Published by: Wiley

A Defense of Abortion

Author(s): Judith Jarvis Thomson

Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs , Autumn, 1971, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp.
47-66

Published by: Wiley

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265091

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JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON A Defense of Abortion’

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a

human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise

is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most

common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of

a human being from conception through birth into childhood is con-

tinuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this

development and say “before this point the thing is not a person, after

this point it is a person” is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for

which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is con-

cluded that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it is, a per-
son from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not fol-

low. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn

into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or

that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes

called “slippery slope arguments”-the phrase is perhaps self-explana-

tory-and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so
heavily and uncritically.

I am inclined to agree, however, that the prospects for “drawing a

line” in the development of the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think
also that we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already

become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it comes as a sur-

prise when one first learns how early in its life it begins to acquire

human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it already has

i. I am very much indebted to James Thomson for discussion, criticism, and
many helpful suggestions.

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48 Philosophy & Public Affairs

a face, arms and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and

brain activity is detectable.2 On the other hand, I think that the prem-
ise is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of con-

ception. A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is

no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss

any of this. For it seems to me to be of great interest to ask what

happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise. How, pre-
cisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abor-

tion is morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion commonly

spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and

hardly any time explaining the step from there to the impermissibility
of abortion. Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious to

require much comment. Or perhaps instead they are simply being eco-

nomical in argument. Many of those who defend abortion rely on the

premise that the fetus is not a person, but only a bit of tissue that

will become a person at birth; and why pay out more arguments than
you have to? Whatever the explanation, I suggest that the step they

take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination

than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer
examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person. from the

moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Some-

thing like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus

has a right to life. 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.

So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. 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

2. Daniel Callahan, Abortion: , Choice and Morality (New York, 1970),
p. 373. This book gives a fascinating survey of the available information on
abortion. The Jewish tradition is surveyed in David M. Feldman, Birth Control in
Jewish (New York, i968), Part 5, the Catholic tradition in John T. Noonan,
Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” in The Morality of Abortion, ed. John
T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

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49 A Defense of Abortion

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. The director of the hospital now tells you,

“Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you-we

would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it,
and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to

kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will

have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from

you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No

doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But

do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine

years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says,

“Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the vio-

linist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember

this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted
you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a
person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in

and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I

imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that

something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I

mentioned a moment ago.

In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you didn’t volunteer

for the operation that plugged the violinist into your kidneys. Can

those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an excep-

tion for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that per-

sons have a right to life only if they didn’t come into existence because
of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but that

some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those
who came into existence because of rape have less. But these state-

ments have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether

you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t

turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a rape.

And in fact the people who oppose abortion on the ground I men-

tioned do not make this distinction, and hence do not make an excep-
tion in case of rape.

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50 Philosophy & Public Affairs

Nor do they make an exception for a case in which the mother has

to spend the nine months of her pregnancy in bed. They would agree

that would be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all the same,

all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and so on. I sus-

pect, in fact, that they would not make an exception for a case in

which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine years,

or even the rest of the mother’s life.

Some won’t even make an exception for a case in which continua-

tion of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother’s life; they regard

abortion as impermissible even to save the mother’s life. Such cases

are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do not accept

this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a number
of points of interest come out in respect to it.

i. Let us call the view that abortion is impermissible even to save

the mother’s life “the extreme view.” I want to suggest first that it does

not issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without the addition

of some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has become preg-

nant, and now learns that she has a cardiac condition such that she

will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be done for her?
The fetus, being a person, has a right to life, but as the mother is a

person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably they have an equal
right to life. How is it supposed to come out that an abortion may

not be performed? If mother and child have an equal right to life,

shouldn’t we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to the mother’s

right to life her right to decide what happens in and to her body,

which everybody seems to be ready to grant-the sum of her rights
now outweighing the fetus’ right to life?

