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Is a fetus a person essay
Arguments against abortion
Opposing arguments about abortion
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In this paper, I will discuss the pro- abortion argument presented by Judith Thomson. The main idea of Thomson’s argument is that abortion is morally permissible. In supporting her position, Thomson presents several arguments regarding the implications of the right to life that she believes the anti- abortion might have dwelled on. As I explain her arguments, I will also attempt to criticize her view on the topic.
As Thomson observes, most of the common argument on abortion is to define whether or not a fetus is a person. This type of argument, Thomson believes, does not lead to the conclusion of whether or not abortion is permissible. Therefore, she assumes that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception for sake of her arguments. Since fetus is a person and a person has a right to life, fetus is, then, has a right to life. Rather than arguing for or against the statement, Thomson approaches by evaluating the right to life and criticizing the false implications that one might have on having the right to life.
The first implication is the idea of having the right to life can outweigh any other rights that come in conflict with it. By this, it means that your personal rights will not matter when they are compared to my right to life. This the extreme view, where abortion is still not allow even if the mother might die from bearing the fetus, since the fetus has the right to life. Thomson objects this implication of the right to life and proposes a scenario in such that the mother may take action to save her own life. In her scenario of the growing baby, the tiny house that you and this baby are stuck in is similar to a mother’s womb. If you continue to let the baby grow, you will be crushed to death but nothing will happe...
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...mine if it is an unjust killing? With this argument, Thomson turns towards the more common cases, where women are aware of pregnancy risks when they voluntarily engage in sexual activities.
Having knowledge of the risks but the woman still engage in the activities, wouldn’t that put her, at least, to be partially responsible for giving the fetus rights to use her body? In the people- seed scenario, a person has taken all the precaution measures to prevent the people- seed from drifting in, yet a seed roots itself inside the house. Thomson argues that the house owner cannot be fully responsible for this seed who will grow into a person. As a counter response to those that argue the owner could have live without windows, Thomson proposes that women may also have a hysterectomy to avoid becoming pregnant when being raped.
As per the thought experiment, Thomson further argues that abortion only deprives the fetus of the use of a woman’s body and nothing else. This disanalogy is often ignored, for it only strengthens Thomson’s argument. Nitpicking between small differences offers no compelling logic to defeat the thought experiment. Similar to how opponents of Thomson’s rationalization carefully attack the smallest details, a distinction cannot be made of what life is more valuable.
Likewise, Thompson holds that a pregnant woman possesses the right to defend herself against her attacker. No matter if the invader is a rapist attempting to harm her from outside or a foetus that may harm her from the inside. The woman still has a moral liberty to repel her attacker by killing the intruder. Killing a person and abolishing their ‘right to life’ cannot be named as immoral when performed in self-defence. Therefore, an abortion is permissible in the ‘extreme case’ whereby continuing with the pregnancy may result in serious injury or death of the woman. However, it can be argued that although it is permissible to act in self-defence against an invader, the foetus is no such invader and should not be treated like one. Unlike the violinist who was artificially attached to you, the foetus is surviving due to the mother’s biological organs and by the natural processes of reproduction and this yields a special relationship. Therefore, this appears to be a crucial difference between the violinist and the foetus. The natural environment of the violinist is not your body, whereas the natural environment of the foetus is within the mother’s womb. Furthermore, the violinist is trespassing because your body is not their natural environment whereas a foetus cannot
In her essay, “A Defense of Abortion”, Judith Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible in most cases even when the fetus is considered a person. She does this by claiming that the right to bodily autonomy supersedes the right to life in almost every case and that the intention of the mother is important in defining when an abortion is permissible. Through multiple thought experiments she shows that the Western perspective often places more importance on the right to autonomy than the right to life even though it is claimed otherwise, and that if a mother does not intend to become pregnant she is not morally obligated to carry the fetus to term in most cases. I will examine these thought experiments and their implications in Thomson’s argument, present a rebuttal and speculate on her response.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, in "A Defense of Abortion", argues that even if we grant that fetuses have a fundamental right to life, in many cases the rights of the mother override the rights of a fetus. For the sake of argument, Thomson grants the initial contention that the fetus has a right to life at the moment of conception. However, Thomson explains, it is not self-evident that the fetus's right to life will always outweigh the mother's right to determine what goes on in her body. Thomson also contends that just because a woman voluntarily had intercourse, it does not follow that the fetus acquires special rights against the mother. Therefore, abortion is permissible even if the mother knows the risks of having sex. She makes her points with the following illustration. Imagine that you wake up one morning and find that you have been kidnapped, taken to a hospital, and a famous violist has been attached to your circulatory system. You are told that the violinist was ill and you were selected to be the host, in which the violinist will recover in nine months, but will die if disconnected from you before then. Clearly, Thomson argues, you are not morally required to continue being the host. In her essay she answers the question: what is the standard one has to have in order to be granted a right to life? She reflects on two prospects whether the right to life is being given the bare minimum to sustain life or ir the right to life is merely the right not to be killed. Thomson states that if the violinist has more of a right to life then you do, then someone should make you stay hooked up to the violinist with no exceptions. If not, then you should be free to go at a...
