A Defense of Abortion
Based on Wikipedia: A Defense of Abortion
The Violinist in Your Bedroom
You wake up tomorrow morning in a hospital bed. There's something attached to your back. Tubes, you realize—connected to another person lying beside you. A nurse explains: you've been kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers. The unconscious man next to you is a world-famous violinist with a fatal kidney disease. You happen to have the only compatible blood type. If you disconnect yourself, he dies. If you stay connected for nine months, he recovers fully.
What are you morally permitted to do?
This bizarre scenario launched one of the most influential arguments in the history of moral philosophy. In 1971, philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson published "A Defense of Abortion" in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, and the debate around reproductive ethics was never quite the same. Her essay has been called "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy"—a remarkable achievement for what is essentially an elaborate thought experiment about kidnapping and musical talent.
A Surprising Concession
What makes Thomson's argument so clever is where she starts. She doesn't argue about when life begins, or whether a fetus is a person, or whether it has moral status. She simply grants all of that to her opponents.
Fine, she says. Let's assume the fetus is a full person from the moment of conception. Let's assume it has a complete right to life. Now what follows from that?
The standard argument against abortion runs like this: the fetus is a person, all persons have a right to life, therefore abortion violates the fetus's right to life. Thomson's genius was to notice that this argument has a hidden premise—one that almost everyone accepts without thinking about it. The hidden premise is that having a right to life means having a right to whatever you need to stay alive.
But does it?
What Rights Actually Mean
Consider our kidnapped violinist-supporter again. The violinist certainly has a right to life. No one disputes this. But does his right to life give him the right to use your kidneys? Does it entitle him to your body for nine months against your will?
Thomson argues that it does not. Your right to life means others cannot kill you. It means they cannot actively end your existence. But it doesn't mean that everyone in the world must give you whatever you need to survive. If the violinist needs your kidneys to live, that's a tragedy. But your kidneys belong to you, not him.
Here's another way to think about it. If you have a right to life, and you're starving to death, does that give you the right to take food from my refrigerator? Most people would say no—you have a right not to be killed, but not a right to take whatever you need from others. Your right to life doesn't impose unlimited obligations on everyone else.
This distinction matters enormously. Thomson argues that even if the fetus has a full right to life, this right doesn't include the right to use another person's body without consent. By disconnecting herself from the violinist, a person doesn't violate his right to life—she merely declines to provide him with something (her body) that he has no right to demand.
Kindness Is Not Obligation
Now, would it be kind to stay connected to the violinist? Perhaps. Thomson readily admits that staying connected might be the generous thing to do, especially if the burden isn't too severe. But kindness and obligation are different things.
If you allow the violinist to use your kidneys for nine months, Thomson writes, "this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due." You might be a wonderful person for doing it. But you're not a murderer for declining.
This distinction between what's morally required and what's morally praiseworthy runs throughout Thomson's argument. Going above and beyond is admirable. But we cannot demand that everyone be a saint, and we certainly cannot criminalize the failure to be saintly.
The Expanding Child
Thomson presents another scenario to make a different point. Imagine you're trapped in a tiny house with a child who is rapidly growing. The walls are closing in—well, actually, the child is expanding outward. In a few minutes, you'll be crushed to death. The child won't be seriously harmed; eventually he'll burst through the walls and walk away.
Can a third party intervene? Perhaps not—an outside observer faces the terrible dilemma of choosing between two innocent lives. But what about you? Can you defend yourself?
Thomson argues yes, absolutely. Self-defense doesn't require that your attacker be morally culpable. The child isn't trying to kill you; he's just growing. But you're still permitted to protect your own life.
The same principle applies, Thomson suggests, to cases where pregnancy threatens the mother's life. The fetus may be innocent—it hasn't chosen to endanger anyone—but innocence doesn't eliminate the pregnant person's right to self-defense.
And here Thomson makes a crucial observation. She writes that in this tiny house scenario, we must remember something important: "the mother owns the house." The body in question belongs to the pregnant person. Whatever rights others might have, they don't override ownership of one's own body.
But What About Consent?
The violinist objection is powerful, but critics quickly identified what they saw as a weakness. In the violinist case, you were kidnapped—you didn't consent to being hooked up. But what about pregnancies resulting from voluntary intercourse? Doesn't choosing to have sex mean accepting the possibility of pregnancy?
Thomson anticipates this objection with another thought experiment—one of the strangest in philosophical literature.
Imagine a world where pregnancy works differently. Tiny "people-seeds" float through the air like pollen. If one drifts into your home and takes root in your carpet, it will grow into a person. You don't want this to happen, so you install the finest mesh screens money can buy over all your windows. These screens are highly effective but not perfect—occasionally, a defective screen lets a seed through.