The most familiar argument here is the following. We are told that

performing the abortion would be directly killing3 the child, whereas
doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only letting her

die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be killing an innocent

person, for the child has committed no crime, and is not aiming at

his mother’s death. And then there are a variety of ways in which this

3. The term “direct” in the arguments I refer to is a technical one. Roughly,

what is meant by “direct killing” is either killing as an end in itself, or killing

as a means to some end, for example, the end of saving someone else’s life. See

note 6, below, for an example of its use.

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51 A Defense of Abortion

might be continued. (i) But as directly killing an innocent person is

always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be per-

formed. Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent person is murder, and

murder is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not

be performed.4 Or, (3) as one’s duty to refrain from directly killing an
innocent person is more stringent than one’s duty to keep a person

from dying, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (4) if one’s only

options are, directly killing an innocent person or letting a person die,

one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an abortion may not

be performed.5

Some people seem to have thought that these are not further prem-

ises which must be added if the conclusion is to be reached, but that

they follow from the very fact that an innocent person has a right to

life.6 But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the simplest

way to show this is to bring out that while we must certainly grant

that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (i) through

(4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an inno-
cent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother’s

directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is

4. Cf. Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage, St. Paul Edi-
tions (Boston, n.d.), p. 32: “however much we may pity the mother whose health
and even life is gravely imperiled in the performance of the duty allotted to her
by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any
way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing
with here.” Noonan (The Morality of Abortion, p. 43) reads this as follows:
“What cause can ever avail to excuse in any way the direct killing of the inno-
cent? For it is a question of that.”

5. The thesis in (4) is in an interesting way weaker than those in (i), (2),
and (3): they rule out abortion even in cases in which both mother and child
will die if the abortion is not performed. By contrast, one who held the view
expressed in (4) could consistently say that one needn’t prefer letting two per-
sons die to killing one.

6. Cf. the following passage from Pius XII, Address to the Italian Catholic

Society of Midwives: “The baby in the maternal breast has the right to life imme-

diately from God.-Hence there is no man, no human authority, no science, no

medical, eugenic, social, economic or moral ‘indication’ which can establish or
grant a valid juridical ground for a direct deliberate disposition of an innocent

human life, that is a disposition which looks to its destruction either as an end
or as a means to another end perhaps in itself not illicit.-The baby, still not

born, is a man in the same degree and for the same reason as the mother”
(quoted in Noonan, The Morality of Abortion, p. 45).

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52 Philosophy & Public Affairs

impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the

mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot

seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by

and wait for her death. Let us look again at the case of you and the

violinist. There you are, in bed with the violinist, and the director of

the hospital says to you, “It’s all most distressing, and I deeply sym-

pathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain on your kid-
neys, and you’ll be dead within the month. But you have to stay where

you are all the same. Because unplugging you would be directly kill-

ing an innocent violinist, and that’s murder, and that’s impermissi-

ble.” If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not commit
murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to

your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.

The main focus of attention in writings on abortion has been on

what a third party may or may not do in answer to a request from a
woman for an abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things being

as they are, there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself.
So the question asked is what a third party may do, and what the

mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, is deduced, almost as an after-

thought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But it

seems to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant

to the mother that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on

for the fetus. For we cannot simply read off what a person may do

from what a third party may do. Suppose you find yourself trapped

in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a

rapidly growing child-you are already up against the wall of the

house and in a few minutes you’ll be crushed to death. The child on

the other hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop

him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply burst open
the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it

if a bystander were to say, “There’s nothing we can do for you. We

cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the ones to
decide who is to live, we cannot intervene.” But it cannot be concluded

that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your

life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to wait pas-
sively while it crushes you to death. Perhaps a pregnant woman is

vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don’t allow the

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53 A Defense of Abortion

right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be

remembered that she is a person who houses it.

1 should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming that

people have a right to do anything whatever to save their lives. I think,

rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self-defense. If

someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else

to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do

so. But the case under consideration here is very different. In our case

there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened, and
one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is

not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not

threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we

bystanders cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.

