One common pro-choice slogan is “My body, my choice,” but even pro-choice philosophers agree this is a bad argument for legal abortion. According to Judith Jarvis Thomson “No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it.”
However, Thomson offered her own bodily rights argument for abortion that relies on the more defensible claim that just as I have the right to refuse to let a stranger use my organs to survive, a pregnant woman has the right to refuse to let her unborn child use her organs in order to survive. Here is a paraphrase of her famous thought experiment that has come to be known as the “Violinist Argument:”
Imagine you wake up one morning in a hospital bed and your kidneys have been connected to a famous unconscious violinist. It turns out the Society of Music Lovers has kidnapped you and has connected you to this violinist in order to filter the rare blood type you both share. They must do this for nine months and only then will the violinist recover and no longer need your assistance. The hospital director apologizes for what the Society of Music Lovers has done to you, but insists that the violinist is a person with a right to life and therefore you cannot unplug yourself from him without killing him and violating his right to life.
Nearly everyone agrees that in the above situation it would be very kind of you to stay plugged in and let the violinist use your body for nine months. However, most people would also agree that no one should be forced to do such a thing, even if the violinist dies as a result of you “unplugging” from him. Defenders of the violinist argument claim that just as we cannot compel people to donate the use of their organs or body tissue in order to save the life of another person, we cannot force pregnant women by law to donate the use of their bodies to sustain the life of their unborn children.
In the face of the violinist thought experiment, pro-life advocates should resist the urge to say, “That could never happen!” It’s only an analogy, and it could be restated with the more mundane example of being forced to donate blood to someone who has a rare blood type. We also should not casually dismiss Thomson’s argument, since it is reputedly the most reprinted essay in the history of philosophy. I can almost guarantee that if you take an introduction to philosophy or ethics course at a public university this argument will be discussed.
The pro-life advocate must instead show that the moral rules surrounding the right to refuse to donate one’s body as life support for a sick human do not apply to the case of aborting a healthy human being in the womb. It’s helpful to highlight the following differences between Thomson’s violinist thought experiment (or other cases of organ donation) and cases of pregnancy.
First, in the case of a stranger who will die unless I donate blood or bone marrow, I am not obligated to help him, because I was not involved in how he became ill. Likewise, if I’m the one who’s been kidnapped in Thomson’s violinist scenario, the reason the violinist is dying has nothing to do with me.
He has been connected to my body by the plotting of the Society of Music Lovers. But why is the fetus connected to a woman’s body in pregnancy? Ninety-nine percent of the time, it is because the woman willingly engaged in sexual intercourse, which is known to create dependent people (i.e., unborn children). In normal cases of pregnancy, both the mother and father more resemble Thomson’s Society of Music Lovers than they resemble the kidnapped kidney donor, because they created an innocent child and caused that child to be dependent on a woman’s body.
If I freely engaged in an activity that I knew had the possibility of creating a helpless human life, I am responsible for creating that life and I owe her whatever assistance she needs to survive.
In a debate I had with pro-choice philosopher David Boonin, he tried to amend the organ donor analogy to allow for the issue of responsibility for voluntary actions. He asked: if you agreed to donate bone marrow, would you be responsible to continue donating bone marrow and not be allowed to back out of the procedure? If you are allowed to back out, then why can’t a pregnant woman “back out” of being pregnant even if she agreed to becoming pregnant (such as through IVF)?
I countered that you can back out of donating marrow because in this case you still haven’t caused the person to need your bone marrow. In refusing to continue treatment you just return the recipient to his original dying state—you haven’t directly caused his death. However, refusing to continue a pregnancy isn’t a neutral act that returns the fetus to a state of nonexistence. Instead, it is an evil act that directly causes a healthy child to die and thus violates his right to life.
Consider the rare though real cases of women who do not know they are pregnant until they give birth. If the pro-choice advocate believes that we have no obligation to the children we create, then there is no reason a mother who unexpectedly gives birth to a child in a field could not simply leave the child there.
Suppose a woman lived in a country where abortion was illegal, or she could not afford to pay for an abortion. Upon giving birth at home could she simply abandon the child or “refuse to provide life-giving bodily aid” in the form of breast milk? If this woman does have a responsibility to care for this child because she was responsible for his existence, then it follows she would be responsible for that same child when it came into existence at conception, and abortion would be morally wrong.
Finally, in the violinist case a person is expected to use his organs in an extraordinary way in order save someone from dying. But in pregnancy the uterus is used in an ordinary way, according to its natural purpose, in order to sustain another person’s natural existence. If the uterus is designed to sustain an unborn child’s life, don’t unborn children have a right to receive nutrition and shelter through the one organ designed to provide them with that ordinary care?
Finally, we should note that Thomson assumes the unborn child is a person but from her perspective, a “person” is merely an individual who is not morally obligated to anyone he does not explicitly choose to be obligated to. But many people endorse an alternative account of the human person that is summarized by philosopher Francis Beckwith: “[H]uman beings are persons-in-community and have certain natural obligations as members of their community that arise from their roles as mother, father, citizen, child, and so on.”
Since children are helpless, their well-being is possible only if adults—making sacrifices if necessary—ensure it. This should be no different for unborn children, created in a consensual act designed to bring about their existence, who have a right to live in the wombs of their mothers, which are naturally designed to accommodate them.