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A Defense of Abortion
A Defense of Abortion
JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON
Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise
that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the
moment of conception. The premise is argued for,
but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most
common argument. We are asked to notice that the
development of a human being from conception
through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is
said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this
development and say “before this point the thing is
not a person, after this point it is a person” is to make
an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature
of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded
that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it
is, a person from the moment of conception. But this
conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be
said about the development of an acorn into an oak
tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees,
or that we had better say they are. Arguments of this
form are sometimes called “slippery slope
arguments”—the phrase is perhaps self-explanatory—
and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on
them so heavily and uncritically.
I am inclined to agree, however, that the
prospects for “drawing a line” in the development of
the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think also that we
shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already
become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it
comes as a surprise when one first learns how early in
its life it begins to acquire human characteristics. By
the tenth week, for example, it already has a face,
arms and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs,
and brain activity is detectable. On the other hand, I
think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a
person from the moment of conception. A newly
fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is
no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I
shall not discuss any of this. For it seems to me to be
of great interest to ask what happens if, for the sake
of argument, we allow the premise. How, precisely,
are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion
that abortion is morally impermissible? Opponents of
abortion commonly spend most of their time
establishing that the fetus is a person, and hardly any
time explaining the step from there to the
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impermissibility of abortion. Perhaps they think the
step too simple and obvious to require much
comment. Or perhaps instead they are simply being
economical in argument. Many of those who defend
abortion rely on the premise that the fetus is not a
person, but only a bit of tissue that will become a
person at birth; and why pay out more arguments
than you have to? Whatever the explanation, I
suggest that the step they take is neither easy nor
obvious, that it calls for closer examination than it is
commonly given, and that when we do give it this
closer examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.
I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a
person from the moment of conception. How does
the argument go from here? Something like this, I
take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus
has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to
decide what shall happen in and to her body;
everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right
to life is stronger and more stringent than the
mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her
body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be
killed; an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to
imagine this. 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 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 safely be 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? What if it were not nine months, but nine years?
Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital
says, “Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay
in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the
rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons
have a right to life, and violinists are persons.
Granted you have a right to decide what happens in
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and to your body, but a person’s right to life
outweighs your right to decide what happens in and
to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from
him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous,
which suggests that something really is wrong with
that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a
moment ago.
In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you
didn’t volunteer for the operation that plugged the
violinist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose
abortion on the ground I mentioned make an
exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly.
They can say that persons have a right to life only if
they didn’t come into existence because of rape; or
they can say that all persons have a right to life, but
that some have less of a right to life than others, in
particular, that those who came into existence
because of rape have less. But these statements have a
rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of
whether you have a right to life at all, or how much
of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of
whether or not you are the product of a rape. And in
fact the people who oppose abortion on the ground I
mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence do
not make an exception in case of rape.
Nor do they make an exception for a case in
which the mother has to spend the nine months of
her pregnancy in bed. They would agree that would
be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all the
same, all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a
person, and so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would
not make an exception for a case in which,
miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine
years, or even the rest of the mother’s life.
Some won’t even make an exception for a case in
which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to
shorten the mother’s life; they regard abortion as
impermissible even to save the mother’s life. Such
cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of
abortion do not accept this extreme view. All the
same, it is a good place to begin: a number of points
of interest come out in respect to it.
1. Let us call the view that abortion is
impermissible even to save the mother’s life “the
extreme view.” I want to suggest first that it does not
issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without
the addition of some fairly powerful premises.
Suppose a woman has become pregnant, and now
learns that she has a cardiac condition such that she
will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be
done for her? The fetus, being a person, has a right to
life, but as the mother is a person too, so has she a
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right to life. Presumably they have an equal right to
life. How is it supposed to come out that an abortion
may not be performed? If mother and child have an
equal right to life, shouldn’t we perhaps flip a coin?
Or should we add to the mother’s right to life her
right to decide what happens in and to her body,
which everybody seems to be ready to grant—the sum
of her rights now outweighing the fetus’ right to life?
The most familiar argument here is the
following. We are told that performing the abortion
would be directly killing1 the child, whereas doing
nothing would not be killing the mother, but only
letting her die. Moreover, in killing the child, one
would be killing an innocent person, for the child has
committed no crime, and is not aiming at his
mother’s death. And then there are a variety of ways
in which this might be continued. (1) But as directly
killing an innocent person is always and absolutely
impermissible, an abortion may not be performed.
Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent person is
murder, and murder is always and absolutely
impermissible, an abortion may not be performed.
