Rhetoric In A Defense Of Abortion By Judith Thomson

Judith Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” is an essay where Thomson argues that abortion is not impermissible. To be even more precise, she argues for abortion should also be sometimes permissible, but she also grants that there are certain situations in which getting an abortion would be immoral. “Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.” (Thomson, 48). She uses the rhetorical triangle to help her achieve her argument about abortion. Which uses ethos, pathos, and logos to influence her providing the argument surrounding abortion.

The rhetorical triangle includes rhetor, text, context, and audience. She begins the essay by insisting “Most opposition to abortion

Thomson’s essay was created as a strong, convincing essay. Thomson uses pathos when explaining the example for the mother and child situation. Thomson states “Some won’t even make an exception for a case in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother’s life; they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother’s life.” (Thomson, 50) that even when the mother’s life is endangered, they still regard abortion as impermissible. However the case stated before is extremely rare and many people who are against abortion doesn’t believe in the extreme view. She states that “The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while abortion is permissible to save the mother’s life, it may not be performed by a third party but only by the mother’s life.” (Thomson) the mother and child share the same body so it should be left in her hands to control the situation. Most up till now mostly showed a mixture of logos and pathos, but it did include the least amount of ethos. She gave an example “Suppose a woman has become pregnant, and learns that she has a cardiac condition such that she will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be done for him? And also if the fetus has the right to live, but as the mother is a person too, so has a right to life, but as the mother is a person

Alternatively, one might think that having the right to life means that one has the right not to be killed. Again, though, Thomson thinks that the violinist case shows this to be false; surely one can unplug oneself from the violinist, even though doing so kills him. Pathos were included when she provided the example of the violinist. If one attempts to alter the definition by suggesting instead that having the right to life means having the right not to be killed unjustly, then one has done little to advance the debate on abortion. She states that the third party don’t have the right to have the choice of killing the person. She went with the logos and pathos way when she was trying to explain what was going to happen. It shows how Thompson agrees with how the choice of life is not up to the third party or anybody else. With pathos and logos, Thomson further argues that even if women are partially being usually responsible for the presence of the fetus, because it is a voluntarily by engaging in intercourse with the full knowledge that pregnancy might result, it does not thereby follow that they bear a special moral responsibility toward