Responses[edit]

By positing a moral justification for abortion even if one grants a fetal right to life, Thomson's article opened up a new avenue in the philosophical debate about the ethics of abortion. Critics of her view have formulated many objections to her argument, and defenders have responded in kind in a back and forth that continues in philosophy journals. Thomson's imaginative examples and controversial conclusions have made "A Defense of Abortion" perhaps "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy".^[16] Critics of Thomson's argument 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 to this general agreement is Peter Singer, who argues that, despite human intuitions, a utilitarian calculus implies that one is morally obliged to stay connected to the violinist.^[17] Thomson observes that the woman's right to abortion does not include the right to directly insist upon the death of the child should the fetus happen to be viable, that is, capable of surviving outside the womb. She writes: "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."^[15]


The most common objection is that Thomson's violinist argument can justify abortion only in cases of rape, although Thomson uses separate analogies to argue in cases other than rape. In the violinist scenario, the pregnant woman was kidnapped; she did not consent to having the violinist plugged into her and she did nothing to cause the violinist to be plugged in, just as a woman who is pregnant due to rape did nothing to cause the pregnancy. In some cases of abortion, the pregnant woman had voluntary intercourse, and thus has either tacitly consented to allow the fetus to use her body (the tacit consent objection),^[18] or else has a duty to sustain the fetus because the pregnant woman herself caused the fetus to stand in need of her body (the responsibility objection).^[19] 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),^[20] or that abortion directly and intentionally kills the fetus, whereas unplugging the violinist merely lets him die of natural causes (the killing versus letting die objection).^[20] Defenders of Thomson's argument reply that the alleged disanalogies between the violinist scenario and typical cases of abortion do not matter, 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. Thomson's defenders also point to her people-seeds argument as a strong analogy to typical cases of abortion.^[21]