Or, (3) as one’s duty to refrain from directly killing an
innocent person is more stringent than one’s duty to
keep a person from dying, an abortion may not be
performed. Or, (4) if one’s only options are directly
killing an innocent person or letting a person die, one
must prefer letting the person die, and thus an
abortion may not be performed.
Some people seem to have thought that these are
not further premises which must be added if the
conclusion is to be reached, but that they follow from
the very fact that an innocent person has a right to
life. But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps
the simplest way to show this is to bring out that
while we must certainly grant that innocent persons
have a right to life, the theses in (1) through (4) are
all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an
innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible,
then the mother’s directly killing the innocent person
inside her is murder, and thus is impermissible. But it
cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the
mother performs an abortion on herself to save her
life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain,
that she must sit passively by and wait for her death.
Let us look again at the case of you and the violinist.
There you are, in bed with the violinist, and the
director of the hospital says to you, “It’s all most
distressing, and I deeply sympathize, but you see this
is putting an additional strain on your kidneys, and
you’ll be dead within the month. But you have to stay
where you are all the same. Because unplugging you
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would be directly killing an innocent violinist, and
that’s murder, and that’s impermissible.” If anything
in the world is true, it is that you do not commit
murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you
reach around to your back and unplug yourself from
that violinist to save your life.
The main focus of attention in writings on
abortion has been on what a third party may or may
not do in answer to a request from a woman for an
abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things
being as they are, there isn’t much a woman can safely
do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a
third party may do, and what the mother may do, if it
is mentioned at all, is deduced, almost as an
afterthought, from what it is concluded that third
parties may do. But it seems to me that to treat the
matter in this way is to refuse to grant to the mother
that very status of person which is so firmly insisted
on for the fetus. For we cannot simply read off what a
person may do from what a third party may do.
Suppose you find yourself trapped in a tiny house
with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a
rapidly growing child—you are already up against the
wall of the house and in a few minutes you’ll be
crushed to death. The child on the other hand won’t
be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him
from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply
burst open the house and walk out a free man. Now I
could well understand it if a bystander were to say,
“There’s nothing we can do for you. We cannot
choose between your life and his, we cannot be the
ones to decide who is to live, we cannot intervene.”
But it cannot be concluded that you too can do
nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your life.
However innocent the child may be, you do not have
to wait passively while it crushes you to death.
Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the
status of house, to which we don’t allow the right of
self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it
should be remembered that she is a person who
houses it.
I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am
not claiming that people have a right to do anything
whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there
are drastic limits to the right of self-defense. If
someone threatens you with death unless you torture
someone else to death, I think you have not the right,
even to save your life, to do so. But the case under
consideration here is very different. In our case there
are only two people involved, one whose life is
threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are
innocent: the one who is threatened is not threatened
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because of any fault, the one who threatens does not
threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may
feel that we bystanders cannot intervene. But the
person threatened can.
In sum, a woman surely can defend her life
against the threat to it posed by the unborn child,
even if doing so involves its death. And this shows
not merely that the theses in (1) through (4) are false;
it shows also that the extreme view of abortion is
false, and so we need not canvass any other possible
ways of arriving at it from the argument I mentioned
at the outset.
2. The extreme view could of course be weakened
to say that while abortion is permissible to save the
mother’s life, it may not be performed by a third
party, but only by the mother herself. But this cannot
be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is
that the mother and the unborn child are not like two
tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate
mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns the
house. The fact that she does adds to the
offensiveness of deducing that the mother can do
nothing from the supposition that third parties can
do nothing. But it does more than this: it casts a
bright light on the supposition that third parties can
do nothing. Certainly it lets us see that a third party
who says “I cannot choose between you” is fooling
himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If Jones has
found and fastened on a certain coat, which he needs
to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also
needs to keep him from freezing, then it is not
impartiality that says “I cannot choose between you”
when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again
and again “This body is my body!” and they have
reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been
like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly
likely to bless us if we say to him, “Of course it’s your
coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may
choose between you and Jones who is to have it.”
We should really ask what it is that says “no one
may choose” in the face of the fact that the body that
houses the child is the mother’s body. It may be
simply a failure to appreciate this fact. But it may be
something more interesting, namely the sense that
one has a right to refuse to lay hands on people, even
where it would be just and fair to do so, even where
justice seems to require that somebody do so. Thus
justice might call for somebody to get Smith’s coat
back from Jones, and yet you have a right to refuse to
be the one to lay hands on Jones, a right to refuse to
do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be
granted. But then what should be said is not “no one
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may choose,” but only “I cannot choose,” and indeed
not even this, but “I will not act,” leaving it open that
somebody else can or should, and in particular that
anyone in a position of authority, with the job of
securing people’s rights, both can and should. So this
is no difficulty. I have not been arguing that any
given third party must accede to the mother’s request
that he perform an abortion to save her life, but only
that he may.
