A Defence Of Abortion

Judith Jarvis Thomson is an American philosopher, she is renowned for her contribution to moral philosophy, which influenced and mould the view of our society on abortion and rights of individuals. She was an elected member of American Philosophical Society. She is well known for her thought experiment in her paper “A defence of Abortion”.In her paper she provides a much-needed defence of abortion by giving a thought experiment.

Thought experiment

“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. ... To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”

The opposition of abortion relies on the premise that a foetus is a person, from the moment of its conception. The word ‘person’ here is important because if we start to consider foetus, a person, then certain rights will have to be assigned to her or him, and the most basic of right is of the “right not to die”.

Another argument against abortion is that, what constitute a person is not a simple criterion but a combination of different criteria, like does it have potential for life or does it have consciousness?

This cuts through the debate of whether to consider a foetus a person or not, because it simply maintains the perspective that an individual ought to have the first right over his body. This experiment insinuates that the right to control you own body trumps over another person’s right not to get killed. This reaffirmed the view that in a society, individual should not be treated as a pawn for some utilitarian utopia

In an ideal society, it is true that rights should be perceived with sympathy and support, however it should not only be for the life of the foetus, but also with the person carrying the same. Someone’s right not to die can’t supersede someone else’s right to his own body.