’s “A Defense For Abortion” Essay, Research Paper
Judith Jarvis Thomson, in “A Defense of Abortion”, argues that even if we grant that fetuses have a fundamental right to life, in many cases the rights of the mother override the rights of a fetus. For the sake of argument, Thomson grants the initial contention that the fetus has a right to life at the moment of conception. However, Thomson explains, it is not self-evident that the fetus’s right to life will always outweigh the mother’s right to determine what goes on in her body. Thomson also contends that just because a woman voluntarily had intercourse, it does not follow that the fetus acquires special rights against the mother. Therefore, abortion is permissible even if the mother knows the risks of having sex. She makes her points with the following illustration. Imagine that you wake up one morning and find that you have been kidnapped, taken to a hospital, and a famous violist has been attached to your circulatory system. You are told that the violinist was ill and you were selected to be the host, in which the violinist will recover in nine months, but will die if disconnected from you before then. Clearly, Thomson argues, you are not morally required to continue being the host. In her essay she answers the question: what is the standard one has to have in order to be granted a right to life? She reflects on two prospects whether the right to life is being given the bare minimum to sustain life or ir the right to life is merely the right not to be killed. Thomson states that if the violinist has more of a right to life then you do, then someone should make you stay hooked up to the violinist with no exceptions. If not, then you should be free to go at any time.
When Thomson contends that having a right to life includes having a right to be given the bare minimum one needs for continued life, she also holds that if the bare minimum that is needed for continued life is something that that person has no right to be given, then it does not follow that the person is owed that bare minimum to survive. She argues that a person has no right at all against anybody that he/she should do anything to keep that person alive. Thomson uses the violinist to illustrate that just because he needs the continued use of your kidneys for continued life, that does not establish that he has the right to be given the use or you kidneys. She claims that he definitely has no right against you that you should give him use of your kidneys continuously. Thomson maintains that nobody has the right to your kidneys unless you give them permission. If you do give him the right to your kidneys it is out of kindness on your part, and if you begin to unplug him now, no one should try to prevent you from it. In relating back to the fetus, because a person has the right to decide what happens in and to their body, and a fetus does not have that right yet. This is because it depends on the mothers body and not it’s own. Just as the fetus has not gained a right to your body for it’s growth, the violinist has not gained or been given permission to the use of your body. Neither have more of a right to life then you do because they both depend on you for life. Since your right to life includes deciding what happens in and to your body, you are able to make a decision about whether they live or die.
One difficulty with Thomson’s argument is why should we admit that a woman has no more obligation to her own child than she has to a violinist that she doesn’t even know? This means that she is claiming that a mother has no more moral obligation to her unborn child than she has to strangers. Another issue is that Thomson is stating it seems to be that if you alone own something, then you alone have the rights to it. No one else has any right to it unless you give it to him. One counter-example to this claim, is if you own an abundance of food and turn a starving beggar away. In this case a person owns something, and the person has not given the beggar the right to use it, but it is not permissible to deprive or withhold it from him, especially if it means his death. Also, in her analogy, the violinist is sick, but in abortion the fetus is not sick. If one removes the fetus from the womb and it dies, its death is because it has been taken out of that environment which is the ordinary means for sustaining his life. When fetuses are sick, they are spontaneously aborted. When a fetus is deliberately aborted; it is usually healthy. In abortion the fetus dies not of something for which one is not responsible; it dies either because someone poisons the amniotic fluid he lives in, because someone dismembers it, or because it is taken out of the natural environment that it lives in. Even if the fetus does not have a right to be hooked up to a woman to use her body, it is still shocking that she or a doctor may poison, dismember, or let the fetus die in an environment that cannot support its life.
PART 3:Thomson implies that moral obligations must be voluntarily accepted in order to have any moral force. Therefore, she misguidedly infers that all moral obligations to a child are voluntary. However, if a man were to father a child unaware that the mother decided to keep the baby, and he refuses to help with child support. Although he took every precaution to avoid fatherhood, showing that he did not want to be a father, according to nearly all child-support laws in the United States he would still be obligated to pay support precisely because of his relationship to this child.
