Judith Thomson's article on abortion is almost certainly the most widely anthologized essay on the topic. It was published one year before Roe v. Wade and Thomson argues in it for what might best be described as a moderate pro choice position. The essay is not always easy to follow; while the individual arguments are clear, the overall thread is sometimes less evident. I will try to make the outline clear in these notes. Look especially to the first paragraph of each numbered section. But don't neglect the details that follow.

1. Thomson begins by considering the typical anti-abortion argument. The crucial premise, she says, is typically a claim that the fetus is fully a human person from the moment of conception. She maintains that this is false, and in any case that it is argued for badly, but she does not let her case rest on claiming that the fetus is not a person. She actually allows for the sake of the argument that it is a person. That's a powerful moive if it works. Hse grants her opponents their main premise. Then she tries to show that they're wrong anyway.

Even though she grants the premise hor the sake of the argument, she doesn't really think it's true. Why not? As she sees it, the premise that the fetus is a person rests on a fallacy: the fallacy of the slippery slope. There are various versions of this fallacy, but they rest on the same line of reasoning: they take a pair of ideas that are linked by a continuum of intermediate cases and where there is no sharp line telling us which intermediate cases belong with which idea. Then they identify one end of the continuum with the other.

In the abortion case, the argument runs as follows: a new-born infant is a person -- has a full right to life, among other things. But a new-born infant is not very different from a fetus at the beginning of the ninth month. In fact, fetuses much younger than this, if born prematurely, would be treated as persons. However, there is no way to draw a sharp line. Premature babies are only a little different from non-viable fetuses, and so on, all the way back to newly-fertilized ova. The conclusion is supposed to be: A fetus is a full human person from the moment of conception. But this argument is a case of the slippery slope fallacy. As Thomson points out, there is a continuous process of development from acorn to oak. But an acorn is not an oak tree.

Even though Thomson thinks that the argument doesn't work, and even though she believes that a fetus is the early stages of its development is not a full fledged person, she adopts an important strategy for the rest of the article: she grants the opposition its major premise.

She allows for the sake of the argument that the fetus is a full-fledged human person from the moment of conception.

As we said above, this is a powerful technique. If it works, it shows that the opposition's position is not just in need of patching up; it shows that it can only be defended by drastically different means. Whether Thomson succeeds or not, however, is a different matter; you will have to judge for yourself.

2. Thomson's next move is to review the typical anti-abortion argument and to attempt to show that it is flawed. The argument itself is presented in brief:

Every person has a right to life; the fetus is a person and hence has a right to life. The mother has a right to control her body, but the right to life is a stronger right. Therefore, an abortion may not be performed.

The violinist example illustrates a common device in philosophical argumentation. It is a thought experiment. In a thought experiment, we consider a hypothetical case that isolates some aspect of the real world -- msome aspect that we want to think about more carefully. Our reactions to the hypothetical case can sometimes guide us in analyzing the real-world situation that we are concerned with. In this example, Thomson asks you imagine that you find yourself hooked up to a famous unconscious violinist. If he can't use your kidneys for nionemonths, he'll die. You are in this position not because you agreed to be but because the Society of Music Lovers kidnapped you. All the same, the violinist himself is perfectly innocent; he had no part in creating your predicament.

Thomson thinks it is far from obvious that you are obliged to stay in that bed, hooked up to the violinist. Granted, the violinist has a right to life. But it is not at all clear that it trumps your right to control what happens to your body.

You may protest that this case is very different from the typical pregnancy, and you wold be right. But note carefully: Thomson's reason for rasing the example is not because she thinks it proves that abortion is acceptable. What she is trying to do is show that the usual anti-abortion argument is not acceptable. If an argument is correct, then applying the same reasoning to other cases should also be correct. The anti-abortion argument deals with the particular case of abortion by reasoning from a more general principle: if we have a choice between respecting someone's right to life and respecting someone's right to control their body, the right to life should always win out. That's what the anti-abortionist seems to be saying. So if the anti-abortionist is right, we can't kill the person whose life is in the balance in these cases. Thomson thinks that this argument produces the wrong result when we apply it to the violinist case. Therefore, we can doubt that it produces the right result in the abortion case.

All the same, Thomson knows that there is room for the other side to object to the example. They could modify their position slightly and say that the original anti-abortion argument only applies iif no one's rights were violated. In particular, they could argue that the case of rape is an exception.

In fact, many legislators and others do want to make an exception for the case of rape. But Thomson points out that this has an unsavory air about it. Is the idea that a fetus who comes into existence as a result of rape does not have a right to life? Or has a diminished right to life? This position seems hard to accept. And Thomson points out that many anti-abortionists don't accept it. They insist on what she calls the extreme view: abortion is always wrong, even to save the life of the mother.

