Morality and Support in Judith Jarvis Thomson's Essay, A Defense of Abortion

In this paper I will explain and examine Judith Jarvis Thomson’s view on abortion as outlined in her essay “A Defense of Abortion”. I will summarize her perspective on the issue, and will then criticize and support her arguments and the analogies she includes.

First, I will address Thomson’s decision to assume that a fetus is a person from the time of conception. I think she makes a wise choice in labeling a fetus as a person throughout pregnancy because this decision eliminates one controversy surrounding the morality of abortion. Were Thomson not to concede the issue regarding personhood, skeptics could focus on their issue with that single point and this disagreement could invalidate the rest of Thomson’s argument. Choosing to label all fetuses as people, with a right to life, prevents the opposition from dismantling Thomson’s argument from the very beginning. Once it is agreed upon that the fetus in Thomson’s scenario is a human at all stages of development, all those who read her essay have a common starting point, helping to prevent pre-determined bias.

I will now discuss Thomson’s first analogy: the violinist case. The violinist case begins with a scenario in which you are admitted to the hospital for a routine procedure. However, you wake up the next morning and find yourself in a bed with a complete stranger. Upon further investigation, you realize that the two of you are connected through a series of tubes and wires. Soon after, another stranger enters your shared hospital room and introduces himself as a representative of The Society of Music Lovers. He tells you that the man you are in bed with is a gifted violinist suffering from a fatal disease. Luckily though, he tells you, they found the only match f...

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...ns her right to autonomy, which is then infringed upon by the unexpected and unwanted fetus, allowing that it is morally permissible for her to abort the fetus. I think this argument is valid because it too weighs a woman’s right to autonomy against a fetus’s right to life. In the case of rape, a woman’s body is involuntarily taken and used. Because we have determined that it is morally permissible for a woman to maintain her autonomy at the expense of the fetus’s life, we can draw similar conclusions about the flawed anti-people-seed screen. In this situation, too, a woman’s body is taken against her will by a fetus. At no point does she offer her body to this fetus or waive her right to autonomy. Therefore, we can deduce that this woman’s right to autonomy is being violated by the fetus, and that it is therefore morally permissible for the fetus to be aborted.