A Defense of Abortion - Table of Criticisms and Responses

Tacit consent objection

The pregnant woman voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse foreseeing that a fetus may result, and so has tacitly consented to the fetus using her body; no such consent occurs with the violinist (or pregnancy due to rape).

• Tacit consent cannot be inferred where contraception was used.
• Engaging in a voluntary action while foreseeing a certain result does not entail that one has tacitly consented to that result.
• Even if the woman has tacitly consented to the fetus making demands on her body, it does not follow that she has consented to sustain it for the entire nine months of pregnancy.
• In the US there is the legal concept of an inalienable right. A person can not legally surrender one of these rights. For example, Surrogacy contracts that prohibit the surrogate mother from aborting are illegal. No court would enforce that clause of the contract and you would have no legal remedy if she then chose to do so because she is not permitted by law to surrender her bodily autonomy to anyone. Just as she cannot surrender her autonomy to you, she cannot surrender it to the fetus due to inalienability. However, not everyone agrees with the current legal definition of inalienable rights, and using the current law or legal precedent to back up your position are examples of logical fallacies called argumentum ad populum, argument from tradition, argument from authority, and argument from common practice.

Responsibility objection

The pregnant woman voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse with the result that the fetus stands in need of the use of her body. The woman is thus responsible for the fetus's need to use her body and so the fetus has a right to use her body. No such responsibility occurs with the violinist (or pregnancy due to rape).

• The woman is responsible for the fetus existing, but as she could not have caused the fetus to exist without being dependent on her, she is in a relevant sense not responsible for the fetus's need to use her body.
• Thomson raises this objection herself and concludes it is not convincing. First, she offers an argument that lends support to the view that abortion is justified at least in the case of rape. Second, she points out that one cannot drive a wedge between rape and other cases simply by appealing to the fact that in other cases the woman is responsible for there being a fetus that needs assistance, since the woman is also to some extent responsible in cases of rape (e.g., she could get a hysterectomy or "never leav home without a (reliable!) army"). Therefore she concludes that abortion is morally permissible in at least some cases where intercourse is voluntary. However, hysterectomies could threaten a woman's life, and almost all women cannot afford reliable armies. Also, while the woman might have been responsible for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was the rapist who had the final say in whether or not a woman became pregnant (similar as to how people who commit shooting sprees, rather than the people who legally sold them the guns, have the final say in whether or not they commit the shooting spree).
• If a thug stole both kidneys from a man and sold them the thug would have caused the man to be in need of a kidney. He would be responsible for that need in a very simple and clear cut manner. There is no need to imply or infer his intentions. If we caught the perpetrator and convicted him we would imprison him but we would not take a kidney from him against his will to sustain the victim's life. Even violent criminals retain their inalienable rights and bodily autonomy is one of these rights. However, not everyone agrees that absolute bodily autonomy is an inalienable right.

Stranger versus offspring objection

Parents have special obligations towards their offspring (as shown, for example, by laws requiring child support payments and by the fact that child abandonment is morally wrong). The fetus is the pregnant woman's offspring, and so she has a special obligation to sustain it; the violinist is a stranger and so you have no such obligation.

• Special obligations do not arise from mere biological relatedness; they can only be assumed, either explicitly or implicitly. For example, by taking the baby home from the hospital one implicitly agrees to care for it.
• Even special parental obligations do not require parents to undergo organ donation or other direct use of their body (such as pregnancy) for the sake of their offspring.
• From the fact that it is morally permissible for a society to enact child support laws, it does not follow that there is any obligation (to the child) to pay child support independently of such laws.
• The wrongness of child abandonment may suggest we have some positive duties towards others; but it would not follow that those duties are strong enough to require sustaining the fetus.
• In order to argue that one obligation can be inferred from another obligation the inferred obligation must be equal or lesser to the accepted obligation. Thus you could infer a financial obligation from a bodily obligation because a financial obligation is trivial in comparison to the violation of bodily autonomy but you can't go the other way as that would be trading up. However, one could argue that a financial obligation is a much greater burden since being forced to pay child support for 18 years or more is a much greater overall burden than being forced to sustain a pregnancy for several months.

Killing versus letting die objection

There is a morally relevant difference between killing and letting die. Abortion typically kills the fetus and thus is impermissible, but unplugging the violinist merely lets him die and so is permissible.

• The objection would not apply to 'merely extractive' methods of abortion (such as hysterotomy) where the fetus is extracted intact and then allowed to die rather than killed.
• Those who oppose abortion do not hold that merely extractive abortions are less objectionable than other methods of abortion; so they cannot consistently raise the killing versus letting die objection.
• Killing is not in and of itself worse than letting die, or is not sufficiently worse to undermine the violinist analogy.
• Even if killing is substantially worse than letting die, it is justified in the case of abortion because letting die would require a merely extractive abortion, which under current technology involves substantial risk to the pregnant woman.
• The objection does not invalidate the violinist argument because the violinist argument is not "letting die". Pulling the plug on someone is killing them because you are an active participant, not a passive observer to the actions of someone else. The killing in both cases, however, is justifiable as defense of your own bodily autonomy.
• Even if we accept that killing the fetus is wrong we are still left with the stand-off between the fetus' right not to be killed and the mothers right to her body. The mother should come first in the same way the person hooked up to the violinist can leave.

Intending versus foreseeing objection

There is a morally relevant difference between intending harm and causing harm as a foreseen but unintended side effect. In most cases, abortion intentionally causes the fetus's death and so is impermissible; whereas unplugging the violinist causes death as an unintended side effect and so is permissible.

• Intentionally causing death is not in itself worse than causing death as an unintended side effect, or is not sufficiently worse to undermine the violinist analogy.
• If the intending versus foreseeing distinction is morally relevant, this is presumably because intending harm usually involves a failure of respect towards the victim that foreseeing harm usually does not. But intentionally causing the fetus's death through abortion (in order to avoid the dangers to the woman of a merely extractive abortion) seems no worse from the point of view of respect than causing the fetus's death as an unintended side effect; so the distinction does not undermine the analogy between the violinist scenario and abortion.
• There is no reason to believe that the underlying motives are different in the two cases ... the desires to protect ones bodily integrity and escape the foreign invader. There is no evidence on record to indicate that women would object to a safe extraction method that did not kill the fetus were one to become available and thus no justification for the assumption of maternal malice that is the foundation of the objection.
• Assume that the kidnap victim in the violinist argument is the second best violinist in the world and wishes the violinist were dead so that she could ascend to the top of her profession. Her primary intent in unplugging the violinist is now to kill him. If this objection held water the change of heart would deprive her of the right to separate herself from the violinist. But it does not. Her right to pull the plug derives from her ownership of her own body, not from the purity of her intentions.