We will move on to what Thomson has to say about this view in a moment. But before we do, a question for you to ponder: do anti-abortionists who allow an exception for cases of rape have to say that the fetus's right to life is diminished or non-existent in those cases? Or is there some other way of making the distinction that seems less unsavory? On the other hand, if there is a better way to make the distinction, will it really leave the case of rape in a class by itself? Or will it blur the edges a lot more than the anti abortionist concedes?

3. The extreme view, as we just noted, holds that abortion is wrong even to save the mother's life. This view usually rests on a distinction between killing and letting die. But Thomson thinks this distinction doesn't do the job it is supposed to. In particular, it doesn't show that the mother herself can't perform an abortion to save her own life.

Many people have made a made a moral distinction between killing and letting die. Some people insist that the distinction is flawed from the start, and that by not performing an abortion in a case where the woman's life is at stake, you would be in effect killing her. Whether that is right in the end, it's not obvious from the outset. People who make the "killing/lewting die" distinction take very seriously the premise that Thomson claims to be granting: the fetus is a person with the same moral standing as you or I. If you take that view, then a pregnancy in which the mother will die if the baby lives is a tragedy no matter what, and anyone who thinks that abortion is still wrong in these cases would no doubt insist on this point. But they would also insist: the tragedy will be worse if we add an immoral choice to it and actively take the life of the baby. Depending on the anti-abortionist, he or she might say that by not performing the abortion, we are putting things in the hands of God -- or, if you prefer, letting nature take its course. If the woman miraculously survives, that would be a reason for great rejoicing. But on the anti-abortionist's view, either death is a tragedy, and we only make it worse by becoming active participants in the process.

In spite of this, Thomson thinks that the anti-abortionist's argument can't be right. It needs some premise such as "It is always wrong to kill and innocent person directly or "We have a stronger duty not to kill an innocent person than we do to prevent the death of an innocent person." And as Thomson sees it, all such premises, taken strictly, are false.

To show this, she returns to the violinist. Suppose the doctor comes in and tells you that the procedure is putting a strain on your kidneys. As a result, you will die. But the violinist will live. The doctor insists, however, that you can't be unplugged from the violinist, because that would be killing him directly.

As Thomson sees it, there is one thing we can say for sure: you have the right to reach to unplug yourself from the violinist in order to save your life. And if that is so, the argument against abortion to save the mother's life is flawed.

In fact, I think we can strengthen Thomson's case here. You have the right to unplug yourself even if you started out by agreeing to let the violinist use your kidneys. As we will see, this isn't as relevant to Thomson's argument as it seems. But meanwhile, she has a diagnosis of what may be going wrong iif anyone objects to this conclusion: maybe no third party can choose between you and the violinist. But we can't read off your rights from the rights of a third party. To make this point, she considers a particularly far-fetched example: you are in a house with a gigantic and rapidly-growing child. The child is growing so fast that unless you kill it, you will be crushed to death. It may be true that no outsider can choose between you and the child. But you have the right to kill the child, innocent though it may be, to save your life.

I have a lot of trouble with this example. It is so far-fetched that I am not at all sure I can trust my moral intuitions in thinking about it. Our moral reactions are most trustworthy in situations that have some basis in previous experience. The farther the thought experiment is from reality, the more doubt there is that we really know what we would think if we were confronted with the situation in real life. Most of us have had the experience of finding that our reactions to a situation when we actually confront it are quite different from what we might have expected them to be. This should teach us to be cautious in our use of philosophical thought-experiments. Thomson, it seems to me, has gone beyond the bounds of caution.

Returning to the violinist case, it is also not clear that she has stayed on the mark she set for herself. The British philosopher John Finnis points out a problem with her argument. In the usual case, an abortion quite straightforwardly involves killing the fetus rather than letting it die. But unplugging yourself from the violinist is not killing him. He may die, or his kidneys may manage to function and save him. What you are doing, it can be argued, is letting nature take its course. And if this is right, the example has no bearing on the proponent of the "killing/letting die" distinction, because the example doesn't involve direct killing.

Let's be sure we follow Finnis's point. Thomson is trying to convince us that the difference between killing and letting die doesn't work the way the anti-abortionist wants it to. To convince us, she gives us a case that is supposed to invlove acceptable direct killing of an inocent person. But Finnis's poiont is that that's not really what the exampoe is at all. Unplugging yurself is not the same as stabbing the violinist in the back. It isn't killing him; it is only letting him die.

Now of course, the example of the rapidly-growing child does involve direct killing. The only trouble, as we just noted, is that the example is so far fetched that it is at best hard to evaluate and at worst completely useless.

