Defending a Woman's Right to Abortion
Defending a Woman's Right to Abortion
In an essay entitled “A Defense of Abortion” author Judith Jarvis Thomson offers a number of considerations that would justify abortion in almost all cases without denying the personhood of an unborn child. Thomson’s argument is not based on the distinguishing comparison between human beings classified as members of a species, namely homosapiens, who possess the human genetic code and the actual human person who possesses cognitive consciousness or the ability to know what is going on around him/her. Instead, her argument is based on the assumption that every person has a right to life. Although Thomson herself does not believe that the life of a human person begins at conception, for arguments sake, she is willing to admit this. Thus it is granted that every fetus is a person, and every person has a right to right to life. In Thomson’s view, abortion remains justifiable.
Thompson begins by giving an example of a violinist with a fatal kidney disease. Suppose you wake up one morning, in a hospital bed, and find yourself attached at the back to a famous violinist. Upon talking to the doctors, you learn that you were kidnapped by “The Society of Music Lovers”, who in a desperate attempt to save this violinist, have plugged in his circulatory system with yours, turning you into a human dialysis machine. The doctors later inform you that they are sorry that this has happened to you, but it will only take nine months for the violinist to recover, at which point he can be “unplugged” from you, but to unplug him from you now would cause him to die. Since violinists are people too, and since every person has the right to live, Thomson uses this to point out that no matter how long the violinist needs to get better, even if it takes him nine years you are expected to lie there because he has a right to life, and thus you have no right to take his life from him by “unplugging” him from you.
The violinist example is merely a strategy that Thomson uses to point out the major flaw in the pro-lifer’s view. Since Thomson previously establishes the pro-lifer’s view to be: “…a person’s life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body…” (740). In using the situation described...