that matter morally. Even if we are entitled to do something (e.g., not share our chocolates or not allow others to use our bodies), exercising this entitlement might still be wrong in certain circumstances.

If, to give Thomson’s example, Henry Fonda can save my life simply by walking across the room and placing his cool hand on my forehead, it would be callous, self-centered, and indecent not to do it. In other words, Fonda would lack virtue. 

The reason? It is virtually costless for Henry Fonda to save my life. When it is that easy to save a life, we ought to do it. Considerations like these lead Thomson to argue that, in some cases, abortion may be impermissible. If, for example, a person was considering a late-term abortion simply to avoid the inconvenience of postponing a holiday, it would be wrong to perform it.

Strictly speaking, then, Thomson isn’t 100% pro-choice. However, given that cases in which it is costless to continue a pregnancy are hardly representative of most abortions,  for all practical intents and purposes, Thomson’s argument provides strong support for a pro-choice position.

References:

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. (1971) ‘A Defense of Abortion’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 47-66

How The 2 Major American Political Parties Evolved

By Joseph T F Roberts PhD Political Philosophy I am currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Law and Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, I completed my Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Manchester, where I wrote a thesis on the moral permissibility of Body Modification Practices and, specifically, whether or not we have the right to pursue them without being interfered with by others. My current research focuses on the limits of consent, embodiment, and the regulation of recreational drugs.

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Violinists, Expanding Babies, and Henry Fonda: Thomson on Abortion

Lecture notes for Judith Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion."

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This book introduces readers to the many arguments and controversies concerning abortion. While it argues for ethical and legal positions on the issues, it focuses on how to think about the issues, not just what to think about them. It is an ideal resource to improve your understanding of what people think, why they think that and whether their (and your) arguments are good or bad, and why. It's ideal for classroom use, discussion groups, organizational learning, and personal reading. From the Preface To many people, abortion is an issue for which discussions and debates are frustrating and fruitless: it seems like no progress will ever be made towards any understanding, much less resolution or even compromise. Judgments like these, however, are premature because some basic techniques from critical thinking, such as carefully defining words and testing definitions, stating the full structure of arguments so each step of the reasoning can be examined, and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of different explanations can help us make progress towards these goals. When emotions run high, we sometimes need to step back and use a passion for calm, cool, critical thinking. This helps us better understand the positions and arguments of people who see things differently from us, as well as our own positions and arguments. And we can use critical thinking skills help to try to figure out which positions are best, in terms of being supported by good arguments: after all, we might have much to learn from other people, sometimes that our own views should change, for the better. Here we use basic critical thinking skills to argue that abortion is typically not morally wrong. We begin with less morally-controversial claims: adults, children and babies are wrong to kill and wrong to kill, fundamentally, because they, we, are conscious, aware and have feelings. We argue that since early fetuses entirely lack these characteristics, they are not inherently wrong to kill and so most abortions are not morally wrong, since most abortions are done early in pregnancy, before consciousness and feeling develop in the fetus. Furthermore, since the right to life is not the right to someone else’s body, fetuses might not have the right to the pregnant woman’s body—which she has the right to—and so she has the right to not allow the fetus use of her body. This further justifies abortion, at least, until technology allows for the removal of fetuses to other wombs. Since morally permissible actions should be legal, abortions should be legal: it is an injustice to criminalizing actions that are not wrong. In the course of arguing for these claims, we: 1. discuss how to best define abortion; 2. dismiss many common “question-begging” arguments that merely assume their conclusions, instead of giving genuine reasons for them; 3. refute some often-heard “everyday arguments” about abortion, on all sides; 4. explain why the most influential philosophical arguments against abortion are unsuccessful; 5. provide some positive arguments that at least early abortions are not wrong; 6. briefly discuss the ethics and legality of later abortions, and more. This essay is not a “how to win an argument” piece or a tract or any kind of apologetics. It is not designed to help anyone “win” debates: everybody “wins” on this issue when we calmly and respectfully engage arguments with care, charity, honesty and humility. This book is merely a reasoned, systematic introduction to the issues that we hope models these skills and virtues. Its discussion should not be taken as absolute “proof” of anything: much more needs to be understood and carefully discussed—always.

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In ''Abortion and Ownership'' John Martin Fischer argues that in Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist case you have a moral obligation not to unplug yourself from the violinist. Fischer comes to this conclusion by comparing the case with Joel Feinberg's cabin case, in which he contends a stranger is justified in using your cabin to stay alive. I argue that the relevant difference between these cases is that while the stranger's right to life trumps your right to property in the cabin case, the violinist's right to life does not trump your right to liberty in the violinist case.

In this paper I take a critical look at Judith Jarvis Thomson famous violinist analogy for abortion. I argue that while the violinist example does show that a right to life does not entail a right to be given the means of life, the violinist cast is relevantly different from the pregnancy case. I also argue that Thomson's positive argument in favor of the permissibility of abortion fails because it is based on a false conception of bodily self-ownership. Finally, I offer an argument against abortion built not on the child's rights, but the mother's obligation to the vulnerable.

Law and Philosophy

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Violinists, Burglars, People-Seeds, Samaritans, and Reluctant Bone Marrow Donors: Why Do We Need Analogies to Pregnancy in Order to Understand It?

Agency, Pregnancy, and, Persons: Essays in Defense of Human Life, edited by Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger (New York: Routledge, 2022).