4. Thomson does go on to make a further point about third-party interventions, however. She asks us to consider another case: you are freezing; so is Jones. You are struggling with one another for a coat that you need to keep from dying of exposure. If the coat belongs to you and not to Jones, that counts. And you can hire a third party to help you do what you have a right to do: get the coat and save your life. The reason this is supposed to be relevant to abortion is clear enough. A woman might say that her body that is hosting the child -- that she has a right to her own body. And if she does, then she also has a right to get someone help her protect what is hers.

5. So far, only the case in which the mother's life is at stake has been considered. What about cases in which that isn't so? It might seem that here the classic anti-abortion argument has much more force: what right other than the woman's own the right to life could tip the scale? The problem, however, as Thomson insists, is that the right to life is not a simple thing. She concludes that it can't do the job the anti-abortionists want it to.

We need to ask what the right to life actually amounts to. Some people might say that it is the right to be given whatever you need to continue living. But that can't be right, as Thomson makes clear by another example. If you were sick unto death, and the only thing you needed to stay alive was the cool touch of Henry Fonda's (or better, perhaps, Brigit Fonda's) hand on you fevered brow, you do not have any right against Brigit Fonda that she should fly in and save your life. It would be very nice of her to do it, but she does not violate your right to life if she refuses.

How does this apply to the violinist case? You have given the violinist no right to the use of your kidneys. So you don't violate his rights if you refuse to let him continue using them.

6. Nothing follows yet about abortion. But on the general issue of rights, Thomson offers another approach, in terms of justice. It's plausible that the right to life is the right not to be killed unjustly. And if this is right, it is hardly clear that all cases of abortion are cases of unjust killing.

Thomson's first example -- of the boy with the box of chocolates -- makes the point about the connection between rights and justice. If the boy won't give any chocolates to his brother, then we can ask: do the chocolates belong to him alone? If not -- if his brother has a share in them -- he is being unjust in not letting his brother have any. But if they belong to him alone, he is not being unjust to his brother, even if he might be mean-spirited. The brother has no right to the chocolates.

But where does this leave us with respect to abortion? The question, as Thomson sees it, is whether the fetus has some right to the use of the mother's body. In the case of rape, the answer is clearly "No," she thinks. But what about the case of voluntary intercourse? Couldn't we argue that the woman is partly responsible for the fetus's situation and, in fact, its very existence? And doesn't this give the fetus rights against the woman?

Thomson isn't convinced. She uses a variety of examples. If a burglar -- or even an innocent person -- ends up in my home because my security was not fully adequate, that gives them no right to the use of my home. But while this is true, it doesn't seem to get us very far. A person who stumbles into my house is not, in the normal course of things, dependent on me. And if she is, I might well have _some_ obligation to help her. But a burglar is deliberately violating my own rights. That could hardly give him rights.

But what about a case in which a woman has intercourse using state-of-the-art birth control? If the birth-control methods fail, is it really plausible that she has given the fetus a right to use her body? Thomson doesn't think so. She offers a very bizarre thought experiment involving people seeds and screens to bolster her case. The example seems to me quite dubious. Once again, it is too far from reality for our intuitions to be of any real use. But surely she is right to pose the question: if a woman has taken reasonable precautions, has she really given a fetus any rights to the use of her body? Does she actually do the fetus an injustice if she has an abortion?

She concludes that the line of argument based on the woman's role in bringing the fetus into existence can at most show that in some cases, abortion would be unjust killing. In other words, it makes at most a limited case against abortion.

7. But where does this leave us? Here Thomson offers a very different way of approaching the issue -- one not based on the notion of rights at all. The concept she attempts to use is moral decency. And her conclusion is that while there are some cases in which of course abortion is acceptable, there are other cases in which it would be morally indecent.

The general idea here is illustrated by the simply case of the boy eating his way through the chocolates. Suppose the boy owns the chocolates. Then he is not unjust in not giving any to his brother. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing wrong. At the very least, he is being mean.

Back to the violinist: suppose the violinist only needed the use of your kidneys for one hour, and that you would be essentially unharmed if you cooperated. Then you are not unjust if you refuse. But it would be, as she says, morally indecent of you.

And on to abortion. Thomson insists:

Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right to demand it -- and we are leaving open the possibility that there may be such cases -- nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.

8. In fact, on the whole question of where she leaves us, Thomson is clear that the answer is not clear. She says:

...a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and ... any law which rules this out is an insane law.

It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad.

© copyright Allen Stairs, 1998

Web surfer's caveat: These are course notes, intended to augment classroom discussion of the issues and readings. They should be read as such and are not intended for general distribution or publication.