Analysis Of Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense Of Abortion

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One of the most dominant articles on abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” The article was written in 1971. In her article, Thomson defends the thesis that the impermissibility of abortion does not follow from the premises: that the fetuses are a person and that every person has a right to life. Thomson argues that even if the fetus is considered to be a person, the fetus’s right to life will not always outweigh the mother rights to decide what happens in and to her body. She also argues that even if a woman voluntarily had intercourse it does not mean that the fetus obtains special rights against his mother. Thomson’s article is seen as presenting the best possible defense of abortion, peculiarly with the famous “violinist” …show more content…

Thomson’s argument turns on the analogy between your being plugged into the famous violinist and a woman’s being pregnant. She uses violinist experiment to justify that just because the violinist needs the use of your kidney for his life, does not establish that he has given the right to use your kidney. However, her analogy of unplugging the violinist is not even equivalent to aborting an unborn child. There is a significant difference in both cases: unplugging the violinist and aborting the …show more content…

More accurately, unplugging the violinist is not the direct cause of death because, in Thomson analogy, the violinist is suffering from the kidney ailment which is the cause. On the other hand, in abortion the fetus is not sick, therefore, abortion directly kills a healthy unborn child since the fetus has been taken out from the womb that is his very natural environment that sustains its life. In order to justify abortions, someone might argue that what if the abortion is not done surgically. Instead, a new abortion method that can remove the fetus from the mother’s womb without killing it right away. For instance, Clinton mentions that However, even if we agree that the fetus does not have a right to occupy a woman’s womb, it is still morally wrong that someone may poison the fetus’s very natural environment and let the unborn die in that environment that no longer can support its

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