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Defense Of Abortion

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In “A Defense for Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson grants those who are against abortion the right that personhood starts at conception but goes on to argue for the permissibility of abortion by complicating the personhood argument. In this paper I will argue for the defense of abortion by first explaining Thomson’s famous violinist case, then I will criticize her argument. Thomson begins laying out her argument by first describing the main focus when interpreting if abortion is permissible or not. This is if the fetus is a person bearing full rights, and at what point is it considered a person (Thomson, 48). Those who are against abortion typically argue that a fetus is a person, bearing full rights, at the time of conception. This is supported …show more content…

This argument is referred to as the personhood argument. This is what the argument looks like. Personhood starts at conception (thus fetuses are persons). If a being is a person, then it has a right to life. If a being has a right to life then it is wrong to kill it. Abortion is the termination of a fetus; therefore abortion is wrong (Thomson, 48). Much of the debate on whether if abortion is permissible or not gets caught up on this first premise that fetuses obtain personhood at conception and to deny this premise would be to claim that personhood does not start at conception which would make this argument fail. Thompson does not believe this claim that personhood is achieved at conception, but she feels that the permissibility of abortion can still be argued for even if premise (1) were true. She does this by attacking premise (3); that if a being has a right to life, then it is wrong to kill it. As far as the abortion debate is concerned, premise (3) is stating that a right to life is stronger than the right of a mother to decide the fate of her body so the right to life is greater than the right to privacy making abortion …show more content…

Considering that the violinist has this rare kidney ailment that will inevitably result in his death unless he remains attached to you, the only person capable of saving his life; by unplugging yourself from the violinist, you are not directly killing him. It is his ailment that is taking his life not your decision to unplug yourself from him. In this instance, even though you may be aware of what will result from unplugging yourself from the violinist, your intention is not to kill him. However, in the case of abortion, you are directly responsible for killing the fetus. If your intention wasn’t to just kill an innocent being, then you could carry out the pregnancy for the nine-month duration and when the child is born if you still find keeping the child to be far to large of a burden, then it does not seem morally impermissible to put the child up for adaption. Considering that there are options available to relieve yourself of the responsibility of taking care of a child, it seems that it is never permissible to end the life of an innocent being through

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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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Written Assignment #6 In Judith Jarvis Thompson’s article, A Defense of Abortion, where Thompson discusses argues that abortion is not always permissible, but permissible in certain circumstances; such as, the abortion is done attempt to save the mother’s life and in cases of rape. However, I do not believe provides a solid enough argument in stating that abortion is immoral in nearly all circumstances. In this argument, Thompson takes on the perceptive that the fetus is a living person.

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She states that if every person has a right to live and a fetus is in fact a person, then as a result the fetus has a right to a life and the threat of abortion violates their rights—the unwilling mother, whose rights are also being violated, has also a right to her own body. According to Thomson, abortion is permissible when the pregnancy is the result of a rape—presented by the violinist experiment, a threat to the life of the mother is present—growing baby/small house experiment, and any cases in which attempts to prevent a pregnancy were made—burglar and seeds experiment. It should be pointed out that none of her arguments applies to a pregnancy in which no effort to prevent the pregnancy was made—or in other words, voluntary and conscious sex was involved. Thomson concluded that because her experiments, in her opinion, covered all possible cases of pregnancy and she proved the moral permissibility of abortion in all, then as a result abortion is never immoral, unless done for pointless and superficial reasons in which case it would be considered indecent, questionable, and

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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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Mary Anne Warren’s argument for the moral permissibility of abortion concentrates on the question of personhood and humanity with reference to a common anti-abortion argument and the discussion of potential personhood. Her argument builds on the belief that fetuses are not human beings and considers humanity through certain categories one must have in order to be considered a human person. Warren’s argument is logical, however, her argument is unsound because of a series of erroneous premises. Thus, because these premises are erroneous, an Aristotelian-type argument can be constructed that properly discusses potential persons and argues against Warren, thus aruging for the moral impermissibility of abortion.

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The “awareness” is why I think the child should have permission to use the woman’s body for its right to life. If a person feels so strongly about not wanting to have any chance of becoming pregnant, then that person should not participate in consensual sex. It is unjust to kill a fetus just because it was the unwanted result of your risky actions. To further explore the violinist example, if there was a tiny chance of getting

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Another argument pro-lifes bring is that, because a fetus has the potential to become a person, it is not fair to get rid of it because we are not giving the fetus the chance to grow to become someone in life, and everyone deserves to have a chance at life.

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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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I find myself struggling to pick a side because I think both the arguments from Thomson and Hursthouse need to be taken into consideration in the abortion debate. While I don’t entirely agree with Hursthouse’s view that the rights of women and the status of the fetus are irrelevant, my views are somewhat more aligned with her perspective. Overall, Thomson and Hursthouse both recognize scenarios where abortion may be morally permissible, yet their justifications

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Thomson hints to the idea that every human being has a right to life; therefore, the woman would have no moral obligation to continue with the pregnancy (Warren 309). Warren places much emphasis on Thomson’s argument for the probability of it being a strong stance for the permissibility of abortion or a strong argument that abortion is murder, which is unique in and of itself because it has the possibility of arguing for or against abortion. Thomson construes two steps in which the moral status of abortion should be determined by. The first step is determining the true moral status of a fetus and the second is creating a distinguishable difference between the rights of the fetus vs. the rights of the woman (Warren 309). Warren structures her argument like that of Thomson’s by creating two steps which will support her stance that abortion is morally

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Introduction In his paper “Why Abortion Is Immoral”, Don Marquis attempts to put forward and defend his argument of why abortion is morally equivalent to the killing of a human. Using the deprivation account of the wrongness of death, he is able to apply the same immorality of killing a human to killing a fetus, even if it is not classified as a human, by claiming that both subjects have the capacity for a future like ours. Yet, Marquis fails in explaining why having a future like ours starts when an embryo becomes a fetus and not earlier in the developmental process, leading to absurd outcomes from his logic that causes his argument to fall apart. In this essay, I posit that the use of the deprivation of account on a fetus leads to logically absurd outcomes, and therefore nullifies Marquis’ the claim that abortion is prima facie wrong.

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Mary Anne Warren establishes a belief that a fetus’s right to live is overruled by an expecting mother’s right to an abortion because it is not a technically a true person until it is born. Warren supports her argument by saying that a nearly full-developed fetus is no more significant than a small embryo because “…it is not fully conscious… it cannot reason or communicate message… and has no self-awareness” (Warren, page 499). In contrast, our text states that “…some fetuses develop the capacity to survive outside the womb…” after nearly being two-thirds fully developed; this means that a fetus is ultimately capable of communication and awareness through it’s movements (Munson and Lague, page 469).

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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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The reasoning of this belief is that the woman is who will have the responsibility of caring for that child and it is her body. The issue, however, with this reasoning is that it does not deal with the morality of the issue or take into consideration whether abortion is right or wrong. In Webster 's dictionary, abortion is defined as the "termination of a pregnancy often accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of an embryo or fetus. " It is the killing of an unborn child. Even though morality is hard to describe, the bulk of society complies that murder is wrong; therefore, abortion should be expressed as immoral as well.

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The termination of pregnancy by removing a fetus or embryo from the womb before it can survive on its own is called abortion. Nowadays, abortion is so common that more than forty percent of all women will perform abortion at some time of their reproductive lives. While this numbers are scary, what is more troublesome is that several countries support this dreadful act. Society is now considering this act of murder each day more normal, and position the mother 's rights before the baby´s rights. Killing an adult is no different than killing a fetus, both are genetically unique and were made by God.

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