Thomson starts off her paper by explaining the general premises that a fetus is a person at conception and all persons have the right to life. One of the main premises that Thomson focuses on is the idea that a fetus’ right to life is greater than the mother’s use of her body. Although she believes these premises are arguable, she allows the premises to further her explanation of why abortion could be
Thomson provides the example of being hooked up for nine months to provide dialysis to an ailing violinist to expose how a fetus’s right to life does not supersede a mother’s right to make medical decisions about her body (48-49). I find that this thought experiment especially helpful in understanding how even though a fetus does have a right to life, because the continuation of their life hinges on the consent of their mother to use her body, it falls to the mother to choose whether or not to allow the fetus to develop to term.
Thomson’s main idea is to show why Pro-Life Activists are wrong in their beliefs. She also wants to show that even if the fetus inside a women’s body had the right to life (as argued by Pro – Lifers), this right does not entail the fetus to have whatever it needs to survive – including usage of the woman’s body to stay alive.
In her article Thomson starts off by giving antiabortionists the benefit of the doubt that fetuses are human persons. She adds that all persons have the right to life and that it is wrong to kill any person. Also she states that someone?s right to life is stronger than another person?s autonomy and that the only conflict with a fetuses right to life is a mother?s right to autonomy. Thus the premises make abortion impermissible. Then Thomson precedes to attacks the premise that one?s right to autonomy can be more important to another?s right to life in certain situations. She uses quite an imaginative story to display her point of view. Basically there is a hypothetical situation in which a very famous violinist is dying. Apparently the only way for the violinist to survive is to be ?plugged? into a particular woman, in which he could use her kidneys to continue living. The catch is that the Society of Music Lovers kidnapped this woman in the middle of the night in order to obtain the use of her kidneys. She then woke up and found herself connected to an unconscious violinist. This obviously very closely resembles an unwanted pregnancy. It is assumed that the woman unplugging herself is permissible even though it would kill the violinist. Leading to her point of person?s right to life is not always stronger than another person?s right to have control over their own body. She then reconstructs the initial argument to state that it is morally impermissible to abort a fetus if it has the right to life and has the right to the mother?s body. The fetus has the right to life but only has the right to a ...
Thomson recognizes that this thought experiment has a very limited application – specifically to those instances where a pregnancy is the result of coercion or violence. In the sec...
Abortion is an important and rather popular topic in the philosophical world. On one side of the argument, pro choice, Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is permissible because the pregnancy might not have been voluntary or the mother’s life is at risk if she continues on with the pregnancy. On the opposing side of the argument, Don Marquis argues that abortion is wrong because it takes away all the potential things a fetus could value in their future life. In this paper, I will argue against Don Marquis view of abortion. I will begin by explaining that Marquis does not take into consideration the effect the pregnancy may have on the mother, and I will talk about how Thomson does take the mother into consideration. Next, I will criticize
The standard argument against abortion claims that the fetus is a person and therefore has a right to life. Thomson shows why this standard argument against abortion is a somewhat inadequate account of the morality of abortion.
Alternatively, one might think that having the right to life means that one has the right not to be killed. Again, though, Thomson thinks that the violinist case shows this to be false; surely one can unplug oneself from the violinist, even though doing so kills him. Pathos were included when she provided the example of the violinist. If one attempts to alter the definition by suggesting instead that having the right to life means having the right not to be killed unjustly, then one has done little to advance the debate on abortion. She states that the third party don’t have the right to have the choice of killing the person. She went with the logos and pathos way when she was trying to explain what was going to happen. It shows how Thompson agrees with how the choice of life is not up to the third party or anybody else. With pathos and logos, Thomson further argues that even if women are partially being usually responsible for the presence of the fetus, because it is a voluntarily by engaging in intercourse with the full knowledge that pregnancy might result, it does not thereby follow that they bear a special moral responsibility toward
Thomson appeals to the strongest case for abortion, rape, to define the rights of the fetus and the pregnant person. Thomson concludes that there are no cases where the person pregnant does not have the right to choose an abortion. Thomson considers the right to life of the pregnant person by presenting the case of a pregnant person dying as a result of their pregnancy. In this case, the right of the pregnant person to decide what happens to their body outweighs both the fetus and the pregnant person’s right to life.
How would you feel if someone decided that you should never get a chance at life? That
According to Judith Thomson in her book “A Defense of Abortion”, a human embryo is a person who has a right to life. But, just because the human fetus has the right to life does not mean that the mother will be forced to carry it (Thomson, 48). Naturally, abortion may be seen as the deliberate termination of a pregnancy before the fetal viability. Though people have understood this, the topic of abortion has remained a controversial issue in the world. Individuals are divided into “Pro-choice” and “Pro-life” debaters depending on their opinion on the morality of the action. "Pro-life," the non-consequentialist side, is the belief that abortion is wrong, generally because it equates to killing. "Pro-choice," the consequentialist view, however,