17 Pages Posted: 9 Jun 2022 Last revised: 24 Aug 2022

Francis Joseph Beckwith

Baylor University - Department of Philosophy; Baylor University - Department of Political Science; Baylor University - Institute for Studies of Religion

Date Written: April 30, 2022

Without a doubt the most well-known and original case for abortion rights in the philosophical literature is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” Published in 1971, Thomson’s argument has been anthologized in countless textbooks and has been subject to critique by scholars on all sides of the abortion debate. What makes Thomson’s case original is that she argues for the moral and legal permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is a person with a right to life. In making her case, Thomson uses several fictional stories, each of which is seemingly analogous to the different ways a woman could become or remain pregnant. In each story, one person depends on or appropriates the body or property of another person (the “victim”) without the victim’s explicit consent. According to Thomson, if the victim has a right to reject the dependance or appropriation of their body or property even if the rejection results in the other person’s death even though that other person has a right to life, then a woman has a right to expel from her body a fetus even if it results in its death even though it has a right to life. Rather than directly challenging Thomson’s argument, as I have done elsewhere, in this chapter I am going to simply raise the question as to why we even need an analogy to pregnancy in order to understand its meaning and the moral obligations that may arise from it. I will also briefly discuss portions of David Boonin’s 2019 book, Beyond Roe, since it is the most recent version of Thomson’s strategy. In that book he uses an obscure American court case as an analog to pregnancy in order to defend the legal right to abortion. In part I, I provide summaries of the analogies, and then, in Part II, I move on to question why we even need them. In the process of that questioning I will draw the reader’s attention to certain moral intuitions and human goods that are largely ignored by analytic moral philosophers who traffic in Thomson-type analogies, even though these moral intuitions and human goods would be considered by most people in human history, and virtually anyone who presently lives in a non-Western non-liberal culture or civilization, as obviously true.

Keywords: abortion, Roe v. Wade, Judith Jarvis Thomson, pregnancy, parental obligations, McFall v. Shimp, David Boonin, the violinist analogy

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Debunking The Violinist Argument

• By Jess Ford
• August 31, 2022

The Violinist Argument first appeared in a 1971 text from Judith Jarvis Thompson. In her essay, “ A Defense of Abortion ,” Thompson presented a metaphor for why women should have the right to an abortion. She claimed that a woman choosing to abort her child was equivalent to someone “disconnecting” themselves as life support for someone to whom they did not give consent.

Additionally, Thompson argued that the value of that person’s life should not have any impact on the rights of the person disconnecting themselves as life support. Even if that person were a renowned celebrity, forcing one person to remain as life support for the other violated their constitutional rights.

Thompson was an influential philosopher with thought-provoking illustrations. But how does the Violinist Argument hold up in our post- Roe world? And, as Christians, how should we engage in this conversation?

Engaging in the Conversation

A commonality across every person, no matter their background, interest, or worldview, is the desire to know the truth. The truth is sought after by every person. The search for truth can look simple or complex, but every human searches.

The abortion conversation is a conversation about truth.

When two people or groups discuss abortion and the sanctity of life, the dialogue is only meaningful when the conversation leads to locating that which is truthful. The truth is the prize because beliefs about truth always overflow into actions. Understanding and believing a truthful idea leads to righteous actions. When the truth about abortion is understood, actions of righteousness are the overflow.

More About Pro-Life Issues

• Who Counts as One of Us?
• Expressing Pro-Life Views in Winsome Ways
• Pro-Life Arguments Explained – Part 1
• Abortion Pros and Cons: 5 Pro-Life Arguments
• Speaking Up To Defend Life

Both pro-lifers and pro-choicers have spent years developing compelling arguments for the right to life and the right to abortion. When engaging in conversations with those who think differently, we should listen with intent and care. We must not merely listen to prove the other party wrong but seek to partner in a mutual pursuit of truth.

The pro-life movement grows in strength and impact when eyes open to the value of life in the womb. We are candid about our desire to change hearts and minds. We want to see pro-choice individuals change their minds about abortion. But, we must engage with them in love and partner to pursue truth together.

So, let’s interact with a pro-choice argument rallying in popularity: The Violinist Argument.

What is the Violinist Argument?

The following paraphrases Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous defense of abortion:

The Violinist Argument

Imagine waking up one morning in a hospital bed with your kidneys attached to the unconscious body of a world-famous violinist. As you regain awareness of your surroundings, you notice that the Society of Music Lovers kidnapped you and connected your body to the violinist. They tell you that your unique blood type is necessary to save the famous musician's life. His kidney ailment has a certainty of fatality without the intervention of connecting you to him. They say to remain calm, as the violinist only needs to be connected to you for nine months. The hospital director knocks on your hospital room door and apologizes for what the Society of Music Lovers did to you but continues to say, "The violinist has a right to life. Thus, you cannot disconnect yourself from him without murdering him and violating his right to life."

As you likely have gathered, Judith Jarvis Thompson constructed this argument to defend abortion in cases of rape. Many pro-choice activists attempt to use this argument to combat abortion restrictions.

When stepping into the shoes of the individual who the Society of Music Lovers kidnaped, you may feel that you would be justified to disconnect your body from the famous violinist, even knowing your actions would result in his death.

Of course, the moment you suggest you are justified in disconnecting your body from the violinist in this challenging and obscure hypothetical scenario, the pro-choice activist would immediately expose an alleged double standard.

How are you justified in disconnecting the violinist’s body from your own, but a woman who conceived a pregnancy in rape can’t remove an unwelcome person from her body? Though this argument seems compelling to some, it is flawed in various forms and misses the heart of the Sanctity of Life message. Let’s explore.

