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Moral status of fetus human properties
A defense of abortion- thompson central idea
The right of fetus
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Is Thomson’s analogy strong or weak? The main analogy argument based on Thompson’s Abortion article is the violinist scenario she uses. The violinist scenario is an example of abortion but from a different angle. The author describes the scenario as a violinist being plugged to someone to help save the violinist by extracting kidney blood to fight off the poison in the violinist body because you both share the same blood type. This is the only method to save the violinist. The author then states the fact that the only way to unplug yourself is to unplug the violinist, which will kill him. If not, you would have to wait only nine moths until the violinist is fully recovered and you can be safely unplugged from him with no harm done. Therefore, the solution for the argument the author is trying to provide is that you have the same blood type to save the violinist, unplugging yourself from him will kill him, therefore waiting nine months to fully heal the violinist is the right thing to do, and you can save his life. Going back to the article based on abortion, by analogy the author is trying to make a comparison between the violinist scenario and abortion. Two things that are being compared is the life of the mother and her fetus, and the dying violinist who needs help. These two things are similar because both scenarios are in a predicament to save a life, or take a life. Also, another similarity is that the violinist and the fetus are both entitled to the right of life, and their right to life shouldn’t be devalued. The only difference between the two scenarios is that the fetus has no freedom of speech because it lies within the mother’s stomach. The fetus cannot defend its life, and is powerless. Ultimately the fetus cannot b...
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...eople joined in marriage. Sex before marriage is not promoted, and as stated before to avoid unwanted pregnancy sex before marriage should be prohibited to decrease the amount of abortions. Furthermore, the point is that the fetus’ did not give the mother his or hers consent to terminate their life.
In conclusion, Thomson’s analogy is weak, out of context, irrelevant, and hypocritical. If its okay to kill a fetus which is still consider alive, than you might as well say it is okay to kill a three year-old kid. It is technically the same thing, the only difference is that one can speak, one can’t. It is also weak because who gave us the right to devalue the right of life for someone else? Also, if the mother is entitled to her body and can do whatever she pleases, the stranger is also entitled to not help the dying violinist. Therefore, Thomson’s argument is weak.
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
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
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...
In the Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, the author argues that even though the fetus has a right to life, there are morally permissible reasons to have an abortion. Of course there are impermissible reasons to have an abortion, but she points out her reasoning why an abortion would be morally permissible. She believes that a woman should have control of her body and what is inside of her body. A person and a fetus’ right to life have a strong role in whether an abortion would be okay. Thomson continuously uses the story of a violinist to get the reader to understand her point of view.
In my opinion Marquis ' argument for why abortion is morally wrong has a couple of flaws, it’s biased towards the fetus and makes some unreasonable assumptions. Specifically, Marquis account of why killing adult human is wrong can potentially lead to some controversial conclusions. Marquis also doesn 't consider any consequences on the lives of the potential parents of the fetus. Due to the nature of the topic of abortion, it really only applies to women who are thinking of getting an abortion, and as such, we can 't make the standard assumptions that we will have with normal fetuses. In this essay I will explain Marquis ' argument, and try to show that his argument cannot conclude that abortion is morally wrong.
In conclusion, Thompson's criticisms of the Standard anti-abortion argument are false. Premise 1 stays true as life begins at conception because that is the point when the fetus starts to grow. Premise 2 stays alive because murder is both illegal and morally wrong. Why? because you are depriving them of their future and causing harm to the people who love the victim. And lastly, premise 4 remains true because there is a difference between not helping someone live and directly killing them, thereby proving the case of the unconscious violinist as not analogous. All in all, the standard anti-abortion argument remains a sound argument.
The mother-son case illustrates that there are more factors in play than just the two that Thomson presents in her thesis. Thomson’s conditions by themselves cannot explain every situation. The relationship between the people involved can also affect whether a decision is morally permissible or not. If that relationship entails that one person is emotionally bound and ethically responsible for the security and well-being of the other, the first cannot knowingly contribute to the death of the second. Thomson’s thesis must be modified to include this condition as well.
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 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’s argument is presented in three components. The first section deals with the now famous violinist thought experiment. This experiment presents a situation in which you wake up one morning and discover you have been kidnapped and hooked up to an ailing violinist so that his body would have the use of your kidneys for the next nine months. The intuitive and instinctive reaction to this situation is that you have no moral duty to remain hooked up to the violinist, and more, that he (or the people who kidnapped you) does not have the right to demand the use of your body for this period. From a deontological point of view, it can be seen that in a conflict between the right of life of the fetus and the right to bodily integrity of the mother, the mother’s rights will trump those of the fetus. Thomson distills this by saying “the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly”.
Abortions have been performed for thousands of years. In the 1800s abortions began to be outlawed. The reasons for anti-abortion laws varied for each state. Some people did not want the world to be dominated by newly arrived immigrants. Abortion in the 1800s were very unsafe due to the fact that the doctors had a limited educations and hospitals were not common. The outlawing of abortions from 1880 to 1973 led to many woman attempting illgeal abortions. (add author). Almost two hundred women died from attempting illegal abortions in 1965. Between two hundred thousand and one million illegal abortions were given each year. In states where local laws restrict the availability of abortion, women tend to have the lowest level of education and income. Additionally, in those states, less money goes toawrds education, welfare, fostercare programs, and adoption services. (Anderson, 5).
middle of paper ... ... She argues that fetuses are not persons or members of the moral community because they don’t fulfill the five qualities of personhood she has fashioned. Warren’s arguments are valid, mostly sound, and cover just about all aspects of the overall topic. Although she was inconsistent on the topic of infanticide, her overall writing was well done and consistent.
Thomson concludes that there are no cases where the person pregnant does not have the right to chose an abortion. Thomson considers the right to life of the pregnant person by presenting the case of a pregnant person dying as a result from 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. The right to life of the fetus is not the same as the pregnant person having to die, so as not to infringe on the right of the fetus. In the case of the violinist, their necessity for your body for life is not the same as their right over the use of your body. Thomson argues that having the right to life is not equal to having the right to use the body of another person. They argue that this is also the case, even if the the pregnant person knowingly participated in intercourse and knew of the possibility of pregnancy. In this case it would seem that abortion would not be permissible since the pregnancy was not by force. However, we are reverted back to the case of rape. If a fetus conceived voluntarily has the right not to be aborted due to how it was conceived, then the fetus conceived from rape should also have that same right. Instead of creating a distinction of cases where the fetus has a right to use the body of a pregnant person, Thomson instead makes a distinction of when abortion would be morally
Sometimes, husband and wife the protection of sexual relation has failed from process condom for example using low quality materials. The causes of the family reason why they want an abortion because they are not ready to take care of a baby being born. Secondly, the health of the mother, the physical disorders of the body. The major reason that abortion should not be banned is to prevent transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from mother to infant during pregnancy and “reduce maternal morbidity and mortality” (Rudolph Gurtovnik, 2008, p.28). It is the big problem that the government has to solve and spend a lot of budget to treat all of these people.
One of many arguments against this is that if the teens feel they are “destined” to be together and they wait to become married, there is a strong potential for pregnancy before marriage. However, just because teens wait to become married does not mean that they wait to share the privileges that married couples share. Today, sex before marriage is widely practiced. Many couples, who are not even considering marriage, have sex. Chances are that if a teen couple is thinking about marriage, they probably have already had intercourse. Allowing the teens to become married would only encourage sex before they are fully prepared to handle the responsibilities that come ...