Proponents of abortion rights typically
argue that the unborn are not persons with a right to life. Hence, abortion is
not immoral or unjustified. Judith Thomson does not argue in such a manner. She
contends that we can conclude that abortion is morally permissible even if the
fetus is a person with a right to life. She writes, “ I propose that we grant
that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. 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. But surely a person’s
right to life is stronger than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and
to her body. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.”
(A Defense of Abortion, P. 267, Para. 2) She goes on to provide two cases where
a mother would have a right to an abortion while granting the pro-life
position: the violinist case and self-defense. In the former, she provides the
following scenario:
“ 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 now is
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 still longer? What if the director of the hospital says,
"Tough luck, I agree, but you've now 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 that you would regard this
as outrageous...” (Ibid).
There seems to be a key implication of
this scenario: the person withdrawing support from the violinist does not seem
to be doing anything immoral and yet it would be generous to extend the use of
his or her body to the violinist. Numerous responses to Thomson’s argument have
been proposed in the literature. I will instead narrow in on one key problem
with her analogy. Her mere withdrawing support from the violinist does not seem
to be parallel to the case of an abortion. Most people would grant Thomson’s
argument that it would not be immoral to “unplug” yourself from the violinist
but yet some would question whether it is parallel to abortion. As philosopher Francis
Beckwith points out, “Euphemistically calling abortion the “withholding of
support or treatment” makes about as much sense as calling suffocating someone
with a pillow the withdrawing of oxygen.” (Personal Bodily Rights, Abortion,
and Unplugging the Violinist, P. 116, Para. 3).
Moreover, Thomson’s argument through
the Violinist analogy would seem to only permit abortion in the cases of rape
since the woman was involuntarily hooked up to the violinist without any form
of consent. Since a woman’s bodily rights are violated when she is raped, she
ultimately does not consent to the pregnancy.
One other case of Thomson’s essay
deserves attention. Later on in her essay she defends abortion rights as akin
to self-defense. She argues that even if we grant that both the mother and
unborn child are innocent and have a right to life, the mother has the right to
terminate her pregnancy if keeping her child would endanger or possibly end her
life. While most pro-life advocates would agree with Thomson that abortion in
this case would be permissible, her argument is nonetheless problematic. She
claims that we cannot appeal to self-defense when someone threatens to kill you
unless you torture another individual to death. You would not have a right to
torture the other person even though doing so would save your life. Why? It is
because “In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is
threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are innocent. For this reason we may
feel that we bystanders cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.” (P.
269). Thomson’s purpose in this scenario is to show that any view that forbids
abortion given life-threatening circumstances for the mother is “extreme” and
is to be rejected.
This scenario seems plausible but there
is a serious flaw here. First, Thomson equivocates on the notion of threat in
her two examples. She implicitly claims that the kind of threat posed by the
assassin is analogous to the unborn child even though the unborn child is
innocent and the assassin is not. The assassin is posing an active threat to her life, not a mere
passive threat that the unborn child is posing. The unborn child, we may grant,
is posing a threat to the mother’s life by way of his mere presence in her
body. But that kind of threat is passive or indirect, not direct or active. Nevertheless,
Thomson insists that we grant that the mother has a right to abort the fetus by
virtue of it being a threat to her life and if by keeping the fetus alive her
death will occur. The second problem is a progression from the first one.
Thomson fails to show why a person, whose mere presence in another person’s
life and is a threat to her life, ought to be killed in the name of
self-defense if in fact no direct act of violence has been committed.
To borrow an illustration from my
friend Lydia McGrew, suppose you and Joe are locked in a sealed and airtight
room with sufficient but little oxygen for both people to breathe. Both of you
are innocent and neither of you are actively doing harm to each other. You and
he are simply sitting together against the wall. But because there is limited
oxygen and no external oxygen source to supply more air for both of you to
breathe, you end up depriving the other person of needed air just by breathing!
Keep in mind that you and Joe are actively doing nothing to each other but
simply sitting there. But when you breathe, that reduces the amount of oxygen
the other person needs to survive and the same applies to you. His presence and
simply breathing poses a threat to your life and you pose a threat to Joe’s
life by virtue of simply being there and breathing air. Would you be morally
justified in strangling Joe to save some additional air for yourself? Of course
not and neither would Joe though it would be beneficial to either of you to
kill the other person to save additional oxygen. For these reasons, even if we
grant that abortion is morally permissible when the mother’s life is in danger,
Thomson has not shown that to be the case by her argument from self-defense.
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