What is Wrong With The Violinist Argument?

When you listen intently to the argument presented, clear and unavoidable problems drain the hypothetical scenario of its power. The primary flaw in the argument is based on the distinction between taking another’s life and someone dying.

When considering the life of the violinist, there was a moment when he received the diagnosis of a fatal kidney ailment. This kidney ailment was the condition that posed a threat of death. Various factors could have caused kidney dysfunction, but it is clear that the dysfunction stemmed from problems within the individual.

This illustration cannot be correlated to abortion because another individual causes the death of the preborn child during an abortion procedure. There is a clear distinction between letting an individual die and intentionally taking their life .

Judith Jarvis Thompson performs gymnastics with the written word to avoid the harsh reality of what abortion is: the intentional ending of a life.

The Violinist Argument is not an argument at all. The logic fails to address the reality of abortion. It is undeniable that surgical abortions require abortionists to interrupt a pregnancy with intentional actions to end the life of a preborn. It is indisputable that the abortion pill interrupts a pregnancy with powerful drugs that remove a baby from the womb. 

In Love, Speak Truth

In conclusion, when confronting pro-choice arguments, it is always vital to remain gentle, caring, and truthful. The person you are communicating with holds divine value, just like the little people in the womb who we are fighting to protect.

In the case of abortion, we are unashamed of our intentions of attempting to change hearts and minds. We want to see pro-choice people open their eyes to the value of children in the womb. But we must remember that the greatest persuader is love.

© 2022 Jess Ford. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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About the Author

Jess Ford is a writer and preacher that desires to equip and inspire Christians to live the abundant life available to them through surrendering to the Holy Spirit. Jess is passionate about the pro-love movement and is the son of Embrace Grace President, Amy Ford. Jess’ testimony speaks to the value of life in the womb. Jess graduated from ORU in May of 2020 with a degree in theology, and moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas to get married to his wife, Audrey Ford.

Learn more about Jess through his website: www.jessford.org

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A Critique of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s A Defense of Abortion, Part I

