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Taking any one of the readings from this class not covered by the reflective reading assignment you are to write an argumentative essay that addresses the same topic as the author. Your essay is to offer a critical assessment of the author’s position and defend its own thesis. If you are in agreement with the author’s position, you are called to offer an original and substantive defence of this position that supplements the author’s argument. If you are in disagreement with the author, you should demonstrate what the author has wrong and why, as well as provide a defence of your counter-position. A third alternative is to express a position of ambivalence. This is not a position of indifference. Instead, you are called to defend why you are generally torn by the topic and the question as it stands cannot yet be resolved. If you are ambivalent, you must both demonstrate what the author has right and what the author has wrong, as well as articulate what remains in question and offer suggestions for a direction forward.

Bioethics: An Anthology, Third Edition. Edited by Helga Kuhse, Udo Schüklenk, and Peter Singer.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Original publication details: Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” pp. 47–66 from Philosophy and
Public Affairs 1: 1 (1971). Reproduced with permission from John Wiley & Sons.
3
A Defense of Abortion
Judith Jarvis Thomson1
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.2 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 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.
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A defense of abortion 39
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 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 the 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 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
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40 judith jarvis thomson
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 killing3 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.4 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.5
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.6
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 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
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A defense of abortion 41
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 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
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.
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42 judith jarvis thomson
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, 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 do 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
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
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A defense of abortion 43
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?
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?7 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.
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
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44 judith jarvis thomson
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 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.
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 going to make the question of whether
or not a man has a right to a thing turn on how easy
it is to provide him with it; and this seems not merely
unfortunate, but morally unacceptable. Take the case
of Henry Fonda again. I said earlier that I had no right
to the touch of his cool hand on my fevered brow,
even though I needed it to save my life. I said it would
be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West
Coast to provide me with it, but that I had no right
against him that he should do so. But suppose he isn’t
on the West Coast. Suppose he has only to walk across
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A defense of abortion 45
the room, place a hand briefly on my brow – and lo,
my life is saved. Then surely he ought to do it, it would
be indecent to refuse. Is it to be said “Ah, well, it
follows that in this case she has a right to the touch of
his hand on her brow, and so it would be an injustice
in him to refuse”? So that I have a right to it when it
is easy for him to provide it, though no right when it’s
hard? It’s rather a shocking idea that anyone’s rights
should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and
harder to accord them to him.
So my own view is that even though you ought to
let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he
needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to
do so – we should say that if you refuse, you are, like
the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give
none away, self‐centered and callous, indecent in fact,
but not unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a
case in which a woman pregnant due to rape ought to
allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour
he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right
to do so; we should conclude that she is self‐centered,
callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses. The
complaints are no less grave; they are just different.
However, there is no need to insist on this point. If
anyone does wish to deduce “he has a right” from
“you ought,” then all the same he must surely grant
that there are cases in which it is not morally required
of you that you allow that violinist to use your
kidneys, and in which he does not have a right to use
them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if
you refuse. And so also for mother and unborn child.
Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right
to demand it – and we were leaving open the
possibility
that there may be such cases – nobody is
morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of
all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and
commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months,
in order to keep another person alive.
6. We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds
of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we might
call the Minimally Decent Samaritan. The story of the
Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes like this:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,
and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his
raiment,
and wounded him, and departed, leaving him
half dead.
And by chance there came down a certain priest
that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the
other side.
And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came
and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where
he was; and when he saw him he had compassion on him.
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring
in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and
brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out
two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him,
“Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more,
when I come again, I will repay thee.” (Luke 10: 30–35)
The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some
cost to himself, to help one in need of it. We are not
told what the options were, that is, whether or not the
priest and the Levite could have helped by doing less
than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they
could have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows
they were not even Minimally Decent Samaritans, not
because they were not Samaritans, but because they
were not even minimally decent.
These things are a matter of degree, of course, but
there is a difference, and it comes out perhaps most
clearly in the story of Kitty Genovese, who, as you will
remember, was murdered while thirty‐eight people
watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help
her. A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to
give direct assistance against the murderer. Or perhaps
we had better allow that it would have been a Splendid
Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it would
have involved a risk of death for himself. But the
thirty‐eight not only did not do this, they did not
even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police.
Minimally Decent Samaritanism would call for doing
at least that, and their not having done it was
monstrous.
After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus
said “Go, and do thou likewise.” Perhaps he meant
that we are morally required to act as the Good
Samaritan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do
more than is morally required of them. At all events it
seems plain that it was not morally required of any of
the thirty‐eight that he rush out to give direct assistance
at the risk of his own life, and that it is not morally
required of anyone that he give long stretches of his
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46 judith jarvis thomson
life – nine years or nine months – to sustaining the life
of a person who has no special right (we were leaving
open the possibility of this) to demand it.
Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions,
no one in any country in the world is legally required
to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone else.
The class of exceptions is obvious. My main concern
here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion,
but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no
state in this country is any man compelled by law to
be even a Minimally Decent Samaritan to any person;
there is no law under which charges could be brought
against the thirty‐eight who stood by while Kitty
Genovese died. By contrast, in most states in this
country women are compelled by law to be not
merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good
Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This
doesn’t by itself settle anything one way or the other,
because it may well be argued that there should be
laws in this country – as there are in many European
countries – compelling at least Minimally Decent
Samaritanism.8 But it does show that there is a gross
injustice in the existing state of the law. And it shows
also that the groups currently working against
liberalization
of abortion laws, in fact working toward
having it declared unconstitutional for a state to
permit
abortion, had better start working for the
adoption of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn
the charge that they are acting in bad faith.