I suppose that in some views of human life the
mother’s body is only on loan to her, the loan not
being one which gives her any prior claim to it. One
who held this view might well think it impartiality to
say “I cannot choose.” But I shall simply ignore this
possibility. My own view is that if a human being has
any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just,
prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn’t
be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the
arguments against abortion we are looking at do
grant that the woman has a right to decide what
happens in and to her body.
But although they do grant it, I have tried to
show that they do not take seriously what is done in
granting it. I suggest the same thing will reappear
even more clearly when we turn away from cases in
which the mother’s life is at stake, and attend, as I
propose we now do, to the vastly more common
cases in which a woman wants an abortion for some
less weighty reason than preserving her own life.
3. Where the mother’s life is not at stake, the
argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a
much stronger pull. “Everyone has a right to life, so
the unborn person has a right to life.” And isn’t the
child’s right to life weightier than anything other
than the mother’s own right to life, which she might
put forward as ground for an abortion?
This argument treats the right to life as if it were
unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to be
precisely the source of the mistake.
For we should now, at long last, ask what it
comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having
a right to life includes having a right to be given at
least the bare minimum one needs for continued life.
But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a
man needs for continued life is something he has no
right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and
the only thing that will save my life is the touch of
Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then
all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of
Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It
would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the
West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice,
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though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to
the West Coast and carried Henry Fonda back with
them. But I have no right at all against anybody that
he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the
story I told earlier, the fact that for continued life that
violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does
not establish that he has a right to be given the
continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no
right against you that you should give him continued
use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use
your kidneys unless you give him such a right; and
nobody has the right against you that you shall give
him this right—if you do allow him to go on using
your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not
something he can claim from you as his due. Nor has
he any right against anybody else that they should
give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he
had no right against the Society of Music Lovers that
they should plug him into you in the first place. And
if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned
that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in
bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must
try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is
given something he has a right to be given.
Some people are rather stricter about the right to
life. In their view, it does not include the right to be
given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right
not to be killed by anybody. But here a related
difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing
that violinist, then everybody must refrain from
doing a great many different sorts of things.
Everybody must refrain from slitting his throat,
everybody must refrain from shooting him—and
everybody must refrain from unplugging you from
him. But does he have a right against everybody that
they shall refrain from unplugging you from him? To
refrain from doing this is to allow him to continue to
use your kidneys. It could be argued that he has a
right against us that we should allow him to continue
to use your kidneys. That is, while he had no right
against us that we should give him the use of your
kidneys, it might be argued that he anyway has a right
against us that we shall not now intervene and
deprive him of the use of your kidneys. I shall come
back to third-party interventions later. But certainly
the violinist has no right against you that you shall
allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said,
if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on
your part, and not something you owe him.
The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the
right to life. It reappears in connection with all the
other natural rights; and it is something which an
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adequate account of rights must deal with. For
present purposes it is enough just to draw attention
to it. But I would stress that I am not arguing that
people do not have a right to life—quite to the
contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we
must place on the acceptability of an account of rights
is that it should turn out in that account to be a truth
that all persons have a right to life. I am arguing only
that having a right to life does not guarantee having
either a right to be given the use of or a right to be
allowed continued use of another person’s body—
even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life
will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very
simple and clear way in which they seem to have
thought it would.
4. There is another way to bring out the
difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to
deprive someone of what he has a right to is to treat
him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother are
jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the
older boy takes the box and refuses to give his
brother any of the chocolates, he is unjust to him, for
the brother has been given a right to half of them.
But suppose that, having learned that otherwise it
means nine years in bed with that violinist, you
unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being
unjust to him, for you gave him no right to use your
kidneys, and no one else can have given him any such
right. But we have to notice that in unplugging
yourself, you are killing him; and violinists, like
everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in the
view we were considering just now, the right not to
be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a
right you shall not do, but you do not act unjustly to
him in doing it.
The emendation which may be made at this point
is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to
be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed
unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never
mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the
violinist has a right to life with the fact that you do
not act unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself,
thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him
unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it
is no wonder you do him no injustice.
But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the
argument against abortion stares us plainly in the
face: it is by no means enough to show that the fetus
is a person, and to remind us that all persons have a
right to life—we need to be shown also that killing
the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is
unjust killing. And is it?
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I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case
of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not given
the unborn person a right to the use of her body for
food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy could it
be supposed that the mother has given the unborn
person such a right? It is not as if there were unborn
persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman
who wants a child says “I invite you in.”
