Judith Jarvis Thomson's Argument In Defense Of Abortion

In this decade, Americans have been deeply polarized over the controversial issue of abortion. Although some might say abortion is reasonable, others believe that no one but God has the right to take someone’s life. The main question that derives from the abortion argument asks if abortion is morally impermissible on the basis that it violates the fetus’s right to life. In this sense, I discuss that the fetus is debatably declared a living person which then should have a right to life. The right to life is a fundamental human right and moral principle based on the belief that a human being has the right to live and should never be killed by any other human being by law. (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1) This question develops the argument that the fetus should equally fit under the right to life even before it is birthed into the world because it is classified a living person at the time of conception and has the potential to live and create …show more content…
Thomson created the Basic Anti-Abortion Argument, summarized below, with recognizing the fetus as a person. She elucidates how every person, including the fetus, has the right to life. The mother has the right to decide what her body will go through, but the fetus’s right to life strongly outweighs the mothers right to choose what happens physically to her body. Therefore, the fetus may not be killed and an abortion may not occur. (Feinberg and Shafer-Landau, 642) This argument then