You cut someone off from invasive access to your body, while knowing this will result in death. Death is neither your means nor your end, in the jargon of philosophers. You don’t want it for its own sake, nor do you want it for the sake of something else it will bring. And in neither case are you seeking the person’s death. In neither case did you consent to having the violinist plugged in or the child exist in the womb. In Thomson’s analogy, just as it would be morally acceptable for you to choose to detach from the violinist, even if you know he will die as a result, so too would it be acceptable for a pregnant woman to have the unborn child detached. Imagine someone with kidney or liver failure who needs to be plugged into your body so he can rely on your kidney or your liver for, say, nine months, until a transplant could be found. Her famous analogy compared a pregnant woman to a hypothetical individual who, without his consent, has been hooked up to a famous violinist who is sick and requires this connection to remain alive. But she nonetheless justified abortion as non-intentional killing. Thomson stipulated for the sake of argument that the unborn child is a human being-and even that it is a human person. This basic bodily autonomy argument for abortion was first fully articulated in 1971 by moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. Here we focus on the bodily autonomy argument. We say more about the social equality argument in our new book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. Women have authority over their own bodies and need the right to abortion in order to be free and equal. Even if the unborn child is a human being and a moral person, that doesn’t give him a right to trespass in a woman’s body. These thinkers say that, without abortion, women cannot control their bodies and their reproductive choices. That is, there are two goods-and two state interests-at play when it comes to abortion, and the state needs to balance them.Īs a result, one significant set of arguments, often used by feminists, is that abortion is first and foremost a matter of female autonomy. Conceding these three points for the sake of argument, they argue that the state’s protection of innocent life cannot come at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy. Some abortion supporters sense the truth of the basic pro-life argument-that the unborn child is a human being and a person with moral value, and that the state has a legitimate role in protecting the lives of all people-so they make a different case. This essay is adapted from the authors’ forthcoming book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
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