Abstract
In Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”, she uses a thought experiment involving a violinist as an analogy for pregnancy to argue that abortion is permissible in some cases. There is much scrutiny with her use of the thought experiment, one of the most common being that it only pertains to pregnancy by rape. I argue that although it’s probably true that her thought experiment represents rape more accurately, it is also an apt analogy for unplanned pregnancy, not just rape. I support this position by suggestion some common possible objections and addressing them.
In Judith Jarvis Thomson’ paper “A Defense of Abortion”, she concedes a fetus’ right to life and argues that even if the claim that a fetus has a right to life is true, it does not entail that abortion is immoral. Her first argument uses a thought experiment involving a violinist to show that abortion is permissible in some cases. The thought experiment proceeds like this: “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 find 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 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. [If you unplug from him, he will die, but] it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can be safely unplugged from you.” Since most people would intuitively say that unplugging yourself would not be immoral, she argues that abortion is not immoral in certain cases, even when the fetus’ right to life is granted. There is much controversy regarding Thomson’s use of this thought experiment, as it’s deemed to be “far-fetched”. Others say that the violinist example is only applicable to pregnancy by rape. That’s a point even Thomson acknowledges and she uses other examples to expand her argument past rape, but I think that the violinist example is analogous to unplanned pregnancy as a whole. The intent of this paper is to substantiate the appropriateness of the violinist analogy to unplanned pregnancy and not only rape, by raising possible objections and addressing them.
The first objection is perhaps the most glaring, consent. There is no consent involved in the example, just like rape. Women who voluntary engage in sex gave their consent and pregnancy from consented sex is not represented through the violinist example. But by making that conclusion, one has to infer that by consenting to have sex, a woman consents to let a fetus use her body. When a pregnancy is unplanned (i.e., when contraception is used), the woman only consents to having sex and not to having the baby. Engaging in a voluntary action while foreseeing a possible result, but taking measures to prevent that result, clearly does not mean consenting to the result. The point is that just like the violinist, no permission for someone else to use your body was given. Thomson’s example perhaps does represent rape better, but it can’t be said that the example only pertains to rape.
Similar to the first, the second objection to Thomson’s example is that her example only pertains to rape, this time because of responsibility. In cases of rape and the violinist, you have no responsibility towards the violinist and the woman has no responsibility towards the child. In the case of unplanned pregnancy, though, some argue that even if the pregnancy is unplanned, the woman still retains responsibility for the fetus, so there is a distinction between the violinist and unplanned pregnancy. Thomson addresses this with other examples in her paper, but it could also be objected with reasoning alone. If women are responsible for failed contraception attempts, are they not responsible for being raped as well? She could always hypothetically have a personal hidden army to protect her; she simply didn’t take enough precautions to avoid being raped! In both rape and failed contraception, the fetus is not the desired end result, and the woman should not be held responsible.
Another possible objection is the characters of the situation. A fetus is a part of the parent, while the violinist is a stranger. It’s evident that one should have responsibility and duty towards their flesh and blood over a complete stranger. Parents have the duty to protect the well-being of their offspring, and abortion is quite the opposite of that. This objection could be used inversely, though. With the violinist, him being a stranger, after nine months he is gone. With your offspring, after nine months there’s a lot more work involved and takes the energy of a lifetime to fully satisfy those responsibilities. That means that unplanned pregnancy has much deeper implications and gives even more reason why it should not be forced on women. The time that the responsibility kicks in can be disputed as well. Do parents have responsibility with an unplanned fetus? Or is the responsibility only applicable after the parents accepted that they are responsible for tending to their offspring? It will have to be conceded that the violinist example does not represent this perfectly, but the issue of parental responsibility has no impact on the scope of the example (i.e., whether it affects unplanned pregnancy as well as rape), and is debatable anyway.
Thomson employs several other examples to further her argument, but that does not concern this paper. The challenges against the aptness of the violinist are mostly unfounded. The scope of the example does not end at rape. No analogy perfectly represents its target, and this one is no different, but it’s fair to claim that the violinist example is a suitable analogy to unplanned pregnancy as a whole, not just rape. The persuasiveness of Thomson’s argument as a whole is much too broad to be covered in a relatively short paper, but I have no doubt that her thought experiments, or at least the violinist one, are both appropriate and effective.