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Comments on why the prenatal child has the right under individual liberty to be in the mother s womb
One of the most influential articles on abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion," written in 1971. Thomson asks the reader "to imagine" that you "wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist" who has a fatal kidney ailment. You find "the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours," making you like a kidney dialysis machine. You were kidnapped, because "you alone have the right blood type to help."
To Thomson, unwanted pregnancy and the unconscious violinist are morally equivalent cases. She argues that neither the stranger nor the mother owes the needed life support; the stranger may unplug himself from the violinist, and the mother may unplug herself from her child.
As Thomson recognizes, personhood is the pivotal issue in the abortion debate. If personhood begins before birth, then whenever it begins, we must respect the rights of both mother and child. If human beings are not persons before birth, then abortion is not homicide (the killing of one person by another), and from the perspective of rights, there is nothing further to discuss. In her article, Thomson grants, for argument's sake only, that human fetuses are persons. Even so, she concludes, abortion is not necessarily unjust homicide.
Thomson's defense is a classic example of blame the victim. Its influence continues, despite rebuttals by scholars on both sides of the abortion debate. Here are some of my reasons why her analogy fails.
Abortion isn t just unplugging
To begin with, her analogy is irrelevant to reality. In most abortions, the children aren't just "unplugged" and removed from the womb; they are killed-intentionally. They are dismembered or poisoned before eviction.
"I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child," she says. "You may detach yourself even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him."
Yes, there is an important moral distinction between killing by using lethal force (death is certain) and killing by letting die (survival is possible, at least...