0. This is a very heated issue.  Many women who have abortions are in great distress and those who think that abortion is morally acceptable tend to think that it is badly wrong to deny them the right to try to use abortion to get out of this distress.  Thus, people who think abortion is acceptable, tend to feel strongly on the issue, since they see those who are opposed to abortion as forcing women to stay in distressing situations.  At the same time, most people who think abortion is wrong think an abortion is morally equivalent to killing an adult human being.  There are about 1.3 million abortions per year, and so these people believe that 1.3 million people are being killed every year with the government’s permission.  If they are right that abortion is morally equivalent to a homicide, then this is indeed a moral evil in the history of this country comparable to or worse than slavery, and so it is not surprising that people who are opposed to abortion have hot feelings about this.  Though generally they will acknowledge that even if abortion is very bad, the person committing the abortion need not be a bad person: even if abortion does involve killing a person, if one does not know that one is killing a person, then one might not be morally guilty.

o      We are not going to talk much about cases where the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.  Cases where there is a genuine threat to the mother’s life and there is no way of saving the mother’s life other than by directly and intentionally inducing an abortion are very rare in this day and age of medical progress, and also complicated issues arise as to what exactly counts as an abortion—whether a medical treatment that has a miscarriage as a side-effect is really an abortion.

·        I put data up online on the most common reasons for abortion.

1. Public opinion is closely divided on the issue, both among men and women.  A moderate majority of Americans (about 56% versus 42%) thinks that abortion should either be illegal or legal only in cases of rape, incest or danger to mother’s life.  The present abortion laws, after Roe v. Wade, allow abortion before viability for any reason—though there might be parental notification laws or waiting periods tacked on.  Viability is when the child would be able to survive outside the womb.  (One notes a difficulty here: Whether someone would survive outside the womb clearly changes with the advance of medicine.  But surely one’s moral status should not depend on the current status of medical science.  So there is something philosophically fishy about this cut-off.)

·        The history of the issue is interesting.  Abortion was controversial among the ancient Greeks.  The Hippocratic oath that many people still take when they become physicians forbade giving potions to promote abortion.  Plato’s Republic advocates killing newborns in some cases, and so it would be unlikely that he would be categorically opposed to abortion.  Aristotle thought that at first after conception in the woman’s womb there was just an unformed bunch of matter.  Probably, then, he would allow early abortions, though perhaps not late ones.  The Stoics thought that the fetus was like a plant and only became an animal at birth, so that abortion was acceptable.    The ancient Romans generally seem to have had little objection to abortion.  But like the ancient Greeks, they also did not object to killing newborn babies when these babies didn’t match up to their standards.  In fact, generally, the Romans thought that the father owned his children and could do with them as he saw fit.

·        Christianity, from the beginning, always categorically opposed both the infanticide and the abortion practiced by the Romans. 

·        In the 19th and 20th centuries, science showed that the only radical transition within the life-history of fetus and embryo is at conception, and this was seen by many as a disproof of the old Aristotelian theory that there was first unformed matter.  After conception, there is gradual development, but it is organized by DNA from the beginning.  There is no scientific reason to say that some point there is a change between a plant and an animal, or an animal and a human being: there is the constant biological development of a single organism.  There not being any such a transition, Catholic thinkers, at least, have tended therefore to accept that all through the development of the organism we are dealing with a human being, from conception.  There is no unformed mass early on: from conception, we have a new developing organism with its own goals and activities.

·       At the same time, however, a movement to legalize abortion started around the beginning of the twentieth century.  The motivation was to relieve the suffering of women in poverty and in other dire conditions.  Finally, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting abortion before viability interfere unduly with the privacy of women.

2. On an emotionally heated issue like abortion it is difficult for all of us to listen to arguments on the other side.  But this is important: we need to understand the arguments on the other side to understand our own position better.  Also, it happens to many of us that we have some pet argument that we use, which we do not examine critically, and so we think we don’t need to listen to the other side.  Our pet argument makes us feel good about holding on to our position, but perhaps we need to examine it.  The pet argument might be no more than a slogan: “My body—my choice” or “Fetuses have human DNA.”  Both are insufficient.  Just because we own something, e.g., our house, that does not give us a right to do in it whatever we like in it—I have the ability but not the right to choose whether to kill a house-guest.  And whenever I wash my hands, I presumably destroy a whole bunch of skin cells, each with human DNA.  Philosophers, however, have taken such slogans and expanded them into arguments.

3. We now have two arguments that claim that the personhood issue does not need to be settled to come up with an answer to the question of whether abortion is morally acceptable.

4. Judith Jarvis Thomson.  Thomson argues that even if the fetus is a person, it is still acceptable to have an abortion for a good enough reason.  She doesn’t say what exactly counts as a good enough reason, but says that it would be indecent (though apparently not wrong) to have an abortion if the pregnancy merely interfered with one’s travel plans.  She also thinks one doesn’t have a right to a dead fetus: one only has a right to push the fetus out of one’s body, and should keep the fetus alive if one can.  Thomson’s strategy is to give several cases which she thinks are similar to abortion, and which deal with persons, and to argue based on how we can act in these cases that abortion is acceptable.  I am going to focus on two cases.

