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A Selfless Brother's Box Of Chocolates Summary

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In A Defense of Abortion Thompson presents an argument against the morality of abortion by showing the superiority of women’s rights through several different analogous cases. The case of focus will be case eight, “ A Selfless Brother’s Box of Chocolates.” In scenario one, Thompson argues that an older brother has a box of chocolates while his younger brother has nothing; the question of appeal is does the younger brother automatically have a right to these chocolates? The box of chocolates represents a woman’s body while the younger brother represents the fetus. Although it would be nice for the older brother (mother) to share his box of chocolates (mothers body) he is not obligated to share them with anyone even if he is perceived as a selfish, greedy, or a stingy person. In …show more content…

If life was not started at conception in these cases and scientifically the unborn child could not be having any thoughts or actions running through the brain the argument would be stronger to persuade the anti-abortion side. Personally, taking away an unborn living thinking fetus’s rights just because we cannot hear them or see them physically does not seem justified. In case eight I do not see how women can just say “well it is nice of me to share my body so I will or I will not because I don’t have to,” when they have a person breathing and thinking inside of them that could be the next inventor or great doctor of the world. For Thompson to be more persuasive to the opposing side she should try discounting life at conception and arguing how the fetus can not have thoughts, therefore it cannot have desires or rights because the unborn person is 100% reliant on its mother and therefore her right has to superior to the unborn child because this fetus cannot perform one single task without the help of its

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Thomson’s Response to This Objection- I think that Thomson’s response to my objection would be that while we are able to see that the pregnancy/violinist analogy does lack a realistic relevance because the situations that are set up are very different. The reader no matter their belief on the pregnancy/violinist case, or whether they agree with the Thomson case or not, provides no real insight on the rape case. I also think that Thomson would point out that her point in providing this analogy in particular was to stress the inference from said person’s right to life to that said person’s right to the use of another’s body.

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Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once used the metaphor of a “magic mirror” to describe the law because it reflects the assumptions, attitudes, and priorities of each generation. In the mirror of the law, he said, “. . . we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been. ”The cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey played a major role and impacted the foundations of American History allowing rights to women as citizens upon the topic of abortion. The choices of our lives should be a personal choice, not a law, similarly, a woman's right to keep their baby or abort their baby should be a personal choice.

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Patrick Lee and Robert George assert that abortion is objectively immoral. One of Lee and George’s main reason for coming to this conclusion is that human embryos are living human beings. This essentially validates that abortion is indeed the process of killing a human. Another main point said by the two is a rebuttal to a common argument used in favor of abortion, which states that a potential mother has full parental responsibilities only if she has voluntarily assumed them. The rebuttal to this was that the potential mother does indeed have special responsibilities to raise the child.

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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 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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Abortion is killing a fetus, a fetus is a person, all person has a right to life, killing someone with a right to life is always wrong. In Thompsons article, she portrays that this statement isn’t always true by making arguments in certain situations that abortion is okay. However, many might disagree with her arguments about abortion but, to which I see to be perfectly thought-out and, explained. A person is not morally bounded to do something for someone else such as to save their life.

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Thomson then shifts the argument towards the definition of abortion, according to opposing parties, which is that it is directly killing the child and how it is connected to the woman’s rights and the analogy. This idea leads to the four logical trains of reasoning. The first is that directly killing a human being is always not permissible, then an abortion may not be carried out. The second is that killing a person who is innocent is murder, than abortion may not be performed, and the third is that one should refrain from killing a innocent human is more important than keeping another alive, an abortion should not be done. The fourth is “if one's only options are directly killing an innocent person or letting a person die, one must prefer

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Judith Thompson in her analogy of abortion gives a scenario, of someone waking up one morning only to find that they have been plugged into a violinist that has a kidney failure, they are told by doctors that they will have to be plugged into the “famous” violinist for nine months, if they unplug, the violinist dies, if they stay plugged in, the violinist after the nine months recover however that person suffers their right to what happens to their body. The question posed following this analogy is, should the person unplug? There are different aspects to look at it from, let me give my scenario, suppose a lady decides to have sex unprotected because she gains more pleasure from it and in the morning forgets to take her early morning pills and in total forgets to take birth control pills and becomes pregnant. She is the sole cause of the pregnancy and should take responsibility for it; the person plugged into the violinist in Judith Thompson’s analogy isn’t the cause of the failure of the kidney of the violinist so why should they have to take responsibility for it.

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In her essay, Thomson uses arguments from analogies to support her conclusions that abortion is sometimes morally permissible. As discussed in the lectures, an argument from analogy is an argument based on the similarity of two things – A is similar to B, and since it is morally permissible to do A, it is morally permissible to do B. Thomson presents several cases that she proposes to be morally analogous to different cases of abortion, in the case of rape; where the life of the mother is at risk; and in cases of consensual sex where no contraception was used, and where contraception was used and failed. In her first argument, Thomson uses the story of the violinist as a parallel between a pregnancy that results from rape. Thomson wants the reader to believe that the two things she is comparing are similar and morally equivalent.

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Women’s rights have been a long struggle in America’s legal system, as well as in the religious world, for many decades and women continue to have challenges, concerns, and struggles today. Fighting for what is best for their bodies such as a woman’s right to contraceptives to control whether she will get pregnant or not was not ideal for religious and personal reasons but would find a worthy advocate in a woman who would dedicate her life for women’s reproductive rights. The right for a woman to have an abortion became a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Courts in a very well-known case. It has always been a double standard in what was right and wrong, moral or immoral, towards women than men. A man was looked at with respect

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Doris Gudino Professor Chounlamountry Political Science 1 27 July 2015 Pro-Choice Anyone? A woman has, undoubtedly, the freedom to procreate, but once a woman chooses to retreat from that freedom, a commotion arises. Abortion is a woman’s choice for many reasons. It’s her body, therefore, no one else can decide for said person.

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An example for a claim such as this one would be that a person wants to be liked or loved by an individual’s acts of kindness and for the person that individual is, not for being liked or loved for looks or monetary expressions (Garrett). I argue that explaining the wrongness of killing by means of rights in which are given or not given to a fetus is unjustifiable because abortion cases still occur in both sides of the debate of whether it is permissible or not. I make this claim because some individuals who agree with the wrongness of killing still resort to abortion methods to either save the mother or because of their financial

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For example, if there is a complication in pregnancy and the mother can suffer because of the child, I think it is ok to do abortion. It is important to understand the various ideas that go behind abortion. The right of an abortion for a mother should be left on her own decision as the mother knows best about her condition. She is going to be the 'host body ' for the baby, even though her own, for nine months and according to Thompson, the mother should have the right to decide if she wants to foster and go through with the ordeal. But still, there are also a strong debate going on about the human rights of the child:

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(Tanner) Pro-choice defenders also say that it is the woman 's right to choose to have the baby or not, forgetting the baby 's rights. The life of a human being begins at the moment of conception, and it is not the fetus´s fault if the mother wasn 't ready to have a baby or if the situation in which baby was conceived wasn 't ideal. For example, if the baby is conceived by rape, the baby should not pay the consequences of other people, he or she has not done anything wrong .”Compassion for the mothers is extremely important, but it is never

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