PBA310Y: Judith Jarvis Thompson

Prerequisite: PBA210H

• A Defense of Abortion
• A Defense of Abortion
• Do the Unborn Unjustly Use Another's Body?
• “In chapter 7 of Francis Beckwith’s book, Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights (1993), it extensively covers arguments such as this when refuting an analogy similar to the professor’s. The points Beckwith makes are in response to an analogy proposed by abortion advocate Judith Jarvis Thomson, known as “unplugging the violinist” and articulated in her paper, “A Defense of Abortion.” http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/training/classroom/use#footnoteref3_bfcjhip
• http://www.equipresources.org/atf/cf/%7B9C4EE03A-F988-4091-84BD-F8E70A3B0215%7D/JAA025.pdf

• Bodily autonomy versus right to life
• Killing versus letting die
• Direct versus third-party action
• What does a right to life actually entail
  • right to continued life versus right not to be killed
  • right not to be killed unjustly
• on what constitutes a “right”, immoral versus unjust
• Good Samaritan versus Minimally Decent Samaritan
• “Special Responsibility”¹⁾
• “while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child”

Thompson seems to be assuming a consequentialist perspective to be obvious. She doesn't seem to entertain the nothing that something might be intrinsically wrong. Yet, she says this about torture: “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.” Maybe the real problem is that she's not actually allowing the premise, she doesn't actually believe a pre-born child is a person.²⁾

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “there isn't much a woman can safely do to abort herself”
• “Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the right of self-defense.”
• 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 are unborn persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says I invite you in.”
• “a burglar”
• “If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it.”
• “people-seeds” as some kind of environmental toxin as an analogy for the attempted sterilization of the conjugal act

• Against (pro-life)
  • Schwarz 1990
  • Beckwith 1993
  • Lee 1996
• Against (abortion advocates)
  • Tooley 1972
  • Warren 1973
  • Steinbock 1992
  • McMahan 2002
• In Defence
  • Kamm 1992
  • Boonin 2003: ch 4