Probably the most famous argument against the pro-life position is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Violinist Analogy, in which you are attached, against your will, to a famous unconscious violinist to prevent his dying from a kidney ailment. I have already responded to the violinist analogy in previous articles. But within the original essay where the violinist argument appeared, A Defense of Abortion, there are also other arguments against the pro-life position. I would like to take a look at the entirety of her essay and show why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’ll look at it in sections, divided up as she divided her original essay. Introduction Thomson immediately talks about the majority of pro-life arguments, which rely on the fact that the unborn is a human being, a person, from conception. I do find it ironic that she, a professional philosopher, would say that our arguments for that are not argued well, and we accept them uncritically, but then uses one of the worst analogies that pro-choice people use to illustrate that. She says that acorn development is similar to human development, but it does not follow that acorns are oak trees. For why this reasoning fails, see these two articles . She argues that to place a line on the “slope” of human development as to where it is now considered a person commits the “slippery slope fallacy,” but like most fallacies it is not always a fallacy. As long as there is warrant for it, then it is not a fallacious argument. It is not fallacious to argue that a fetus five minutes from being born is fundamentally no different than a newborn five minutes after being born. The only difference between the two is the birth event, and there is nothing mystical about the birth event that suddenly grants personhood or “ humanity .” If you’re going to draw a line, then you need a strong enough argument as to why the line should be drawn there and not five minutes, five hours, or even five days before. She then asserts that it is not clear how we get from “the unborn is a person” to the impermissibility of abortion. I’m surprised a professional philosopher can’t see it, but if we have the premise “it is immoral to kill a person without strong justification”, then it is easy to get to the conclusion “abortion is immoral without strong justification.” Any reason that would be immoral to kill someone outside the womb would also be immoral to kill someone inside the womb. So Thomson claims to accept the pro-life person’s premise that the unborn are persons from conception, but as Frank Beckwith points out, she’s really not making this concession. He writes , “What Thomson is granting, then, is a view of personhood consistent with the pro-life position only insofar as it is aligned with a minimalist understanding of autonomy and choice. That view isolates the individual from other persons — generationally, contemporaneously, and institutionally — except as those relationships arise from the individual’s explicit choice. But that is not the pro-life view of personhood. “The pro-life view is that human beings are persons-in-community and have certain obligations, responsibilities, and entitlements as members of their community that arise from their roles as mother, father, child, sibling, citizen, neighbor, etc. These roles are informed by institutions and ways of life that arose over time to account for, among other things, one’s proper relationship to others, which depends on a person’s degree of development (i.e. whether or not one is a child or an adult), the geographical proximity of those with whom one shares a common life, and what we owe those who cannot care for themselves due to age or infirmity. This also includes one’s responsibility for protecting and nurturing vulnerable and defenseless human beings who come into being as a result of one engaging in generative acts that have the intrinsic purpose of bringing such beings into existence” (emphasis in original). Thomson is not granting our minor premise because her article assumes that human beings have no moral obligations toward each other, or at least only obligations that are chosen. But people have all sorts of responsibilities thrust upon them without free choice. Parents are expected to take care of their children, even when they don’t want to. That obligation does not begin at birth. Here Thomson goes into her famous analogy of the violinist. I have critiqued this specific argument in the past, and a wealth of articles have been written critiquing it in print and on-line, so I won’t go into that here, save a few remarks that I think are valuable to keep in mind. [1] John T. Wilcox argues that the weirdness of the violinist analogy (and Wilcox tells us that weird is a technical term, and does not use it in any way to minimalize the unique aspects of pregnancy) and the commonality of pregnancy “is significant. Some people try to look at this matter very abstractly, and say that right is right, whether it happens one time or billions of times; but in a serious sense, something that happens all the time and is necessary is different , by virtue of that fact, from what is rare or impossible. So it will be plausible to regard them differently from an ethical point of view. It is at least arguable, and many theorists believe, that the moralities we have represent some ways of dealing with the realities and and regularities of human life; and they may not fit well the irregularities or impossibilities. Our teaching methods, when they work, fit the kinds of students we ordinarily have; they might not be suitable for Martians or Venusians. And vice versa. Similarly for our moral principles. So what is appropriate for kidnapped kidney bearers and their violinist parasites might not be appropriate for mothers and the babies in their wombs.” [2] While we can’t ordinarily dismiss an analogy simply because it’s weird , I think there’s a lot of merit to Wilcox’s argument. Our moral obligations may be different in a normal situation like pregnancy than in a case of abduction and being forced into a medical situation like being “plugged in” to a famous violinist. The fact that the situation with the violinist is essentially a medical impossibility may confuse our intuitions on the topic. As I indicated in my last article, the responsibility objection is the most powerful objection to the violinist analogy. In fact, pro-life philosopher Trent Horn talks about a thought experiment he devised with his colleague Tony George, based on Thomson’s violinist analogy. He says, “imagine you wake up in a hospital and you’re connected to Thomson’s violinist. You decide, ‘you know what? It would be nice to stay plugged in but I’m going to unplug from this guy. I can’t stay here for nine months.’ So you unplug, you start to walk out of the hospital, and start to feel really nauseous and light-headed. The director of hospital runs in and says, ‘oh my goodness! Plug back in or you’ll die!’ So you scramble into the bed and you plug in to the guy. The director says this to you: ‘I”m terribly sorry, but last night you were kidnapped by the Society of Musical Pranksters (unlike Thomson’s Society of Music Lovers). And these Pranksters, of which the violinist is a member, have a lot of fun together. But because they’re pranksters, every now and then they’ll end up plugged into an innocent person. And when that happens, it destroys the innocent person’s kidneys. But don’t worry. If you stay plugged in to the violinist in nine months your kidneys will heal, and then you can go on your way.’ And you pass out, because this is just crazy. “The violinist wakes up. He looks over at you and says, ‘hey…he doesn’t have a right to use my body without my consent. I’m not going to let him use my kidneys without my permission.’ He unplugs from you, walks out of the hospital, and you die of kidney failure and you’re thrown into the hospital incinerator. Now the question is does the violinist in that case have the right to unplug from you?” [3] As Trent points out, it seems strange to suggest that the violinist, who is a member of the Society of Musical Pranksters, has the right to unplug from you, since he’s the reason you’re in the predicament in the first place. He’s responsible for you needing that life support. In fact, Trent mentions that philosopher Peter Unger has shown that thought experiments sometimes twist our moral intuitions based on the point of view we have in the experiment. Thomson’s violinist analogy is from the perspective of the pregnant woman. But Tony and Trent’s Reverse Violinist thought experiment is from the perspective of the unborn child. Now admittedly, the responsibility objection to Thomson’s violinist does not work in the case of rape. In fact, Thomson even mentions as much. She concedes that the analogy works because you’re kidnapped (which is more analogous to the case of rape), and goes on to state, “Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are a product of a rape.” I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I believe abortion to be immoral even in the case of rape. However, there are pro-life people who argue that abortions can be justified in the case of rape specifically because of bodily rights, and the position that if you consent to the act of sexual intercourse, you waive your right to bodily autonomy. Thomson doesn’t take this potential objection into consideration . Thomson then suggests that pro-life people would not make an exception for a woman who must stay in bed for the entire pregnancy, or for a woman whose pregnancy, miraculously, lasted nine years or the rest of her life. I think that extending the length of pregnancy in this example is utterly unhelpful. The reality is that a woman isn’t pregnant for her entire life, nor could she ever be. In fact, this is one way in which Thomson confuses intuitions. To the medical community, an abortion just is the act of expelling the separation of the fetus from the mother. As Bernard Nathanson has noted, “The fundamental misunderstanding here corrupts the entire debate. Though in practice death has become the aim as well as the result of separating the fetus, the medical term does not imply any intent to destroy it.” [4] If the pregnancy were to stretch out too long, the doctor could simply remove the fetus intact and, presumably, healthy. Considering that later in her essay she indicates that the right to an abortion does not entail the right to the fetus’ death, this is particularly puzzling. When it comes to a more extreme medical case, such as the mother being bedridden, I am not sure this would be grounds for killing the human fetus. As Dr. Nathanson argues, “In morality, life can only be equated with life, not with convenience or sociology or politics or economics or poverty…In arguing an issue of life, one can only invoke issues of life to counterbalance it.” [5] Her last paragraph of the introduction references pro-life advocates who do not believe abortion is justified even to save the mother’s life. I believe that abortions in those cases are morally justified , so I don’t need to respond to that particular point. In the interest of space, I’ve only critiqued the introduction here. I’ll try to critique as many of the individual sections as possible in each part of this series. The violinist was just the tip of the iceberg. Later in her essay, she uses even more bizarre scenarios in an attempt to justify abortion, but so far Thomson’s essay is not off to a very promising start. [1] See also Frank Beckwith’s books Politically Correct Death and Defending Life , as well as Christopher Kaczor’s The Ethics of Abortion . [2] John T. Wilcox, Nature as Demonic in Thomson’s Defense of Abortion , from The Ethics of Abortion: Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice, Third Edition , ed. by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, (Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York, 2001), p. 260. [3] The relevant section starts at about 6:45 on the video. [4] Bernard N. Nathson, M.D., with Richard N. Ostling, Aborting America , (Doubleday: New York, 1979), p. 177. [5] ibid., p. 240.