• The violinist.  This is the most famous example of Thomson’s.  You are kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers.  There is a famous violinist who has kidney failure.  He can be cured in nine months, but needs nine months of life support.  The violinist is unconscious.  The Society kidnaps you and hooks the violinist up to you so that your kidneys are filtering poisons not just from your system but from the violinist’s.  You’ll have to stay in bed for nine months.  But then you’ll probably be just fine.  The violinist is perfectly innocent—he was unconscious when this was done to him.  Let’s suppose he’s still unconscious.
  • How many people think it’s OK for you to pull the tubes out and leave?  Thomson thinks most people will think it’s OK.  She thinks it would be nice to stay, but that would be supererogatory: admirable, but not a duty.
  • Thomson thinks abortion is like the case of the violinist.  Is it?
  • The question with any example-based argument for or against abortion is: How close is the example to the case of abortion?  Are there any important differences?
  • Many people think there is an important difference between Thomson’s case and the cases of most abortions.  Being kidnapped and hooked up to the violinist is somewhat similar to being raped.  But about 1.5% or less of abortions are performed because of rape or incest.  (Statistics on reasons for abortion are available at http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3711005.pdf)
  • Mary Anne Warren disagrees with Thomson’s argument.  She imagines that you joined a Society of Music Lovers which annually kidnaps a members and hooks him or her up to a violinist.  Warren thinks then you have an obligation to support the violinist because (a) his life depends on you, and (b) your own actions—namely joining the Society—put you in the position of supporting the violinist.  This is more like a pregnancy not coming from rape.
  • What if you couldn’t cut the tubes, and the only way you could get loose from the violinist would be taking a knife and lethally cutting his body to pieces to get the tubes out of his body?  Would it be right then?  (A number of abortions are done in a way that involves cutting the fetus.)
• The house too small.  You are trapped in a small house belonging to you and there is a rapidly growing child there.  If you don’t do anything, the child will crush you to death—you are already trapped so you can’t get out.  What should you do?  Thomson says you have a right to self-defense.  She doesn’t explain what it is you are allowed to do in this case.  Presumably, she means you can shoot the child.
  • This example is more like an abortion performed to save the mother’s life, so it’s only going to apply in
  • It is not obvious, however, that the right to self-defense applies when the so-called “attacker” is an innocent person.  One might think it’s wrong to kill an innocent person even if the innocent person endangers one’s life.
    • Suppose that a toddler is running towards you, but you can’t run away because your leg is broken.  The little kid is a carrier of a deadly infectious disease, though he doesn’t have any symptoms himself and he doesn’t know he has the disease.  The kid is too young to explain to that he should stop.  You have a gun.  Do you have a right to shoot this kid before he gets to you if that’s your only way of stopping him?  Many people think you don’t.
    • And what if the disease the toddler carries would make you sick for nine months, maybe force you to stay in bed for nine months, and cause you a great deal of pain just before finishing its course?  Would you have a right to shoot the kid?
    • And what if the toddler were your own kid?  Would that give you more or less of a right to shoot him?  It seems plausible that you would have less of a right in that case. 
    • It seems that of these cases the one that is most like the average abortion is the one where the toddler’s disease would make you sick for nine months.  But I think one doesn’t really want to say that it’s OK to kill the toddler. 
    • So examples can go either way.   Thomson’s violinist example goes one way, but these sick toddler examples seem to go different ways.
      • There are at least two different accounts of self-defense.  On one, you may fight back, even lethally, against an aggressor.  The fetus and sick toddler cases do not involve an aggressor.  On the other account, you may fight back, even lethally, against someone who is the source of danger (whether this person is an aggressor or not).  A self-defense justification of abortion would be like this. 
      • Note: Health reasons contribute to abortion decisions in 12%of the cases in the U.S.  Not all of these are life-threatening health reasons (I don't have statistics on the breakdown there.)
• Thomson thinks in general we are not morally required to make large sacrifices for someone else.  For instance, she says that if Henry Fonda’s cool touch on her head could save her life, she doesn’t think Mr. Fonda would therefore have an obligation to travel to her to do it.
  • Thomson, who is writing before the general legalization of abortion, says that the only time large sacrifices for someone else are legally requires is in the case of abortion.
    • But what about the draft?  Men are required to go to war to defend their country.  They can’t opt out on the grounds that they don’t want to sacrifice their life for someone else.  (They can opt out only on the grounds that they think war is immoral.)
    • And don’t we sacrifice very large sums of money over a lifetime to the upkeep of the poor through our taxes?
  • Of course Thomson may think that collecting taxes from us for the sake of the poor is wrong or that the draft is wrong.
• Because of these things, a number of people think that Thomson is wrong in thinking that the issue of whether the fetus is a person doesn’t need to be settled.