I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent
Samaritan laws would be one thing, Good Samaritan
laws quite another, and in fact highly improper. But
we are not here concerned with the law. What we
should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled
by law to be a Good Samaritan, but whether
we must accede to a situation in which somebody is
being compelled – by nature, perhaps – to be a Good
Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at
third‐party interventions. I have been arguing that no
person is morally required to make large sacrifices to
sustain the life of another who has no right to demand
them, and this even where the sacrifices do not
include life itself; we are not morally required to be
Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to
one another. But what if a man cannot extricate
himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us
to extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are
cases in which we can, cases in which a Good
Samaritan would extricate him. There you are, you
were kidnapped, and nine years in bed with that
violinist lie ahead of you. You have your own life to
lead. You are sorry, but you simply cannot see giving
up so much of your life to the sustaining of his. You
cannot extricate yourself, and ask us to do so. I should
have thought that – in light of his having no right to
the use of your body – it was obvious that we do not
have to accede to your being forced to give up so
much. We can do what you ask. There is no injustice
to the violinist in our doing so.
7. Following the lead of the opponents of abortion,
I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely
as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or
not the argument we began with, which proceeds
only from the fetus being a person, really does establish
its conclusion. I have argued that it does not.
But of course there are arguments and arguments,
and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the
wrong one. It may be said that what is important is
not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that
it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind
of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its
mother. And it might be argued that all my analogies
are therefore irrelevant – for you do not have that
special kind of responsibility for that violinist, Henry
Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility
for me. And our attention might be drawn to the fact
that men and women both are compelled by law to
provide support for their children.
I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in
section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now
may be in order. Surely we do not have any such
“special responsibility” for a person unless we have
assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents
do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an
abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do
not put it out for adoption, 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. But
if they have taken all reasonable precautions against
having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their
biological relationship to the child who comes into
existence have a special responsibility for it. They may
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A defense of abortion 47
wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not
wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility
for it would require large sacrifices, then they
may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse – or
anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that
had to be made were enormous. But then so would
a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that
violinist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good
Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume
responsibility for me.
8. My argument will be found unsatisfactory on
two counts by many of those who want to regard abortion
as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that
abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that it is
always permissible. There may well be cases in which
carrying the child to term requires only Minimally
Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a
standard we must not fall below. I am inclined to think
it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give
a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports
our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately
frightened fourteen‐year‐old schoolgirl, pregnant due
to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law
which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows
for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to
abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent
in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent
in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month,
and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of
postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the
arguments I have been drawing attention to treat all
cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion in which
the mother’s life is not at stake, as morally on a par
ought to have made them suspect at the outset.
Secondly, 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. It is easy
to confuse these two things in that up to a certain
point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive
outside the mother’s body; hence removing it from
her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly
different. I have argued that you are not morally
required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the
life of that violinist; but to say this is by no means to
say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle
and he survives, you then have a right to turn round
and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even if this
costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed
his death, by some other means, if unplugging
yourself does not kill him. There are some people
who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my
argument.
A woman may be utterly devastated by the
thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption
and never seen or heard of again. She may therefore
want not merely that the child be detached from her,
but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion are
inclined to regard this as beneath contempt – thereby
showing insensitivity to what is surely a powerful
source of despair. All the same, I agree that the desire
for the child’s death is not one which anybody may
gratify, should it turn out to be possible to detach the
child alive.
At this place, however, it should be remembered
that we have only been pretending throughout that
the fetus is a human being from the moment of
conception.
A very early abortion is surely not the
killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything
I have said here.
Notes
1 I am very much indebted to James Thomson for
discussion, criticism, and many helpful suggestions.
2 Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality
(New York, 1970), p. 373. This book gives a fascinating
survey of the available information on abortion. The
Jewish tradition is surveyed in David M. Feldman,
Birth Control in Jewish Law (New York, 1968), Part 5, the
Catholic tradition in John T. Noonan, Jr., “An Almost
Absolute Value in History,” in The Morality of Abortion, ed.
John T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
3 The term “direct” in the arguments I refer to is a
technical one. Roughly, what is meant by “direct killing”
is either killing as an end in itself, or killing as a means to
some end, for example, the end of saving someone else’s
life. See note 6, below, for an example of its use.
4 Cf. Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage,
St. Paul Editions (Boston, n.d.), p. 32: “however much we
may pity the mother whose health and even life is
gravely imperiled in the performance of the duty
allotted to her by nature, nevertheless what could ever
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48 judith jarvis thomson
be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct
murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are
dealing with here.” Noonan (The Morality of Abortion,
p. 43) reads this as follows: “What cause can ever avail to
excuse in any way the direct killing of the innocent? For
it is a question of that.”
5 The thesis in (4) is in an interesting way weaker than
those in (1), (2), and (3): they rule out abortion even in
cases in which both mother and child will die if the
abortion is not performed. By contrast, one who held
the view expressed in (4) could consistently say that one
needn’t prefer letting two persons die to killing one.
6 Cf. the following passage from Pius XII, Address to the
Italian Catholic Society of Midwives: “The baby in the
maternal breast has the right to life immediately from
God – Hence there is no man, no human authority, no
science, no medical, eugenic, social, economic or moral
‘indication’ which can establish or grant a valid juridical
ground for a direct deliberate disposition of an innocent
human life, that is a disposition which looks to its
destruction either as an end or as a means to another
end perhaps in itself not illicit. – The baby, still not born,
is a man in the same degree and for the same reason
as the mother” (quoted in Noonan, The Morality of
Abortion, p. 45).
7 The need for a discussion of this argument was brought
home to me by members of the Society for Ethical and
Legal Philosophy, to whom this paper was originally
presented.
8 For a discussion of the difficulties involved, and a survey
of the European experience with such laws, see The
Good Samaritan and the Law, ed. James M. Ratcliffe
(New York, 1966).
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