Abortion: The Unconscious Violinist Argument

Date

April 28, 2024

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Is abortion ethical? Judith Jarvis Thomson created one of the most well-known thought experiments in modern ethics. In her 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion,” she presents the thought experiment of the unconscious violinist: You wake up in the morning . . .

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 found 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 right 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 he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. – (Thomson, A Defense of Abortion)

This thought experiment is supposed to show that even if we agree that a fetus has a right to live (like the violinist undoubtedly has!), we can still defend the mother’s decision to have an abortion (or, in the thought experiment, the kidnapped person’s decision to have the violinist removed).

Sometimes, so Thomson, the right of a person to decide about their own body trumps even someone else’s right to life.

Abortion: The Unconscious Violinist Argument

This argument is intriguing because it moves the abortion debate away from the question of whether the fetus has a right to live and towards the issue of the mother’s right to decide about her own life. Too often, abortion is debated in relation to the personhood of the fetus: when its heart begins to beat, when the (Christian) soul enters the fetus, when it begins perceiving pain or when it becomes able to move or interact with external stimuli. All these are important milestones in a fetus’s development, but, according to Thomson, they miss the point. Because even when we assume that a fetus has full personhood rights (as the famous violinist certainly has!) – even then it seems unjust to force the mother to serve the violinist’s needs.

But is abortion ethical?

But if we think about the argument a little longer, all sorts of difficulties start to appear.

First, it seems that there is a significant difference between being kidnapped in the night and strapped to another person without one’s consent, and, on the other hand, having sex that leads to pregnancy. The sexual act is, usually, consensual, and bears an inherent risk of pregnancy of which the consenting partners are (or should be) aware. Nothing like that is true of the forced union with the violinist. Therefore, the argument could only be used in favour of abortions after rape, but not in cases of voluntary sexual activity.

Another relevant difference to the question of whether abortion is ethical seems to be that the fetus is the mother’s own child, while the violinist is a stranger. …

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Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)