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A Defense Of Abortion By Judith Jarvis Thomson

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Abortion is a topic that has been widely disputed and has long been considered whether it should be permissible. Even though it has been 30 years since abortion in Canada has been fully legalized, it is a topic that has remained taboo and many who choose to get an abortion are still heavily judged by society (Long, 2006). Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her piece, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, argues that abortion is morally permissible in most circumstances (Thomson, 1971). Thomson states how people should be Minimally Decent Samaritans, in that even if someone has no right to their assistance, they should save that person’s life if it doesn’t require significant sacrifice, and that this should be a standard we aim to stay above (Thomson, 1971). This
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Reconstruction Since abortion is the epitome of a controversy topic, it often instigates passionate debates. In Judith Jarvis Thomson's "Defense of Abortion", she provides a pro-choice perspective. Her standpoint centralizes on evaluating the situation independently as opposed to gaging the cases in a black and white manner. Through rather outlandish depictions such as the violinist, she delineates a thought-provoking scenario for her arguments.

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Judith Thomson’s A Defense of Abortion is an article defending abortion on the grounds of rights, duties, and justice. Thomson uses various thought experiments to represent different circumstances surrounding a pregnancy and the permissibility of abortion in these circumstances. One such thought experiment that she uses in her argument is the burglar example. If you open a window and a burglar climbs into your house, anti-abortionists would argue that the burglar has a right to stay in your house and you have a duty to shelter him because you are partially responsible for his presence there. Even if you install bars specifically to keep out burglars and the burglar still manages to break in then you are still partially responsible and he still

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In “A Defense of Abortion” Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is not always immoral, even when we assume for the sake of argument that a fetus is an innocent person. In cases of rape and even some cases of protected consensual sex, Thomson says it is not immoral for a woman to kill a fetus by denying it use of her body. There are two pieces to Thompson’s argument. First, she rejects the common assumption that to kill an innocent person is always morally wrong. And she uses a clever counterexample (the violinist) to show that even aside from the case where you would need to kill an innocent person to save your own life, it is not always morally wrong to kill someone by denying him use of your body when he needs it to live.

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In “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Thomson argues with a unique approach regarding the topic of abortion. For the purpose of the argument, Thomas agrees to go against her belief and constructs an argument based on the idea that the fetus is a person at conception. She then formulates her arguments concerning that the right to life is not an absolute right. There are certain situations where abortion is morally permissible. She believes that the fetus’s right to life does not outweigh the right for the woman to control what happens to her own body.

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The permissibility of abortion is a topic of popular debate. The discussions presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson and Rosalind Hursthouse provide two unique viewpoints on the matter. In her essay “A Defense of Abortion”, Thomson presents an argument for the moral permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is granted the right to life, and provides the famous violinist scenario, to illustrate that the right to life does not come with the right to use someone else’s body in order to survive. On the other hand, in the chapter “Women's Rights and Wrongs”, Hursthouse focuses on the concept of virtue and how it applies to the decision to have an abortion. Hursthouse believes Thomson fails to address ways in which abortion is permissible because she

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Most abortion arguments discussed today revolve around the premise that a fetus is a human being at conception. In Judith Thomson’s essay, “A Defense to Abortion”, she argues on the topic of abortions. She defends the mother’s right to choose what happens to her body on the assumption that a baby becomes a human at conception. In the argument, she gives the famous Violinist analogy. I will argue in this essay that her argumentative analogy is not sound because of the difference in social importance.

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Abortion has always been one of the most controversial topics throughout the world. Michael Tooley wrote an article called “Abortion and Infanticide” which consisted of his arguments on the topic. Premise one states that “rights secure for individuals things that we desire.” In this premise, Tooley is arguing that if you desire to have something, then others cannot step in and remove that something from you. For example, if I wanted to have an abortion, Tooley argues that nobody should be able to step in and deprive me from wanting to have that abortion.

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Annotated Bibliography "Abortion ProCon.org." ProConorg Headlines. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

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