In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against the threat to

it posed by the unborn child, even if doing so involves its death. And

this shows not merely that the theses in (i) through (4) are false; it
shows also that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so we need

not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at it from the argu-
ment I mentioned at the outset.

2. The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while
abortion is permissible to save the mother’s life, it may not be per-

formed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But this can-

not be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is that the

mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house

which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the
mother owns the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensive-

ness of deducing that the mother can do nothing from the supposition

that third parties can do nothing. But it does more than this: it casts

a bright light on the supposition that third parties can do nothing.

Certainly it lets us see that a third party who says “I cannot choose

between you” is fooling himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If

Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat, which he needs to

keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from

freezing, then it is not impartiality that says “I cannot choose between

you” when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and again

“This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to

feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is

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54 Philosophy & Public Affairs

hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, “Of course it’s your coat,
anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you
and Jones who is to have it.”

We should really ask what it is that says “no one may choose” in
the face of the fact that the body that houses the child is the mother’s

body. It may be simply a failure to appreciate this fact. But it may be

something more interesting, namely the sense that one has a right to

refuse to lay hands on people, even where it would be just and fair to

do so, even where justice seems to require that somebody do so. Thus

justice might call for somebody to get Smith’s coat back from Jones,

and yet you have a right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on Jones,

a right to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be

granted. But then what should be said is not “no one may choose,”
but only “I cannot choose,” and indeed not even this, but “I will not

act,” leaving it open that somebody else can or should, and in particu-
lar that anyone in a position of authority, with the job of securing

people’s rights, both can and should. So this is no difficulty. I have
not been arguing that any given third party must accede to the moth-

er’s request that he perform an abortion to save her life, but only that
he may.

I suppose that in some views of human life the mother’s body is only

on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her any prior claim

to it. One who held this view might well think it impartiality to say
“I cannot choose.” But I shall simply ignore this possibility. My own

view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at
all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this
needn’t be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the argu-
ments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman
has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.

But although they do grant it, I have tried to show that they do not
take seriously what is done in granting it. I suggest the same thing
will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from cases in
which the mother’s life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we now
do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman wants an
abortion for some less weighty reason than preserving her own life.

3. Where the mother’s life is not at stake, the argument I men-
tioned at the outset seems to have a much stronger pull. “Everyone

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55 A Defense of Abortion

has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life.” And isn’t
the child’s right to life weightier than anything other than the moth-

er’s own right to life, which she might put forward as ground for an

abortion?

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic.

It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.

For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a

right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a

right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued

life. But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs

for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If
I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the

touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the

same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand

on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from

the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt

well meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast and carried

Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against any-

body that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I

told earlier, the fact that for continued life that violinist needs the

continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right

to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no

right against you that you should give him continued use of your kid-

neys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give

him such a right; and nobody has the right against you that you shall

give him this right-if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys,

this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from

you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they

should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no

right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him

into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself,

having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in
bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent

you, in order to see to it that he is given something he has a right to

be given.

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In their view,

it does not include the right to be given anything, but amounts to,

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56 Philosophy & Public Affairs

and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But here a related

difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that violinist,

then everybody must refrain from doing a great many different sorts

of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his throat, everybody
must refrain from shooting him-and everybody must refrain from

unplugging you from him. But does he have a right against everybody

that they shall refrain from unplugging you from him? To refrain

from doing this is to allow him to continue to use your kidneys. It

could be argued that he has a right against us that we should allow

him to continue to use your kidneys. That is, while he had no right

against us that we should give him the use of your kidneys, it might

be argued that he anyway has a right against us that we shall not now

intervene and deprive him of the use of your kidneys. I shall come

back to third-party interventions later. But certainly the violinist has
no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your

kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness
on your part, and not something you owe him.

The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right to life. It

reappears in connection with all the other natural rights; and it is

something which an adequate account of rights must deal with. For

present purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would

stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life-

quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we must

place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn

out in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life.
I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee hav-

ing either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed con-

tinued use of another person’s body-even if one …