The father’s responsibility for his offspring stems from the fact that he engaged in an act, sexual intercourse, that he fully realized could result in the creation of another human being, although he took every precaution to avoid such a result. This is not absurd because we hold drunk people whose driving results in manslaughter responsible for their actions, even if they did not intend to kill someone prior to becoming intoxicated. Such obligations, although not directly undertaken voluntarily, are necessary in any civilized culture to preserve the rights of those that cannot control what happens to them, such as a fetus. Consequently, Thomson is mistaken, because she ignores the natural relationship between sexual intercourse and human reproduction, when she claims that if a couple has “taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it.” “Surely we do not have any such ’special responsibility’ for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly.” Therefore, instead of providing reasons for refusing any special responsibilities for a child, she simply rejects the concept altogether
Some people think that the right to life includes the right not to be killed.
Let us grant that one may indeed unplug oneself from the violinist. May one take a gun and shoot him in the head? May one cut him into pieces? May one poison him if by doing so he will disconnect in the process? I imagine you would find this outrageous. Why? Does he not die in either case? Yes, certainly. And are you not the cause of his death in either case? In one sense of “cause of death” yes. But in spite of these similarities there is a difference. The man is sick. If you unplug yourself from him, he will die from his sickness. For if he were not sick, he would not die from being disconnected. But if you shoot him, then he dies of the bullet you have put in his brain, and not of his sickness. For even if he were well, he would still die of the damage done by the bullet. Moreover, you are not responsible for this man’s sickness, his bad kidneys. (If you were, you would have to let him use yours.) But you are, of course, responsible for the bullet in his brain, for the damage you do to his body.
Thus, even supposing that the violinist does not have a right to be hooked up to you, still it is not the case that you may do whatever you want to him. Prof. Thompson, granting that the man has a right to his life, focuses her attention on whether he has a right to what it would take to sustain his life. What she fails to notice, however, is that, even if he doesn’t, this does not imply that whatever one does to him is morally permissible.
In the same way, that the fetus does not have a right to use the woman’s body (unless she gives it to him) does not imply that whatever one does to the fetus is morally permissible. Rather, just as one may not stab the violinist in the throat or shoot him in the head, i.e., damage his body and thus cause his death, one may not cut the fetus into pieces or poison him to death.
Thus, all Prof. Thompson can hope to infer from the violinist example is that one may “disconnect” oneself from the fetus providing one does not fatally damage his body in the process. This means that of the six methods of abortion only those cases of prostaglandin chemical abortion (where the woman’s uterus is stimulated to contract and expel the fetus whole) in which the fetus is born alive and is not decapitated or fatally damaged by the violence of the contractions, and those cases of cesarean section abortion where the fetus dies of neglect rather than by the knife, that only these cases are possibly morally permissible types of abortion. Only those cases where the fetus is not fatally damaged by the procedure might be permissible (on Prof. Thompson’s showing), for only such procedures might be cases of “disconnecting” oneself from a person. The other methods of abortion, dilation and curettage, dilation and evacuation, suction or vacuum aspiration, and salt poisoning, cause the death of the fetus by dismembering him or by poisoning him, and therefore are parallel to cutting the violinist to pieces or poisoning him to death, both of which are moral atrocities.
This argument is not just dangerous because it concedes what prolifers try to prove. It’s frightening because of what it asserts regarding the moral obligations of a mother to her child.
2=moral agents, with no special rights
Because Thomson is looking at the standard of a right to life, it is important here to introduce a second exception to the impermissibility of abortion. Let’s say that the mother voluntarily became pregnant, but then she was told that if she has the baby it would kill her. Now, who has more of right to life- the mother or the fetus. Well, Thomson has already
established that a woman has the right to establish what happens in and to her body in the first section, so if a woman is included with that right then she would have more of a right to life then the fetus.
The third point made through the use of the analogy of the violinist concerns whether or not killing the violinist would be unjust or not. Thomson says that some view the right to life as having the right to not be killed by anyone. However, even though Thomson excepts that everyone has this right, she disagrees that that right, “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” (401). So the violinist does not have more of right to life then the dependency of his own body, that is, of course if no one else volunteers their own body for his. The violinist, even with his right of life included, has no right to your body. Since the violinist does not have a right to your body then you would not be unjustly killing him by detaching yourself from him. So the point of view that says that the right to life includes not being killed by anyone should be
changed. It should be stated that the right to life includes not being killed by anyone unjustly. If you were not killing the violinist unjustly, then you would not be killing the fetus unjustly either. They both depend on your body for life and it would not be unjust of you to not volunteer to save their life. As Thomson says, “you might be self-centered, and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust” (404).