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"In Thomson’s violinist analogy, you’re the violinist. But in Tony and Trent’s Reverse Violinist thought experiment, you’re the unborn child." I'm pretty sure you done goofed, and that this should read "In Thomson's violinist analogy, you're the pregnant mother."

Yes, others have pointed it out and I did edit it in the article. Thanks. 🙂

Yes, indeed! Thanks, though. I already made the edit.

But you didn't edit it in this blog. It was confusing for me. Great post, though.

I did edit it. I changed it to: "Thomson's violinist analogy is from the perspective of the pregnant woman. But Tony and Trent’s Reverse Violinist thought experiment is from the perspective of the unborn child."

What part is still confusing for you?

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Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defense of Abortion

From Philosophy & Public Affairs , Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971).

(Reprinted in "Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics," 5 th ed., ed. Ronald Munson (Belmont; Wadsworth 1996). pp 69-80.)

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say "before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person" is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is. or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak trees, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes called "slippery slope arguments"--the phrase is perhaps self-explanatory--and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.

I am inclined to agree, however, that the prospects for "drawing a line" in the development of the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think also that we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it comes as a surprise when one first learns how early in its life it begins to acquire human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it already has a face, arms and less, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and brain activity is detectable. On the other hand, I think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of conception. A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss any of this. For it seems to me to be of great interest to ask what happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise. How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion commonly spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and hardly anytime explaining the step from there to the impermissibility of abortion. Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious to require much comment. Or perhaps instead they are simply being economical in argument. Many of those who defend abortion rely on the premise that the fetus is not a person, but only a bit of tissue that will become a person at birth; and why pay out more arguments than you have to? Whatever the explanation, I suggest that the step they take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. "Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him." I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

In this case, of course, you were kidnapped, you didn't volunteer for the operation that plugged the violinist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that persons have a right to life only if they didn't come into existence because of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those who came into existence because of rape have less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn't turn on the question of whether or not you are a product of a rape. And in fact the people who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence do not make an exception in case of rape.

Nor do they make an exception for a case in which the mother has to spend the nine months of her pregnancy in bed. They would agree that would be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all the same, all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would not make an exception for a case in which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine years, or even the rest of the mother's life.

Some won't even make an exception for a case in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother's life, they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother's life. Such cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do not accept this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a number of points of interest come out in respect to it.

Let us call the view that abortion is impermissible even to save the mother's life "the extreme view." I want to suggest first that it does not issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without the addition of some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has become pregnant, and now learns that she has a cardiac condition such that she will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be done for her? The fetus, being to life, but as the mother is a person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably they have an equal right to life. How is it supposed to come out that an abortion may not be performed? If mother and child have an equal right to life, shouldn't we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to the mother's right to life her right to decide what happens in and to her body, which everybody seems to be ready to grant--the sum of her rights now outweighing the fetus's right to life?

The most familiar argument here is the following. We are told that performing the abortion would he directly killings the child, whereas doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only letting her die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be killing an innocent person, for the child has committed no crime, and is not aiming at his mother's death. And then there are a variety of ways in which this might be continued. (1) But as directly killing an innocent person is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent person is murder, and murder is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (3) as one's duty to refrain from directly killing an innocent person is more stringent than one's duty to keep a person from dying, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (4) if one's only options are directly killing an innocent person or letting a person die, one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an abortion may not be performed.

Some people seem to have thought that these are not further premises which must be added if the conclusion is to be reached, but that they follow from the very fact that an innocent person has a right to life. But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the simplest way to show this is to bring out that while we must certainly grant that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (1) through (4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother's directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death. Let us look again at the case of you and the violinist There you are, in bed with the violinist, and the director of the hospital says to you, "It's all most distressing, and I deeply sympathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain on your kidneys, and you'll be dead within the month. But you have to stay where you are all the same. because unplugging you would be directly killing an innocent violinist, and that's murder, and that's impermissible." If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.

The main focus of attention in writings on abortion has been on what a third party may or may not do in answer to a request from a woman for an abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things being as they are, there isn't much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do, and what the mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, if deduced, almost as an afterthought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But it seems to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant to the mother that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on for the fetus. For we cannot simply read off what a person may do from what a third party may do. Suppose you filed yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child--you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child on the other hand won't be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he'll be hurt, but in the end he'll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it if a bystander were to say. "There's nothing we can do for you. We cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the ones to decide who is to live, we cannot intervene." But it cannot be concluded that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to wait passively while it crushes you to death Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be remembered that she is a person who houses it.

I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming that people have a right to do anything whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self-defense. If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do so. But the case under consideration here is very different. In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we bystanders cannot interfere. But the person threatened can.

In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against the threat to it posed by the unborn child, even if doing so involves its death. And this shows not merely that the theses in (1) through (4) are false; it shows also that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so we need not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at it from the argument I mentioned at the outset.