One day, despite your precautions, a people-seed roots itself in your living room.
Must you now nurture it for nine months? After all, you knew the screens weren't perfect. You voluntarily opened your windows. You could have lived without fresh air, with sealed windows and bare floors. Does the fact that you accepted some risk mean you've consented to whatever follows?
Thomson thinks not. Following this logic, she observes, any woman could avoid pregnancy from rape by having a hysterectomy—an extreme and permanent measure undertaken just in case. But surely we don't require people to take every possible precaution against every possible outcome. Taking reasonable precautions is enough. The failure of those precautions doesn't constitute consent to the consequences.
The Limits of Thomson's Argument
Thomson doesn't argue that abortion is always morally acceptable. She's quite clear about this.
Consider a woman who wants a late-term abortion "just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad." Thomson calls this "positively indecent." The right to end a pregnancy doesn't mean every reason for doing so is equally valid.
More importantly, Thomson distinguishes between the right to end a pregnancy and the right to ensure the death of the offspring. If an abortion results in a living baby—which becomes more possible as medical technology advances—the mother has no right to insist that the baby be killed. The right is to remove the fetus from one's body, not to guarantee its death.
This distinction has become increasingly relevant as viability—the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb—has moved earlier in pregnancy due to advances in neonatal care. Thomson's argument supports the right to stop being pregnant, but not necessarily the right to any particular method of stopping.
The Objections Keep Coming
Thomson's essay opened a floodgate of philosophical response that continues to this day. Critics have attacked her argument from multiple angles.
The most common objection is that the violinist analogy only works for pregnancies resulting from rape. In consensual sex, the argument goes, the woman either tacitly consented to pregnancy (by engaging in an act she knew could lead to it) or bears responsibility for creating a being that now depends on her. The violinist was attached to you without your involvement; you played no role in his predicament. But in most pregnancies, the woman's actions helped bring the fetus into existence.
Other critics focus on the relationship involved. The violinist is a stranger; the fetus is the woman's own child. Don't we have stronger obligations to our children than to random strangers? Parents who refuse to feed their children can be charged with neglect. Doesn't the same principle apply here?
Still others emphasize the difference between killing and letting die. Unplugging the violinist merely allows him to die of his kidney disease—you're not actively killing him. But abortion, critics argue, directly and intentionally kills the fetus. These are morally different categories.
Interestingly, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer takes a different approach entirely. He argues that our intuition that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist might itself be wrong. If staying connected produces more total happiness than disconnecting, perhaps we really are morally obligated to stay hooked up for nine months. This is a minority view, but it demonstrates how Thomson's thought experiment continues to generate philosophical discussion.
Why This Matters
Thomson's essay remains influential for several reasons. First, it shifted the terms of debate. Before 1971, discussions of abortion focused almost entirely on the moral status of the fetus. Thomson showed that even if you grant personhood to the fetus, serious questions remain about what that personhood entitles it to.
Second, her argument puts bodily autonomy at the center of the discussion. Whatever else we believe about morality, most people have strong intuitions that we have special rights over our own bodies—rights that aren't easily overridden even by the needs of others.
Third, the essay is simply brilliant philosophy. Thomson's imaginative scenarios—the violinist, the expanding child, the people-seeds—have become staples of ethics courses around the world. They demonstrate how philosophy can illuminate difficult moral questions by constructing carefully designed hypotheticals that isolate particular moral principles.
Finally, "A Defense of Abortion" shows that moral philosophy can engage with urgent real-world issues without becoming mere political argument. Thomson reasons carefully, acknowledges the strength of opposing views, and accepts limits on her own conclusions. This is what philosophical ethics looks like when done well.
The Conversation Continues
More than fifty years after its publication, Thomson's essay continues to generate response and counter-response in philosophy journals. Critics find new objections; defenders develop new replies. The violinist has become such a familiar figure in philosophical discourse that simply mentioning him immediately signals which debate you're entering.
What's remarkable is that Thomson never claims to have definitively settled the abortion question. Her argument doesn't prove that all abortions are permissible. It doesn't even prove that most are. What it does is demolish one particular argument—the argument that abortion must be wrong because it violates a fetal right to life.
That argument, Thomson shows, assumes that having a right to life means having a right to whatever you need to survive. And once you think carefully about that assumption—once you imagine waking up attached to a violinist—you realize it's not as obvious as it first appeared.
The debate continues. But thanks to Thomson, it's a more sophisticated debate than it was before.