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Prof. Thomson, the Violinist, and the Kidney Machine.

Questioning the Other Premise of the Anti-Choice Argument

Teed Rockwell

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The argument against legal abortion is stated thusly as a Modus Ponens in the home page of this essay series.

If a fetus is a person, then abortion should be illegal

A fetus is a person.
Therefore abortion should be illegal.

Most rebuttals to this argument focus on the second premise, and deny that the fetus is a person. Professor Judith Jarvis Thomson was the first to recognize the possibility of questioning the first premise. She argued that even if a fetus is a person, a pregnant woman has a right to bodily autonomy, and making abortion illegal would violate that bodily autonomy. Her classic paper A Defense of Abortion, contains this famous thought experiment

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. 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

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Teed Rockwell
Teed Rockwell

Written by Teed Rockwell

I am White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male Heterosexual cisgendered over-educated able-bodied affluent and thin. Hope to learn from those living on the margins.

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