The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while abortion is permissible to save the mother's life, it may not be performed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But this cannot be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is that the mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensiveness of deducing that the mother can do nothing from the supposition that third parties can do nothing. But it does more than this: it casts a bright light on the supposition that third parties can do nothing. Certainly it lets us see that a third party who says "I cannot choose between you" is fooling himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says "I cannot choose between you" when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and again "This body is my body!" and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, "Of course it's your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you and Jones who is to have it."

We should really ask what it is that says "no one may choose" in the face of the fact that the body that houses the child is the mother's body. It may be simply a failure to appreciate this fact. But it may be something more interesting, namely the sense that one has a right to refuse to lay hands on people, even where it would be just and fair to do so, even where justice seems to require that somebody do so. Thus justice might call for somebody to get Smith's coat back from Jones, and yet you have a right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on Jones, a right to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be granted. But then what should be said is not "no one may choose," but only "I cannot choose," and indeed not even this, but "I will not act," leaving it open that somebody else can or should, and in particular that anyone in a position of authority, with the job of securing people's rights, both can and should. So this is no difficulty. I have not been arguing that any given third party must accede to the mother's request that he perform an abortion to save her life, but only that he may.

I suppose that in some views of human life the mother's body is only on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her any prior claim to it. One who held this view might well think it impartiality to say "I cannot choose." But I shall simply ignore this possibility. My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn't be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman has a right to decide what happens in and to her body. But although they do grant it, I have tried to show that they do not take seriously what is done in granting it. I suggest the same thing will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from cases in which the mother's life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we now do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman wants an abortion for some less weighty reason than preserving her own life.

Where the mother s life is not at stake, the argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a much stronger pull. "Everyone has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life." And isn't the child's right to life weightier than anything other than the mother's own right to life, which she might put forward as ground for an abortion?

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.

For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact IS the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow. then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the West coast and brought Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier, the fact that for continued life the violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give him this right--if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is given some thing he has a right to be given.

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In their view, it does not include the right to be given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But here a related difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a great many different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him--and everybody must refrain from unplugging you from him. But does he have a right against everybody that they shall refrain from unplugging you frolic him? To refrain from doing this is to allow him to continue to use your kidneys. It could be argued that he has a right against us that we should allow him to continue to use your kidneys. That is, while he had no right against us that we should give him the use of your kidneys, it might be argued that he anyway has a right against us that we shall not now intervene and deprive him Of the use of your kidneys. I shall come back to third-party interventions later. But certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not something you owe him.

The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right of life. It reappears in connection with all the other natural rights, and it is something which an adequate account of rights must deal with. For present purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life--quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we must place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn out in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life. I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person s body--even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would.

There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother are jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the box and refuses to give his brother any of the chocolates, he is unjust to him, for the brother has been given a right to half of them. But suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being unjust to him, for you gave him no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have given him any such right. But we have to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violinists, like everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not act unjustly to him in doing it.

The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violinist has a right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you do him no injustice.

But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the argument against abortion stares us plainly in the face: it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person, and to remind us that all persons have a right to life--we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?

I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not given the unborn person a right to the use of her body for food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person such a right? It is not as if there are unborn persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says I invite you in."

But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have acquired a right to the use of another person's body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person inside? No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn't her partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use of her body? If so, then her aborting it would be more like the boys taking away the chocolates, and less like your unplugging yourself from the violinist--doing so would be depriving it of what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing it an injustice.

And then, too, it might be asked whether or not she can kill it even to save her own life: If she voluntarily called it into existence, how can she now kill it, even in self-defense?

The first thing to be said about this is that it is something new. Opponents of abortion have been so concerned to make out the independence of the fetus, in order to establish that it has a right to life, just as its mother does, that they have tended to overlook the possible support they might gain from making out that the fetus is dependent on the mother, in order to establish that she has a special kind of responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against her which are not possessed by any independent person--such as an ailing violinist who is a stranger to her.

On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother's body only if her pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some further argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their mothers' bodies, and thus that aborting them is not depriving them of anything they have ~ right to and hence is not unjust killing.

And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, "Ah, now he can stay, she's given him a right to the use of her house--for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.'' It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not--despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won't do--for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

It seems to me that the argument we are looking at can establish at most that there are some cases in which the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother's body, and therefore some cases in which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much discussion and argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we should sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any rate the argument certainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.

There is room for yet another argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may be cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of his life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life is to spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting him use your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health in the slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me plain you ought to allow him to use your kidneys for that hour--it would be indecent to refuse.

Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour, and constituted no threat to life or health. And suppose that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do anything to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she did nothing at all which would give the unborn person a right to the use of her body. All the same it might well be said, as in the newly amended violinist story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour--that it would be indecent of her to refuse.

Now some people are inclined to use the term "right" in such a way that it follows from the fact that you ought to allow a person to use your body for the hour he needs, that he has a right to use your body for the hour he needs, even though he has not been given that right by any person or act. They may say that it follows also that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of the term is perhaps so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to me to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would do better to keep a tight rein on. Suppose that box of chocolates I mentioned earlier had not been given to both boys jointly, but was given only to the older boy. There he sits stolidly eating his way through the box. his small brother watching enviously. Here we are likely to say, "You ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your brother some of those chocolates." My own view is that it just does not follow from the truth of this that the brother has any right to any of the chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother any he is greedy stingy. callous--but not unjust. I suppose that the people I have in mind will say it does follow that the brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and thus that the boy does act unjustly if he refuses to give his brother any. But the effect of saying, this is to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the difference between the boy's refusal in this case and the boy's refusal in the earlier case, in which the box was given to both boys jointly, and in which the small brother thus had what was from any point of view clear title to half.

