Analysis Of Abortion In Thonia And Thomson

In the article "A Defense of Abortion" Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is considered a person. In this paper I will give a fairly detailed description of Thomson main arguments for abortion. In particular I will take a close look at her famous "violinist" argument. Following will be objections to the argumentative story focused on the reasoning that one person's right to life outweighs another person's right to autonomy. Then appropriate responses to these objections. Concluding the paper I will argue that Thomson's "violinist" argument supporting the idea of a mother's right to autonomy outweighing a fetus' right to life does not make abortion permissible.

While parts of both may be true, both cannot stand side by side as completely true when discussing abortion. As they stand today, fetus rights and female rights are incompatible in arena of abortion. Even the “other side” agrees that the two cannot stand shoulder to shoulder. In a chapter entitled “Abortion Does Not Violate Human Rights”, Christian Beenfeldt quotes Brian McKinely when claiming that female rights have a higher precedence than fetus rights: “It’s actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other.” So one question remains, which more important, fetus rights or female rights? The winner of this question can be decided by one simple factor: is the fetus to be considered a true, living human being at the point of conception, or does true human life not begin until after birth? A clarification should be made here, however. In this paper it will be assumed that everyone involved in this debate considers a newborn child to be a human being. That is, at the moment of birth, a child either becomes a human being or continues to be a human being; regardless of the fetus’s life state before birth, it will be assumed that all agree that birth “confirms”, so to speak, the life and human existence of the newborn.

Thomson brings up the standard anti-abortion argument. Every person has a right to life. A fetus is a person. Which means a fetus has a right to life. Therefore abortion is wrong. Thomson does not understand the jump from a fetus having a right to life to abortion being wrong. She believes that the fetus being a person or not is irrelevant to the argument. And abortion is based more on the rights of the woman, fetus, and who has more of the right of ownership of the woman’s body (Thomson 47-48).

In “A Defense of Abortion”, Judith Thomson argues that, under the presupposition of fetal personhood, abortion is not always an unjust killing. She calls into question a person’s right to life and what that truly means. “If you do no kill [someone] unjustly, you do not violate his right to life” (Cahn 194), Thomson asserts, positing that a right to life is simply a right to not be killed unjustly. Her defense attempts to demonstrate that abortion in most cases, or at least not all cases, does not constitute unjust killing and therefore does not violate a fetus’ right to life (194). However, Thomson’s burglar analogy fails to accurately represent pregnancy resulting from consensual sex and therefore does not justify

Judith Thomson’s argument is an interesting and multifaceted one to say the least. Thomson begins the article by analyzing a classic pro-life argument, which goes as follows. The first premise is that the fetus is a person and has a right to life from the moment of conception. Premise two states that it is morally wrong to directly kill someone with a right to life. Finally, since abortion directly kills someone with a right to life, abortion is always morally wrong.

In today society, the topic about abortion is so popular because of the people that are either pro-life or pro-choice. I am pro-choice because of certain reason by me being and Christian it look like I am being and “Hypocrite” but, I have things I believe and do not let my religion take full control on my personal thought when it comes to certain things in my life. The question was asked why Thomson assumes that a fetus is a person with a right to life in her argument. In the article, “A defense of Abortion”, by Judith Jarvis Thomson, says” I think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of conception.

Thomson begins her defense of abortion unconventionally with the acceptance of the opposing assumption that the fetus is an innocent person from the moment of conception “for the sake of argument.” (47) By adopting the primary argument against abortion, Thomson avoids the conundrum of having to prove whether a fetus is a person with rights to life, something that Mary Anne Warren’s essay “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” struggles to clarify. By assuming a fetus is indeed an innocent person that has a right to life, Thomson can proceed with her arguments without the inherent weakness in arbitrarily defining personhood.

He argues in his article “A Defense of Abortion” that it is permissible to kill the fetus. He argues that even though the fetus has already become a human person before birth and has begun acquiring human characteristics, it is ethically allowable to kill the fetus. He provides an example of a violinist where you wake up in the morning with a famous unconscious violinist in your bed that has a fatal kidney ailment and you alone have the right blood type to help him. Therefore you are kidnapped and the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood. The chances are that if the violinist gets unplugged from you now, he will die, but if you wait for nine months, the violinist will have recovered from his illness, and can safely be unplugged from you. Simultaneously, things can go wrong and you might end up staying in bed with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life (Thomson, p.49). Thomson believes that you can acceptably unplug yourself from the violinist even though this will cause his death because right to life does not mean that you can use someone else’s body for your own sake. Judith Thomson say that abortion does not violate the fetus’s legal right, but only denies the fetus that it has no right to use his/her mother’s body. Another argument that Thomson presents is that it is morally permissible to have an abortion if the

