Judith Thomson's A Defense Of Abortion By Judith Thomson

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Register to read the introduction… She suggests that because a pregnancy is such a great sacrifice, that, while women should carry a child to term after becoming pregnant, we cannot require them to do so. This argument also requires that the fetus’ right to life is subject to the mother’s whim and does not carry as much weight as the first two arguments. Thomson concludes the article by saying that she is not attempting to delineate the circumstances in which a pregnancy might be morally permissible and those in which it isn’t, but rather to make it clear that even if we consider a fetus to be a person, that abortion can still be morally permissible. This weakens her argument a great deal, instead of providing a proscriptive criterion to base the morality of abortion on, she simply provides what may be a series of fringe cases to establish that while abortion is normally wrong, it isn’t always so.
Thomson’s argument on abortion is fundamentally deontological. She presents the view that the right of the mother to her bodily integrity carries greater value than the right to life of the fetus. She presents very convincing cases in instances where the pregnancy is due to violence – through rape or abuse, and a somewhat weaker argument that applies to unwanted pregnancies that occur even though reasonable precautions had been taken. This presentation is sufficient to convince most readers that there are certain instances where abortion is not morally impermissible, but does very little to create a framework for evaluating the permissibility of abortion.
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Creating such a framework in 1971 may have been somewhat ahead of its time, but might have aided the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. A moral framework of this nature would have been instrumental in developing the associated legal framework. As it stands, the legal status of abortion in the United States suffers from grave constitutional concerns and periodic attacks. Thomson’s argument is not incorrect, but suffers from the fatal flaw of being too narrow in scope. If she had considered rights other than the fetus’ right to life and the mother’s right to her bodily integrity, she would not have needed to resort to a rather non-intuitive argument that one’s right to life is simply the right not to be killed unjustly. The concept of justified killing is most commonly encountered in the concepts of self-defense, war and capital punishment, all of which seem somewhat extreme cases to compare to abortion. Proponents of both sides of the debate do agree that the health and safety of the mother is paramount in any pregnancy. Thus, we can create a hierarchy with the right to life of the fetus at the lowest level with the mother’s right to bodily integrity directly above. Because a woman should have the right to choose to get pregnant, the right to reproduce and its attendant responsibilities is placed above the right to bodily integrity. Since the mother’s right to life is paramount in this entire hierarchy, it is placed at the top of the chain. Once this framework is in place, the areas of contention between the two main sides of the debate are more readily apparent. The anti-abortion argument is that once a woman is pregnant – for the time being, it shall be assumed that this state of affairs was her choice – then the right to life of the fetus overrules the right to bodily integrity. The primary concern here is that there are women who may attempt to use abortion as a form of birth control. This is an incredibly difficult question to examine from either an ethical or a legal standpoint and is not the purpose of this paper. This type of abortion most certainly doesn’t meet Thomson’s criterion for violating a fetus’ right to life; such a killing simply is not justifiable. For now, the fetus’ right to life shall be left at the bottom of the hierarchy of rights where it was originally placed. One of the issues that has come up with much more regularity since Thomson wrote her article is that of abortion due to diagnoses obtained through prenatal screening. In many of these cases, the mother desires the pregnancy, so the criterion of unjustified killing should not apply and these abortions are generally considered morally permissible. One of the more extreme cases is that of Tay Sachs disease, a disease that

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