A further objection to so using the term "right" that from the fact that A ought to do a thing for B it follows that R has a right against A that A do it for him, is that it is going to make the question of whether or not a man has a right to a thing turn on how easy it is to provide him with it; and this seems not merely unfortunate, but morally unacceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda again. I said earlier that I had no right to the touch of his cool hand on my fevered brow even though I needed it to save my life. I said it would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide me with it, but that I had no right against him that he should do so. But suppose he isn't on the West Coast. Suppose he has only to walk across the room, place a hand briefly on my brow--and lo, my life is saved. Then surely he ought to do it-it would be indecent to refuse. Is it to be said, "Ah, well, it follows that in this case she has a right to the touch of his hand on her brow, and so it would be an injustice in him to refuse"? So that I have a right to it when it is easy for him to provide it, though no right when it's hard? It's rather a shocking idea that anyone's rights should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him.

So my own view is that even though you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so--we should say that if you refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give none away, self-centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a case in which a woman pregnant due to rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so; we should say that she is self-centered, callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses. The complaints are no less grave; they are just different. However, there is no need to insist on this point. If anyone does wish to deduce "he has a right" from "you ought," then all the same he must surely grant that there are cases in which it is not morally required of you that you allow that violinist to use your kidneys, and in which he does not have a right to use them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if you refuse. And so also for mother and unborn child. Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right to demand it--and we were leaving open the possibility that there may be such cases--nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.

We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan. The story of the Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes like this:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion on him.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, "Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee." (Luke 10:30-35)

The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some cost to himself, to help one in need of it. We are not told what the options were, that is, whether or not the priest and the Levite could have helped by doing less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they could have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows they were not even Minimally Decent Samaritans, not because they were not Samaritans, but because they were not even minimally decent.

These things are a matter of degree, of course, but there is a difference, and it comes out perhaps most clearly in the story of Kitty Genovese, who, as you will remember, was murdered while thirty-eight people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help her. A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to give direct assistance against the murderer. Or perhaps we had better allow that it would have been a Splendid Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it would have involved a risk of death for himself. But the thirty-eight not only did not do this, they did not even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police. Minimally Decent Samaritanism would call for doing at least that, and their not having done it was monstrous.

After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said, "Go, and do thou likewise." Perhaps he meant that we are morally required to act as the Good Samaritan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do more than is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-eight that he rush out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life, and that it is not morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life--nine years or nine months--to sustaining the life of a person who has no special right (we were leaving open the possibility of this) to demand it.

Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions, no one in any country in the world is legally required to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My main concern here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion, but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in this country is any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Recent Samaritan to any person; there is no law under which charges could be brought against the thirty eight who stood by while Kitty Genovese died. By contrast, in most states in this country women are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This doesn't by itself settle anything one way or the other, because it may well be argued that there should be laws in this country as there are in many European countries--compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism. But it does show that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the law. And it shows also that the groups currently working against liberalization of abortion laws, in fact working toward having it declared unconstitutional for a state to permit abortion, had better start working for the adoption of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the charge that they are acting in bad faith.

I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent Samaritan laws would be one thing, Good Samaritan laws quite another, and in fact highly improper. But we are not here concerned with the law. What we should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled by law to be a Good Samaritan, but whether we must accede to a situation in which somebody is being compelled--by nature, perhaps--to be a Good Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at third-party interventions. I have been arguing that no person is morally required to make large sacrifices to sustain the life of another who has no right to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do not include life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another. But what if a man cannot extricate himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us to extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are cases in which we can, cases in which a Good Samaritan would extricate him. There you are, you were kidnapped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie ahead of you. You have your own life to lead. You are sorry, but you simply cannot see giving up so much of your life to the sustaining of his. You cannot extricate yourself, and ask us to do so. I should have thought that--in light of his having no right to the use of your body--it was obvious that we do not have to accede to your being forced to give up so much. We can do what you ask. There is no injustice to the violinist in our doing so.

Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or not the argument we began with, which proceeds only from the fetus's being a person, really does establish its conclusion. I have argued that it does not.

But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant--for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist; Henry Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. And our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to provide support for their children

I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such "special responsibility" for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse--or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume responsibility for me.

My argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard abortion as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below. I am inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have been drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion in which the mother's life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought to have made them suspect at the outset.

Second, while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside the mother's body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life of that violinist, but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. There are some people who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my argument. A woman may be utterly devastated by the thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again. She may therefore want not merely that the child be detached from her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion are inclined to regard this as beneath contempt--thereby showing insensitivity to what is surely a powerful source of despair. All the same, I agree that the desire for the child's death is not one which anybody may gratify, should it turn out to be possible to detach the child alive.

At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have only been pretending throughout that the fetus is a human being from the moment of conception. A very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.

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Abortion and the Violinist

In 1971, Princeton University Press published, in its maiden issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs , an article by Dr. Judith Jarvis Thomson entitled “A Defense of Abortion.”

Thomson, a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written highly acclaimed books and articles on a variety of subjects. With her “defense of abortion,” however, she hit, so to speak, the philosophical jackpot. Her article has become the most widely reprinted essay not only on the subject of abortion, which is a remarkable phenomenon in itself, but in all of contemporary philosophy.

