More handpicked essays just for you.
Judith Jarvis Thomson “A Defense of Abortion”
Judith Jarvis Thomson “A Defense of Abortion”
Judith Jarvis Thomson “A Defense of Abortion”
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
In this paper I will be arguing in favor of Judith Jarvis Thomson view point on abortion. I am defending the use abortion and only in the first trimester. I will consider Don Marquis objections of the practice but ultimately side with Thomson. 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. (1) The fetus is a person (or moral equivalent) (2) It is wrong to kill persons (C) It is wrong to have an abortion. But there is a suppressed premise needed to make the argument work because the mother also has a right to her own body (bodily integrity). As it stands the …show more content…
But in another one of her arguments, Jarvis says that it seems like it is not morally permissible to kill a child. Take one of her thought experiments, called the violinist case; You wake up in a hospital with a famous violinist attached to your kidneys, and he needs use of your kidneys for nine months. (1) Every person has a right to life. (2) The violinist is a person. (3) Therefore the violinist has a right to life. (C) It is impermissible to unplug the violinist. This is an analogy towards rape. The violinist is the baby and the music society is the …show more content…
There are other factors in determining what rights a person has in a given circumstance. None of her arguments apply to pregnancy in which sex was voluntary and no effort was made to prevent pregnancy. She argues that abortion is permissible in three types of cases: (1) Rape (violinist experiment), (2) Threat to mothers’ life (death), (3) Cases where attempts were made to prevent the pregnancy (failure of contraception). At the end of her paper she says we must not fall below the standard of minimally decent Samaritans (MDS). However, she doesn’t really says what that standard
According to Thomson, unjust killing comes from the result of depriving someone from a right that they own. In the Henry Fonda case, Fonda was given the magical ability to cure a sickness with just one touch over a fevered brow. So, Fonda has the right to volunteer in touching the fevered brow, but is not obligated to do so because the sick person does not own the right of Henry Fonda’s hand. This analogy is very significant in comparison to Thomson’s argument on justified abortion because it shows that the mother should not be held to any constraints because she has the freedom to her body. Given the fact that the mother has the authority to make any decisions she wants; abortion will always be justified because she is not obligated to give
She again uses a thought experiment where she presents a situation where if a mother were to carry her fetus to term that it would kill her. She states “we are told that performing the abortion would be directly killing the child, whereas doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only letting her die,” which opens up an argument of the difference over killing a person and just letting them die when in this situation the mother could live if she was able to abort the pregnancy. She presents four scenarios to which this situation could end. The first is that killing an innocent is impermissible, so an abortion cannot take place. The second is killing an innocent is equivalent to murder, and murder is never okay so therefore an abortion can not take place. The third is, killing an innocent is worse then letting a person die therefore an abortion may not be performed. Finally, the fourth scenario is that if you have to choose between killing a person and letting them die you have to choose letting someone die and an abortion may not take place. She goes on to say that all of the scenarios are all false, but then only provides a reasoning for the second scenario saying that if the mother performed an abortion to save her own life that it could not
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
First I will prove premise 1, “Every fetus is a person,” true. The definition of person according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "a human being." Now surely no one would regard a fetus as anything other than human such as a primate or dog. But some still might say, "Well, it isn't aliv...
To help argue her point, Thomson first begins with an analogy comparing an acorn of an oak tree to the fetus in a woman’s body. She begins by giving the view of the Pro – Lifers; “It is concluded that the fetus is…a person from the moment of conception” (page 113). She then goes on to say, “similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are Oak trees…” (Page 113). This analogy helps illustrate how much she disagrees with this Pro –life argument. She calls it a “slippery- slope argument” and goes to say, “…it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically” (page 113). Although Thomson makes it clear that she disagrees with the notion that a fetus is a person (…I think the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person from th...
