A Defense Of Abortion By Judith Thomson

Miles Carter

Phil 4 In her 1971 essay, A Defense of Abortion, Judith Thomson takes a philosophical glance at abortion, and through the use of analogy and logical sequencing, she convincingly defends the moral permissibility of abortion. The key to her essay is that she does not focus on the incredibly subjective question of when personhood begins, in fact she grants (for the sake of argument) that a fetus is a person. Her main reasoning for doing this is in response to the “slippery-slope” argument that drawing a definitive line for personhood is completely arbitrary, and may set a dangerous precedent. While she openly criticizes this style of argument, she does allow it some weight in this case and steers her argument towards other, more

Although the vast majority of anti-abortionists would also agree that a woman has a right to bodily autonomy, they still argue that the right to life supersedes all (except in cases of rape or the woman’s life being at risk). While at a first glance this logic may check out, Thomson takes a closer look, using an analogy to demonstrate her point. She proposes a scenario in which a famous violinist is stricken with a fatal illness, and the only way to save him is to plug his circulatory system into yours for a period of nine months, during which you are bedridden. Without your consent, you are kidnapped and plugged into him. There is no natural, intuitive right insisting you must sacrifice a period of your life to save someone else, therefore no moral obligation to remain plugged in. Thomson explains that since most people would agree that it is morally permissible to unplug yourself and continue living your life, they should also agree that it is morally permissible to terminate a fetus that is using your body. This particular analogy, however, is not fully convincing, and brings about an obvious

First, an opponent may bring about the argument that there is no such thing as the right to someone’s body to begin with, thus rendering the notion that the fetus has no right to the mother’s body irrelevant. They may claim, rather, that the argument has nothing to do with a right to use the mother’s body and everything to do with the relative strengths of the right to life and the right to self control. If the right to life is one that never wavers (unless you intentionally hurt someone, which a fetus is incapable of), then the permissibility of abortion depends on the woman’s right to self control. If a woman is assaulted, then of course she never gave up her right to self control, and that right outweighs the fetus’s right to life. However, one may argue, if a woman engages in consensual sex she is sacrificing some of her right to self control, and a resulting fetus has a right to life stronger than this now reduced right to self control. The second objection that may be made in response to the people-seed scenario is another case of disanalogy: in the scenario, the inhabitants of the house have no responsibility for the existence of the seed, thus when a seed drifts into your window and takes root, its existence is of course still not your fault. However, the only way a fetus can exist is through sexual reproduction, and because we are focusing the argument around cases of consensual sex,