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Judith Thomson's Arguments Against Abortion

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Abortion is one of the most highly debated issues concerning ethics. Since ethics is the study of morality, I will attempt to evaluate part of the debate about abortion. A moral normative status is a term that evaluates an action morally, such as “right,” “wrong,” or “obligatory.” Abortion is difficult to analyze, but I will assign a moral normative status to the act of killing a fetus.
The standard argument to show that abortion is wrong is: it is morally wrong to kill a person; a fetus is person; therefore, killing a fetus (abortion) is morally wrong. I agree that it is wrong to kill another person. It is undeniable that we value life far too much to allow it to treat it as a commodity and allow others to take it away with ease or without …show more content…
If it were a person, it would be morally wrong to kill them. In Philosophy & Public Affairs, Judith Thomson brings up an analogy for abortion in which a woman is hooked up to a famous violinist for nine months in order to save his life. Some argue that it would be morally wrong for the woman to unhook herself from the violinist, because she would willingly bring about the death of a person. The violinist is considered a person even though he is currently attached to and dependent upon the …show more content…
The violinist was a person before he was attached to the woman. So, a person may still be a person even if he cannot survive without being attached another person, but a fetus is not a person because it is also not away of and cannot interact with the surrounding environment. The environment would have to extend beyond the mother’s body, because a fetus’s interactions with the womb are automatic and biologically necessary. People interact with other humans and react to the rest of the world.
This argument is extremely subjective. People view adults and fetuses differently. They even view newborns and fetuses differently because newborns are able to experience the world around them, and not just the mother. At perhaps the most basic level, a baby is able to interact by crying when it is hungry or upset. A fetus, on the other hand, is not aware. I do not know enough about biology to know if or when a fetus becomes aware or able to interact while still in its mother’s womb. I assume there would be a point when a fetus is considered a person, so it would be morally wrong to abort

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