My second argument is concerning the end of this essay. It is apparent to me that at the end Thomson completely contradicts herself. She has already granted that in some situations it is okay to have an abortion, however, at the end she says that she does not agree with killing the unborn child. Thomson does not agree that, if the abortion is unsuccessful in killing the fetus, then it is not okay to slit its throat in order to make sure it dies. The contradiction is this. If she has granted that life begins at conception, then abortion would be killing the unborn child anyway- so these two things are not separate. If you are going to kill the unborn child through abortion then you might as well slit its throat- they are both methods of killing the unborn child. Another criticism in this is that if the unborn child has no rights, as Thomson has claimed, through her right to life interpretation, then it does not matter how you kill it because, either way, it would not be killing it unjustly. My question is, “What does it matter?” If the abortion is unsuccessful so you kill it in some other way, before it has come to term, then it would be the same thing. This is only because she granted that life begins at conception.
Ethical problems with Thomson’s argument
2. Thomson’s argument is fatal to family morality. It follows from the first criticism that Thomson’s volunteerism is fatal to family morality, which has as one of its central beliefs that an individual has special and filial obligations to his offspring and family that he does not have to other persons. Although Thomson may not consider such a fatality as being all that terrible, since she may accept the feminist dogma that the traditional family is “oppressive” to women,12 a great number of ordinary men and women, who have found joy, happiness, and love in family life, find Thomson’s volunteerism to be counter-intuitive. Philosopher Christina Sommers has come to a similar conclusion:
For it [the volunteerist thesis] means that there is no such thing as filial duty per se, no such thing as the special duty of mother to child, and generally no such thing as morality of special family or kinship relations. All of which is contrary to what people think. For most people think that we do owe special debts to our parents even though we have not voluntarily assumed our obligations to them. Most people think that what we owe to our children does not have its origin in any voluntary undertaking, explicit or implicit, that we have made to them. And “preanalytically,” many people believe that we owe special consideration to our siblings even at times when we may not feel very friendly to them . . . . The idea that to be committed to an individual is to have made a voluntarily implicit or explicit commitment to that individual is generally fatal to family morality. For it looks upon the network of felt obligation and expectation that binds family members as a sociological phenomenon that is without presumptive moral force. The social critics who hold this view of family obligation usually are aware that promoting it in public policy must further the disintegration of the traditional family as an institution. But whether they deplore the disintegration or welcome it, they are bound in principle to abet it.13
3. A case can be made that the unborn does have a prima facie right to her mother’s body. Assuming that there is such a thing as a special filial obligation, a principle that does not have to be voluntarily accepted in order to have moral force, it is not obvious that the unborn entity in ordinary circumstances (that is, with the exception of when the mother’s life is in significant danger) does not have a natural prima facie claim to her mother’s body. There are several reasons to suppose that the unborn entity does have such a natural claim.
a. Unlike Thomson’s violinist, who is artificially attached to another person in order to save his life and is therefore not naturally dependent on any particular human being, the unborn entity is a human being who by her very nature is dependent on her mother, for this is how human beings are at this stage of their development.
b. This period of a human being’s natural development occurs in the womb. This is the journey which we all must take and is a necessary condition for any human being’s post-uterine existence. And this fact alone brings out the most glaring difference between the violinist and the unborn: the womb is the unborn’s natural environment whereas being artificially hooked up to a stranger is not the natural environment for the violinist. It would seem, then, that the unborn has a prima facie natural claim upon her mother’s body.
c. This same entity, when she becomes a newborn, has a natural claim upon her parents to care for her, regardless of whether her parents wanted her (see the story of the irresponsible father). This is why we prosecute child abusers, people who throw their babies in trash cans, and parents who abandon their children. Although it should not be ignored that pregnancy and childbirth entail certain emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices on the part of the pregnant woman, these sacrifices are also endemic of parenthood in general (which ordinarily lasts much longer than nine months), and do not seem to justify the execution of troublesome infants and younger children whose existence entails a natural claim to certain financial and bodily goods that are under the ownership of their parents. If the unborn entity is fully human, as Thomson is willing to grant, why should the unborn’s natural prima facie claim to her parents’ goods differ before birth? Of course, a court will not force a parent to donate a kidney to her dying offspring, but this sort of dependence on the parent’s body is highly unusual and is not part of the ordinary obligations associated with the natural process of human development, just as in the case of the violinist’s artificial dependency on the reluctant music lover.14