But it might be argued that there are other ways
one can have acquired a right to the use of another
person’s body than by having been invited to use it by
that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges in
intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in
pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is
she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact
the very existence, of the unborn person inside her?
No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn’t her
partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a
right to the use of her body? If so, then her aborting it
would be more like the boy’s taking away the
chocolates, and less like your unplugging yourself
from the violinist—doing so would be depriving it of
what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing
it an injustice.
And then, too, it might be asked whether or not
she can kill it even to save her own life: If she
voluntarily called it into existence, how can she now
kill it, even in self-defense?
The first thing to be said about this is that it is
something new. Opponents of abortion have been so
concerned to make out the independence of the fetus,
in order to establish that it has a right to life, just as
its mother does, that they have tended to overlook
the possible support they might gain from making
out that the fetus is dependent on the mother, in order
to establish that she has a special kind of
responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it
rights against her which are not possessed by any
independent person—such as an ailing violinist who
is a stranger to her.
On the other hand, this argument would give the
unborn person a right to its mother’s body only if her
pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken
in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might
result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn
person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the
availability of some further argument, then, we
would be left with the conclusion that unborn
persons whose existence is due to rape have no right
to the use of their mothers’ bodies, and thus that
aborting them is not depriving them of anything they
have a right to and hence is not unjust killing.
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And we should also notice that it is not at all
plain that this argument really does go even as far as
it purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the
details make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I
therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar
climbs in, it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can
stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house—
for she is partially responsible for his presence there,
having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in,
in full knowledge that there are such things as
burglars, and that burglars burgle.” It would be still
more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed
outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars
from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a
defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we
imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an
innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again,
suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in
the air like pollen, and if you open your windows,
one may drift in and take root in your carpets or
upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up
your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best
you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very,
very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is
defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the
person-plant who now develops have a right to the
use of your house? Surely not—despite the fact that
you voluntarily opened your windows, you
knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture,
and you knew that screens were sometimes defective.
Someone may argue that you are responsible for its
rooting, that it does have a right to your house,
because after all you could have lived out your life
with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed
windows and doors. But this won’t do—for by the
same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape
by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never
leaving home without a (reliable!) army.
It seems to me that the argument we are looking
at can establish at most that there are some cases in
which the unborn person has a right to the use of its
mother’s body, and therefore some cases in which
abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much
discussion and argument as to precisely which, if any.
But I think we should sidestep this issue and leave it
open, for at any rate the argument certainly does not
establish that all abortion is unjust killing.
5. There is room for yet another argument here,
however. We surely must all grant that there may be
cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach
a person from your body at the cost of his life.
Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not
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nine years of your life, but only one hour: all you
need do to save his life is to spend one hour in that
bed with him. Suppose also that letting him use your
kidneys for that one hour would not affect your
health in the slightest. Admittedly you were
kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give anyone
permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it
seems to me plain you ought to allow him to use your
kidneys for that hour—it would be indecent to refuse.
Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour,
and constituted no threat to life or health. And
suppose that a woman becomes pregnant as a result
of rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do
anything to bring about the existence of a child.
Admittedly she did nothing at all which would give
the unborn person a right to the use of her body. All
the same it might well be said, as in the newly
emended violinist story, that she ought to allow it to
remain for that hour—that it would be indecent in
her to refuse.
Now some people are inclined to use the term
“right” in such a way that it follows from the fact that
you ought to allow a person to use your body for the
hour he needs, that he has a right to use your body
for the hour he needs, even though he has not been
given that right by any person or act. They may say
that it follows also that if you refuse, you act unjustly
toward him. This use of the term is perhaps so
common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless
it seems to me to be an unfortunate loosening of
what we would do better to keep a tight rein on.
Suppose that box of chocolates I mentioned earlier
had not been given to both boys jointly, but was
given only to the older boy. There he sits, stolidly
eating his way through the box, his small brother
watching enviously. Here we are likely to say “You
ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your
brother some of those chocolates.” My own view is
that it just does not follow from the truth of this that
the brother has any right to any of the chocolates. If
the boy refuses to give his brother any, he is greedy,
stingy, callous—but not unjust. I suppose that the
people I have in mind will say it does follow that the
brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and
thus that the boy does act unjustly if he refuses to give
his brother any. But the effect of saying this is to
obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the
difference between the boy’s refusal in this case and
the boy’s refusal in the earlier case, in which the box
was given to both boys jointly, and in which the small
brother thus had what was from any point of view
clear title to half.
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A further objection to so using the term “right”
that from the fact that A ought to do a thing for B, it
follows that B has a right against A that A do it for
him, is that it is goi