Because her article has been reprinted, anthologized, amplified, circulated, read and discussed as often and as much as it has, it seems reasonably safe to assume that it has had a significant influence, particularly as an apologia for abortion. The article's broad popularity among abortion advocates suggests that it is the best argument that has been put forth as a defense of and argument for abortion. Recently, a philosopher from Tulane University wrote a book-length defense of it.

Conceding Life

Thomson is confident she can defend abortion, even if she concedes (although she really does not believe it) the humanity of the unborn. She states, “I propose, then, that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception.” Now the ethical dilemma is this: If both mother and uterine child are both human and both have rights to life, can abortion be ethically permitted where the woman does not want to continue her pregnancy?

In order to solve this dilemma, Thomson provides a most imaginative analogy, perhaps the best-known one of its kind in all of abortion literature: “You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist [who] has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment…the Society of Music Lovers … kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.…To unplug would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.”

Thomson believes that she has constructed a similitude that perfectly parallels the case in which a pregnant woman is yoked to her unwanted child for the same length of time. Her argument rests or collapses on this presumption.

There are parallels, to be sure. But are the scenarios, from a moral point of view, in perfect parallel with each other? In both cases there are two human beings who have rights to life. In both cases the continued life of one depends on the willingness of the other to make extraordinary sacrifices. But the parallel she needs in order to make her analogy viable is contestable. Is it true that unplugging yourself from the violinist and directly aborting an unwanted child are morally equivalent acts?

Thomson is confident that virtually everyone would argue that unplugging yourself from the musician is morally permissible. Here, she seems to be on reasonably firm ground. But her firm ground is established by the fact that this image is not controversial. Abortion is controversial because it involves factors that are not present in the violinist image. Let us examine three of these factors.

The act of unplugging yourself is justified on the basis of self-defense. It is a legitimate response to assault and battery (and in the example Thomson uses, to kidnapping and unlawful confinement as well). The development of the child in the womb is not an example of assault and battery or anything close to it. Assault and battery presuppose willfulness and malice aforethought and have always been regarded as criminal acts. It has never been regarded as a criminal act for an unborn child to develop in its mother's womb.

Why Judith Jarvis Thomson's ‘A Defense of Abortion’ convinced so many—and why it's wrong.

The act of unplugging is not the direct cause of the violinist's death. He dies as a direct result of his kidney ailment. On the other hand, direct abortion does, in fact, directly kill the child in the womb. The two acts are distinct and have entirely different moral implications. Self-defense against an unjust aggressor is a different act than directly killing an innocent child in the womb.

The intention present in unplugging yourself from the violinist is to be set free and not that the violinist die. It would, indeed, be immoral to intend the death of your host. This situation, where two ends follow from a single act is handled, classically, according to the principle of double effect. It is never permissible to intend an evil. Therefore, it would be morally impermissible to intend the death of the violinist. But this unfortunate consequence of freeing yourself is permitted to happen because you have a right to free yourself from an unjust aggressor. In a parallel example, doctors remove an ectopic pregnancy from a woman. The intention corresponds to good medicine, removing a pathology (the tube, for example, in which the ectopic pregnancy occurs) and not to intend the death of the fetus, although that consequence does transpire.

The intention of abortion is graphically clear. It is to kill the unborn child. This intention is made all the more salient by the expression “tragic complication,” which is used to describe the rare event of a child surviving a late term abortion. The aborting woman intends to free herself from her unwanted child, but she and her doctor directly intend the death of that child. Another term for induced abortion is “feticide,” which literally means “killing the fetus.”

The Relationship

Thomson supposes that the violinist and the victim are unrelated. She adds nothing to their relationship that would mitigate the victim's aversion to being yoked for nine months. The two are presumed to be total strangers. Such is not the case with the relationship between the mother and her child. The victim, by virtue of being yoked to the violinist, does not inherit or attain any specific kind of positive relationship. He does not become his brother, for example.

When a woman conceives a child, she is no longer merely a woman. Nor is the child merely her child. Conception confers maternity on the woman and her child is her son or daughter. There is a relationship between the two that is primordial, interpersonal and universally recognized. A mother is expected to do things for her children that strangers are not expected to do for each other.

Morality begins when people are generous and loving, when they exercise their duties to be decent rather than their rights not to be inconvenienced. Thomson asserts that “we are not morally required to be good Samaritans or anyway very good Samaritans to one another.” Her language is always legalistic. She completely misses the point that personal love and generosity are primary and that law, rights and obligations are secondary.

John Finnis is correct when he encapsulates the radical weakness of Thomson's argument by saying that she is trying to reduce the mother-child relationship to a “sort of social contractarianism.” It is essentially unjust to try to settle a matter of life and death, which is what abortion involves, by ignoring the ethical primacy of love and generosity while looking to legalistic terms for guidance. Law without love is another way of defining the path to the culture of death.

Thomson's defense of abortion is in itself a significant contribution to the culture of death. What is even more pernicious, however, is her facile deconstruction of motherhood and reduction of all human beings to islands of self-serving individuality. In order to rationalize the death of the unborn, she feels compelled to rationalize the death of the person as a locus of love and generosity. It is as if she is saying that we need the death of the authentic person in order to justify the death of the unborn. One form of killing necessitates a prior form of killing. If our souls are dead, we will surely be dead to the iniquity of abortion.

Donald DeMarco teaches philosophy at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Connecticut.

• January 19-25, 2003

Donald DeMarco Donald DeMarco, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Connecticut, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad ; Poetry that Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart ; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.

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