Judith Thomson provides a defense for abortion, in specific circumstances, through a series of bizarre thought experiments (Thomson, 1971). Thomson begins her argument by refuting the common arguments against abortion, which sets up her first peculiar thought

In “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson argues in defense of the moral permissibility of abortion in several, but not all circumstances. First off, Thomson uses the expanding house example to refute the extremist view on abortion, which states that abortion is morally impermissible even in situations where the mother’s life is in danger. Thomson states that a mother has the right to kill an expanding child that will crush her to death in her house. Thus, Thomson derives the ownership thesis in which she claims that if a human is entitled to ownership of anything in life, it is his or her own body. Similarly, Thomson believes the mother owns the house and therefore has the right to terminate the child’s life.

In pregnancy reduction the same arguments that Thomson uses would apply especially concerning her example of finding yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child in it and that you would be crushed to death but the child would not be crushed to death if allowed to continue growing. She concludes that it would not be a bystander’s decision to decide who lives or dies but that you have the right to attack to save your own life. This is pertinent because pregnancy reduction requires a medical procedure, therefore involves a third party, a bystander, that you are asking to help you in your own self defense and because multiple pregnancy is most often a higher risk to the mother as well as the child. She states that both parties are innocent here and “the person threatened” can interfere even if it requires a third party to assist her. What a third party might do in response to a woman’s request for an abortion could vary and they have that right however no third party should stop a woman from defending “her life against the threat to it posed by the unborn child even if doing so involves its death.” Thomson goes on to say that the mother has more rights than the child because the “mother owns the house” and therefore more rights

Philosophers, lawyers, theologians and others have devoted and continue to devote their lives to study of the ethics of abortion. Since abortion was legalized, the abortion debate has intensified, and does not show any signs of being resolved anytime soon. The idea’s that advocate the women’s right to abort or the proactive logic that supports the pro-life view and the fundamental identity of the baby all come in hand when looking at the ethics of abortion .American philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thompson and american philosopher Don Marquis both came up with very good arguments to support what they believe.

There are some people that disagree with Thomson’s view. They argue that there is no situation where a baby life should be taken. They said that every single life is important and irreplaceable and equal to each other. Thus it should never be right to have abortion since it would kill an innocent child. However they are wrong, even if every single life is important, there are times when the lives of the mother and fetus will hang on a balance and only one will live. An example of one those times when the mother’s and fetus’s lives will hang on a balance were given early. If the mother is at risk due to the pregnancy, there is a high chance the mother will die when she gives birth. Yet the people still says that abortion should not be allowed. In this situation, is only two choices; ether let the mother die or have an abortion. But who gets to live? Based on the people that disagree with Thomson, they said that the baby should survive while the mother dies. I disagree with them. Why should the mother be forced to sacrifice herself to let the baby live. In addition, the people who argued against abortion did say that that every life is important and equal and yet they are will to choose the baby’s life over the mother’s life. Abortion should be allowed and the choice on who get to life should be given to the mother to decide. In the end, it is her life and body. The mother is using her body to carry the baby and keeping it alive, so she does indeed have the right to decide on

A debate that has been analyzed and discussed for many centuries, and still is today; is whether abortions, should be allowed to continue or prohibited. Although with that broad topic in mind, it brings up many other subtopics. One that is most considered is whether a fetus’ right to life is absolute. In today's society, people have different opinions on this topic, some believe that from the moment of conception, that a fetus is a human being, while others believe that regardless of how long the fetus has been in the womb, it not a human until it has experienced the world, developed morality, emotions, able to think for itself. In this paper I will argue that the fetus does not have a right to life, until it is born. Judith Jarvis Thompson speaks about in “A Defense to Abortions” that the life of a fetus is dependent on a woman’s body. Since her body is her own, then it is the right of the woman to give a right to life.

In 1971, philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote an article analyzing the morality of abortion, offering an (albeit limited) defense of the right of a woman to have an abortion. Her A Defense of Abortion was groundbreaking in that it portrayed the value of using philosophical reasoning in modern debates of morality. Thomson grants for the sake of the argument that the fetus is a human being from conception, and that therefore, it has a right to life. In the extreme view, individuals believe that a human fetus’s right to life is stronger a right than a mother’s right to decide what happens to her body, and so therefore, abortion is not morally permissible (Thomson p.154). To argue against this extreme view, Thomson uses several thought experiments to argue that an innocent person can have a right to life and still, in some situations, be permissibly killed. By conceding the argument that pro-life activists often make about a fetus being a human and taking the abortion argument out of the emotionally charged context of the loss of innocent life, Thomson constructs a compelling argument that shifts the focus away from the personhood of a bundle of cells and toward the rights of the mother.