In 1971, two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion for decades to follow, MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson hurled a breaking ball into academia with her often-cited article, “In Defense of Abortion.”
Like many breaking balls, the piece got past the proverbial catcher and sent the pro-life field into a frenzy. Thomson granted pro-lifers’ main arguments—the scientific case that the unborn are unquestionably human from conception onward and the philosophical underpinnings that grant them full-fledged personhood. To make her case, Thomson spins a fictional analogy:
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 type of blood 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 permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can be safely unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? (Thomson 1971, pp. 48–49)
Known simply as “The Violinist,” Thomson’s argument is a significant and influential piece in the abortion rights debate. Most Philosophy 101 students learn it, using it to bolster their stance on abortion rights and often reducing its main thrust to the well-known assertion, “My body, my rights!”
But how convincing is Thomson’s violinist upon closer examination? Is it the grand slam that abortion advocates think it is? The short answer is no.
Thomson’s analogy is odd right off the bat; her prior assumptions regarding sex and pregnancy don’t reflect what we observe in reality, and the parallels between her violinist scenario and ordinary pregnancy fall apart.
The purpose of an analogy is to help us move from something we already understand to one with which we aren’t as familiar, using concepts that are already part of our knowledge. As Dr. Francis Beckwith suggests, it would be odd for me to try and explain eating and drinking to someone by saying it’s sort of like receiving nutrition intravenously through tubes; only with eating and drinking you use your mouth, esophagus, and stomach. To do so would be odd because we already know what eating and drinking are. To explain intravenous feeding, it would make more sense to begin with eating and drinking.1 Similarly, why do we need the violinist and other analogies to help us understand pregnancy and its moral implications, especially when the evidence clearly demonstrates that the unborn children in question are full-fledged members of the human community?
The answer? We don’t. Pregnancy is a natural and common occurrence that we innately understand. Also, there are moral duties that mothers and fathers bear toward their children, which is why our laws protect parental and children’s rights.
Strike one.
For the violinist and her subsequent analogies to hit their mark, Thomson is asking readers to accept troubling underlying assumptions. She presents pregnancy as something more like a disease that has invaded the mother’s body than the good thing it is, and she wants readers to believe that consent to sex—for the sake of pleasure—does not necessarily mean consent to pregnancy.
As for the former, Thomson’s treatment of pregnancy as something the mother should rid her body of is not the way it works in reality. When couples call their friends and family to share the news, “We’re pregnant,” those on the other end don’t pause and respond, “I’m so sorry. That’s awful!” While it’s true that some pregnancies are unplanned, and some are difficult because of health issues, our first impression when we think of “pregnancy” is that it is good. Beckwith, in Defending Life, explains that if a woman is rendered unconscious by an accident and is wheeled into the hospital and the doctors, after initial tests, discover that she is a few weeks pregnant, they don’t immediately act to rid the woman of an unwanted disease. On the contrary, they immediately begin treating at least two patients—mother and child(ren).2
Our first impression when we think of “pregnancy” is that it is good
For Thomson to imply that the link between sex and pregnancy is consensual rather than natural defies common sense, even when birth control is used (since it sometimes fails). Sex between a man and a woman is, by its very nature, oriented toward the possibility of new life. Where else do babies come from?
The count so far is 0 and 2. For strike three, Thomson’s parallels between the violinist and ordinary pregnancy break down.
She compares becoming pregnant with being kidnapped against one’s will. As Scott Klusendorf writes, “Women don’t wake up and just find themselves pregnant. Other than the case of rape, they willingly engage in an act that is ordered toward procreation. Indeed, there can be no intruder until two parents create him.”3 Cases of rape that result in pregnancy are not exceptions to the pro-life view; the pro-life response to those is recorded with compassion and clarity elsewhere.
Thomson would have us believe that pregnancy is like being imprisoned in a hospital bed, unable to move about freely. While some pregnancies do present difficulties because of issues that keep the mother bed bound as childbirth approaches, pregnancy is not a prison. Pregnant women freely go about their day-to-day activities, and many describe never having felt so alive and vibrant.
It doesn’t take much to determine that in this comparison, pregnancy is normal and natural while the violinist, attached by rubber tubes, is indeed in a very unnatural position.
Thomson compares one’s duty to a perfect stranger—the violinist—as no different than a parent’s duty to her or his own offspring. Our society innately recognizes that parents have duties to their own children. It is the very fact that the violinist is a stranger that makes it plausible to detach from him. The unborn child, on the other hand, is exactly where he should be at this point of development. If the womb is not where he belongs, where else should he be?4
Our society innately recognizes that parents have duties to their own children
Thomson wants readers to believe that having an abortion is no different than simply withdrawing bodily support from the violinist. Abortion, however, is the intentional killing of a human being in utero by heinous means including starvation, suction, and dismemberment. As Beckwith concisely states, describing abortion as merely the withdrawal of bodily support is like saying that smothering someone with a pillow is merely the withdrawal of oxygen.5 The abortion kills the unborn child actively and knowingly. In Thomson’s scenario, withdrawal of support isn’t what kills the violinist—it’s his underlying kidney disease.
Finally, many who use Thomson’s argument rely on an extreme version of bodily autonomy, namely the right to control all that happens in and to one’s body. But this kind of right has exceptions—both legal and moral—that are easy to recognize. It does not include the right to practice prostitution, take illegal drugs, walk around naked in public, or shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. As ethicist Christopher Kaczor points out, “. . . taken as a universally true premise without exceptions, there simply is no such thing as the right to control what happens in and to one’s body. This premise cannot justify abortion.”6
Upon closer examination, Thomson’s violinist isn’t the clean-up hitter that abortion advocates wish it to be. Being equipped to understand its flaws helps; but when it comes to making abortion unthinkable in today’s marketplace of ideas, the game is far from over.
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