A Defense of Abortion - Criticism

Criticism

Critics of Thomson's argument (see the table below) generally grant the permissibility of unplugging the violinist, but seek to block the inference that abortion is permissible by arguing that there are morally relevant differences between the violinist scenario and typical cases of abortion. One notable exception being that of Peter Singer who claims that, despite our intuitions, a utilitarian calculus would imply that one is morally obliged to stay connected to the violinist.

The most common objection is that Thomson's argument can justify abortion only in cases of rape. In the violinist scenario, you were kidnapped: you did nothing to cause the violinist to be plugged in, just as a woman who is pregnant due to rape did nothing to cause her pregnancy. But in typical cases of abortion, the pregnant woman had intercourse voluntarily, and thus has either tacitly consented to allow the fetus to use her body (the tacit consent objection), or else has a duty to sustain the fetus because the woman herself caused the fetus to stand in need of her body (the responsibility objection). Other common objections turn on the claim that the fetus is the pregnant woman's child whereas the violinist is a stranger (the stranger versus offspring objection), or that abortion kills the fetus whereas unplugging the violinist merely lets him die (the killing versus letting die objection).

Defenders of Thomson's argument reply that the alleged disanalogies between the violinist scenario and typical cases of abortion do not hold, either because the factors that critics appeal to are not genuinely morally relevant, or because those factors are morally relevant but do not apply to abortion in the way that critics have claimed. A summary of common objections and responses is given below.

Less common objections to Thomson's argument (and the pro-choice responses) include:

• the natural-artificial objection: pregnancy is a natural process that is biologically normal to the human species. The joined condition of the violinist and donor, in contrast, represents an extreme and unusual form of "life support" that can only proceed in the presence of surgical intervention. This difference is morally relevant and therefore the two situations should not be used to model each other. The pro-choice response would be to cite the naturalistic fallacy.
• the conjoined twins objection: the relationship between conjoined twins represents a more complete analogy to pregnancy than the relationship between the violinist and the kidney donor. Because the fatal separation of conjoined twins is immoral, so is abortion. The pro-choice response would be to state that conjoined twins have equal claims to their shared organs, since they were conceived at the same time, in contrast to the fetus/prenatal offspring, who was conceived after his/her/its mother and whose claim to her body is thus inferior to that of the woman.
• the different burdens objection: supporting the violinist is a much greater burden than normal pregnancy, and so unplugging the violinist is morally permissible whereas aborting the fetus is not;
• the artificiality objection: our intuitions on bizarre thought experiments of the sort used by Thomson are unreliable and provide no warrant for the conclusions they are intended to support. The pro-choice response would be that this is a thought experiment and thus it is not meant to be realistic.
• the duty to sustain the violinist objection: despite the common intuition, one does have an obligation to support the violinist, and likewise the fetus.

Of course, critics of Thomson's analogy have replies to these responses, and so the debate goes back and forth.