In the article 'A Defense of Abortion' Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is considered a person. In this paper I will give a fairly detailed description of Thomson main arguments for abortion. In particular I will take a close look at her famous 'violinist' argument. Following will be objections to the argumentative story focused on the reasoning that one person's right to life outweighs another person's right to autonomy. Then appropriate responses to these objections. Concluding the paper I will argue that Thomson's 'violinist' argument supporting the idea of a mother's right to autonomy outweighing a fetus' right to life does not make abortion permissible.
In Thomson’s article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Thomson argues that abortion is not impermis-sible because she agrees with the fact that fetus has already become a human person well before birth, from the moment of conception (Thomson, 268 & 269). Besides that, she also claims that every person has a right to live, does so a fetus, because a fetus is a person who has a right to live.
In A Defense of Abortion (Cahn and Markie), Judith Thomson presents an argument that abortion can be morally permissible even if the fetus is considered to be a person. Her primary reason for presenting an argument of this nature is that the abortion argument at the time had effectively come to a standstill. The typical anti-abortion argument was based on the idea that a fetus is a person and since killing a person is wrong, abortion is wrong. The pro-abortion adopts the opposite view: namely, that a fetus is not a person and is thus not entitled to the rights of people and so killing it couldn’t possibly be wrong.
Many people are familiar with the term abortion and its popular controversy in society today. Anyone who is familiar with the term should also be familiar with the two groups that form the controversy of abortion: pro-life and pro-choice. The article I chose is written by Terry O’Neill and is titled, “Legal Abortion Can Be a Lifeline”. The article was published on January 22, 2013, to U.S. News. It argues that abortion saves lives rather than taking them. O’Neill’s claim “abortion is a lifeline” rests upon the questionable assumption that a baby inside a womb is not considered life.
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.
“A Defense of Abortion” by Judith Jarvis Thomson gives several different scenarios of abortion for her reader to examine. All of her arguments agree, for arguments sake, upon the fact that the fetus has a right to life from the moment of conception. However; the mother has as equal right to life and the mother’s right to decide what happens to and in her body could possibly be taken into consideration to outweigh the fetus’ right to life. Although, she makes it decently clear she doesn’t whole heartedly agree that the fetus has an equal right to life. Thomson takes the abortion debate passed just simply establishing that the fetus is a person, and since all people have a right to life, abortion is immoral. She also changes the argument by not using the go to defense of abortion by trying to define a timeline of when the fetus actually becomes a person. I agree with Thomson in almost all of her arguments and think she gives sound reasoning and her position is easily defended but I believe that she has one idea that cannot be morally justified with the reasoning that she provides, if it can be justified with any amount of reasoning.
The following essay will examine the morality of abortion with specific reference to the writings of Don Marquis, Judith Jarvis Thompson, Peter Singer and Mary Anne Warren. I will begin by assessing the strength of the argument provided by Marquis which claims that abortion is impermissible because it deprives a being of a potential “future like ours,” and then go on to consider the writings of Singer, Thomson and Warren to both refute Marquis claims and support my assertion that abortion is morally permissible primarily because of the threat to the freedom and bodily autonomy of women extending the right to life to a foetus in utero would pose.
The issue that this essay is dedicated to assist to this never ending battle of abortion. This essay will be written from the point of a pro-abortion utilitarian however I must also consider the argument against abortion to get a full understanding of how serious this issue is, the against argument is of a deontological stand-point. First while I argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that I is always permissible. It allows for and supports our sense, for an example, that Ms Judith Jarvis Thompson states in her A Defence of Abortion, “a sick and frightened teenaged school girl who is pregnant due to being raped may choose abortion and it should be morally permissible however choosing to terminate your pregnancy when you are
The ethics of abortion is a topic that establishes arguments that attempt to argue if abortion is morally justified or not. Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote a pro- choice piece called “A Defense of Abortion.” In this paper, she presents various arguments that attempt to defend abortion by relating it to the woman carrying the fetus and her right in controlling her body. On the other side of the spectrum, philosopher Don Marquis wrote a pro- life paper called “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” Ultimately, Marquis argues that abortion is immoral with rare exceptions because it is resulting in the deprivation of the fetus’s valuable future. He supports his paper by creating the future-like-ours argument that compares the future of a fetus to the