The Bioethics of Abortion

Since a Supreme Court case proved its legality forty years ago, abortion has been an extremely polarizing issue. Despite its controversiality, nearly every person-either for or against abortion- uses the same basic question to guide their argument: is a fetus a person? In her pro-choice paper, Judith Jarvis Thomson ignores this question and allows for the sake of argument that a fetus is a person from conception, and instead explores other avenues of thought. In this exploration, Thomson discusses differing degrees of anti abortion views, from the most extreme to the most neutral. Throughout her paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, Thomson rejects the typical right to life argument and argues that abortion is morally permissible in a number of different scenarios. Although Thomson agrees that “there are some cases in which abortion is unjust killing,” she fails to define such a case, which not only creates an area of moral ambiguity but also subjectifies the issue in general.

To delineate her argument, Thomson employs various analogies that she believes validates her claim that abortion is morally permissible. One of Thomson’s main points states that the right to life does not entail the right to use another’s body, as a fetus uses an expecting mother’s. In her paper, Thomson uses the analogy of an “unconscious violinist” to distinguish between the rights of the fetus versus those of the mother. In this example, she constructs a somewhat ludicrous story in which the Society of Music Lovers has attached a violinist with a fatal ailment to a completely healthy person, referred to as “you” by Thomson. Through this correlation, Thomson draws parallels between both the unconscious violinist and the fetus, as well as you and the mother. Thomson asserts that unplugging the violinist from your body is merely depriving him of the right to your body, which he does not have any claim to. Similarly, according to Thomson’s view, although it might have a right to life, a fetus has...