In 1971, Princeton University Press published, in its maiden issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs, an article by Dr. Judith Jarvis Thomson entitled “A Defense of Abortion.”

Thomson, a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written highly acclaimed books and articles on a variety of subjects. With her “defense of abortion,” however, she hit, so to speak, the philosophical jackpot. Her article has become the most widely reprinted essay not only on the subject of abortion, which is a remarkable phenomenon in itself, but in all of contemporary philosophy.

Because her article has been reprinted, anthologized, amplified, circulated, read and discussed as often and as much as it has, it seems reasonably safe to assume that it has had a significant influence, particularly as an apologia for abortion. The article's broad popularity among abortion advocates suggests that it is the best argument that has been put forth as a defense of and argument for abortion. Recently, a philosopher from Tulane University wrote a book-length defense of it.

Conceding Life

Thomson is confident she can defend abortion, even if she concedes (although she really does not believe it) the humanity of the unborn. She states, “I propose, then, that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception.” Now the ethical dilemma is this: If both mother and uterine child are both human and both have rights to life, can abortion be ethically permitted where the woman does not want to continue her pregnancy?

In order to solve this dilemma, Thomson provides a most imaginative analogy, perhaps the best-known one of its kind in all of abortion literature: “You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist [who] has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment…the Society of Music Lovers … kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.…To unplug would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.”

Thomson believes that she has constructed a similitude that perfectly parallels the case in which a pregnant woman is yoked to her unwanted child for the same length of time. Her argument rests or collapses on this presumption.

There are parallels, to be sure. But are the scenarios, from a moral point of view, in perfect parallel with each other? In both cases there are two human beings who have rights to life. In both cases the continued life of one depends on the willingness of the other to make extraordinary sacrifices. But the parallel she needs in order to make her analogy viable is contestable. Is it true that unplugging yourself from the violinist and directly aborting an unwanted child are morally equivalent acts?

Thomson is confident that virtually everyone would argue that unplugging yourself from the musician is morally permissible. Here, she seems to be on reasonably firm ground. But her firm ground is established by the fact that this image is not controversial. Abortion is controversial because it involves factors that are not present in the violinist image. Let us examine three of these factors.

The act of unplugging yourself is justified on the basis of self-defense. It is a legitimate response to assault and battery (and in the example Thomson uses, to kidnapping and unlawful confinement as well). The development of the child in the womb is not an example of assault and battery or anything close to it. Assault and battery presuppose willfulness and malice aforethought and have always been regarded as criminal acts. It has never been regarded as a criminal act for an unborn child to develop in its mother's womb.

Why Judith Jarvis Thomson's ‘A Defense of Abortion’ convinced so many—and why it's wrong.

The act of unplugging is not the direct cause of the violinist's death. He dies as a direct result of his kidney ailment. On the other hand, direct abortion does, in fact, directly kill the child in the womb. The two acts are distinct and have entirely different moral implications. Self-defense against an unjust aggressor is a different act than directly killing an innocent child in the womb.

The intention present in unplugging yourself from the violinist is to be set free and not that the violinist die. It would, indeed, be immoral to intend the death of your host. This situation, where two ends follow from a single act is handled, classically, according to the principle of double effect. It is never permissible to intend an evil. Therefore, it would be morally impermissible to intend the death of the violinist. But this unfortunate consequence of freeing yourself is permitted to happen because you have a right to free yourself from an unjust aggressor. In a parallel example, doctors remove an ectopic pregnancy from a woman. The intention corresponds to good medicine, removing a pathology (the tube, for example, in which the ectopic pregnancy occurs) and not to intend the death of the fetus, although that consequence does transpire.

The intention of abortion is graphically clear. It is to kill the unborn child. This intention is made all the more salient by the expression “tragic complication,” which is used to describe the rare event of a child surviving a late term abortion. The aborting woman intends to free herself from her unwanted child, but she and her doctor directly intend the death of that child. Another term for induced abortion is “feticide,” which literally means “killing the fetus.”

The Relationship

Thomson supposes that the violinist and the victim are unrelated. She adds nothing to their relationship that would mitigate the victim's aversion to being yoked for nine months. The two are presumed to be total strangers. Such is not the case with the relationship between the mother and her child. The victim, by virtue of being yoked to the violinist, does not inherit or attain any specific kind of positive relationship. He does not become his brother, for example.

When a woman conceives a child, she is no longer merely a woman. Nor is the child merely her child. Conception confers maternity on the woman and her child is her son or daughter. There is a relationship between the two that is primordial, interpersonal and universally recognized. A mother is expected to do things for her children that strangers are not expected to do for each other.

Morality begins when people are generous and loving, when they exercise their duties to be decent rather than their rights not to be inconvenienced. Thomson asserts that “we are not morally required to be good Samaritans or anyway very good Samaritans to one another.” Her language is always legalistic. She completely misses the point that personal love and generosity are primary and that law, rights and obligations are secondary.

John Finnis is correct when he encapsulates the radical weakness of Thomson's argument by saying that she is trying to reduce the mother-child relationship to a “sort of social contractarianism.” It is essentially unjust to try to settle a matter of life and death, which is what abortion involves, by ignoring the ethical primacy of love and generosity while looking to legalistic terms for guidance. Law without love is another way of defining the path to the culture of death.

Thomson's defense of abortion is in itself a significant contribution to the culture of death. What is even more pernicious, however, is her facile deconstruction of motherhood and reduction of all human beings to islands of self-serving individuality. In order to rationalize the death of the unborn, she feels compelled to rationalize the death of the person as a locus of love and generosity. It is as if she is saying that we need the death of the authentic person in order to justify the death of the unborn. One form of killing necessitates a prior form of killing. If our souls are dead, we will surely be dead to the iniquity of abortion.

Donald DeMarco teaches philosophy at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Connecticut.