Thomson's Arguments In A Defense Of Abortion

Summary:

Thomson, in “A Defense of Abortion,” writes for arguments sake that all foetuses are considered human i.e. a person. Her argument is that a foetus as it is a person has a right to life. Although, the mother has the ability to decide what happens in her body, the foetus’s right to live outweighs the mother’s choice in the matter. Therefore, the foetus is not to be killed, thus an abortion should not be performed. She defends the notion of abortion using an experiment, by replacing the human embryo in this case with a famous violinist and instead of pregnancy as the medical condition; the violinist is instead relying on your kidneys to sustain his life. In the experiment, it is described as you have been abducted, and by the time you wake up, you are lying with the famous violinist with his circulatory system hooked up to your kidneys to extract the poison from his blood, of which you are immune to. The problem being if he is unplugged, he will die, however if you allow him to use your kidneys for nine months, he will live and both of you can disconnect safely. She argues that you may permissibly unplug yourself from the violinist even though this will kill him, in other words, his right to life, does not include the use of another

The violinist example relates to abortion because although the foetus has a right to live, it is the mothers body it is using for life sustaining functions for nine months. If the mother consented, i.e. knew about the pregnancy and agreed to go through with it, then she has no right to terminate the foetus’s life, however, if she got pregnant due to rape for example, in which she did not volunteer to become a host for nine months, then she should be morally permissible to abort. It is her choice, just like it would have been her choice to detach herself form the violinist due to dissent on the matter of a stranger using her body for nine months, much like a involuntary pregnancy