Essay On Abortion By Thomson

Thomson argue that a pregnant woman still has the right to abortion even if the fetus is a person from conception. He argues this by giving the analogy of someone who is kidnapped and forced to serve as a life support system for a violinist without the person’s consent. I feel this analogy is not comparable to having an abortion because conception and pregnancy are foreseeable consequences of even careful sex and waking up and being someone’s life support is not a foreseeable outcome. By causing children to be made, parents also cause them to need support; it's a package deal. When parents mutually agree to have sex they are risking the chance to becoming pregnant. The parents are not enslaved they've volunteered. This may put the needs of a parent and child in conflict, but it creates no clash of rights between them. This is because parents be obligated their children support.

Thomson uses an analogy to get her point of why a woman has the moral right to an abortion. One morning you wake up and find out you are connected to an unconscious famous violinist. The famous violinist has a fatal kidney disease and the only way he is going to survive is if he “plugged” into someone else’s circulatory system. The Society of Music Lovers found out that you are the only one with the right blood type and kidnapped you, resulting in the situation you are in. When the violinist is plugged into you, your kidneys are extracting the poison from his blood. The doctor now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he ...

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...ying to survive. Going back to Thomson's analogy, the stranger did nothing to cause the violinist to have kidney failure. The stranger did nothing to cause himself to be captured and plugged in. The child is also like the captive person, in which she too, is in the situation involuntarily. To conceive and then abort one's child is to turn conception into a situation that he or she has any say in and will ultimately lead to their death.

Overall Thomson’s violinist analogy supports a woman’s moral right to abortion, but if you dig deeper, the two do not have much in common and are not really relatable. I think the argument is defective and actually proves that a woman does not have the right to kill her fetus by abortion because the fetus did not choose to be conceived and is considered a human being, therefore the fetus has rights just as any other human being does.