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Abortion has been a vastly debated topic. There are many things to
consider and two sides to choose from. Does a woman have the right to
abortion? The stage at which a fetus becomes a person would justify
when abortion is morally accepted. But where do we draw the line? What
factors come into play to determine such a time?
Judith Jarvis Thomson, the author of the article “A Defense of
Abortion,” argues that even though a fetus is a person from the moment
of conception a woman still has the right to abortion (1.Thomson,
CC2005, p 0046). She gives a hypothetical situation in order to help
rethink the morality of abortion. She uses this hypothetical situation
to conclude that aborting a fetus is not murder and it does not follow
that it should be in any way be considered murder. Where to draw the
line is also a highly debated topic and she states the most people
would draw the line at the moment of conception but this conclusion
does not follow. She continues on about how the same thing could be
said about an acorn turning into an oak tree and that the two things
are nothing alike just as an embryo is not a person (2.Thomson, CC2005,
p 0046).
Suppose a normal person was suddenly kidnapped one day and put in a
hospital bed where she has been linked to a stranger. She is the only
person with right blood type to help. The stranger is a famous
violinist who is having kidney failure and needs the kidneys of this
innocent woman. If she chooses to save the life of this violinist she
must stay in the hospital next to him for nine months. (3.Thomson,
CC2005, p 0048) Thomson relates this situation to the case of rape. The
innocent woman would be the victim of rape and the violinist is the
fetus from the result of rape. This puts the woman in the situation of
deciding whether or not she should stay in bed for nine months to save
this violinist. Pro-life argues that she should stay in bed and save
this man’s life because she can and it would murder is she unplugged
herself from him. Thomson argues the point of obligation. Even though
all persons have a right to life, and to decide what happens or does
not happen to his/her body. She is not obligated to save his life
because it was not her fault that he has kidney failure so if she were
to reject the procedure she shouldn’t be blamed for murder. Similar to
abortion even though the fetus was a person with a right to life, it
wasn’t the woman’s fault or choice for the fetus’s conception. She has
every right to life and control of her own body and feels no connection
to this person, stranger, growing inside her and is not obligated to
save his life. Also the violinist has no right to use her body to save
his simply because she has control over her own body and he can’t force
her to save him.
However pro-life might argue that hypothetical situations does not
follow simply because they are completely different cases. The stranger
has no connection whatsoever to the woman while a fetus is part of the
woman, growing inside her, sharing half of her genetic code (4.Noonan,
CC2005, p 0182). But Thomson would argue that in the case of rape the
woman would not feel any connection to the fetus simply because it was
a traumatic experience and a third party has no right to have an
opposition to the abortion. The fetus does not have any right to use
the woman’s body to stay alive and if she had an abortion she had not
violated anyone’s right to life because she is not mentally involved in
this pregnancy.
Her analogies are not solely revolved around rape. She poses another
situation to help rethink the case in which the mother’s health or life
is in danger because of the fetus. (5.Thomson, CC2005, p 0049) There
are only 2 people involved in this situation, the mother and the fetus.
Both are innocent but in this case the fetus is threatening the life of
the mother but not by any of their faults. Pro-life would argue to not
abort the fetus because it is murder and immoral even though the life
of the mother is in danger. That on its own is murder because it could
be said that the fetus is murdering the mother. So Thomson states that
third parties, believers in pro-life, should not intervene and it
should be the choice of the person being threatened, the mother.
However, John Noonan, the author of “How to Argue About Abortion,”
criticizes Thomson’s method and other methods as well. He argues that
using analogies to reason abortion is unreliable. He states that the
correct way to deal with the case of abortion is through perception or
sense experience, and that actually experiencing the situation in
person is the only way to know what is at stake and what to consider.
Through perception all the answers will be clear because it allows
people to use their own moral judgment to decide whether abortion is
right or wrong.
He criticizes Thomson’s method in that the victim has no bond to the
violinist at all because they are unrelated they are strangers to each
other. It is disgusting to relate a kidnapping and choice of
convenience to pregnancy. He interprets her violinist situation as
being human does not mean having to respect another person’s right to
life in the case where it becomes inconvenient. He is appalled that
this hypothetical situation could be accepted as an example of how a
mother would make a choice. To show a real life situation that he
thinks is closer to the situation of a pregnant mother than that of
Thomson’s he includes in his article a court case. In Nebraska a cattle
buyer, Orlando Depue, was invited to dine with a family of farmers, the
Flateaus. After dinner he became weak and sick and asked the Flateaus
if he could spend the night. The family refused and left him in the
cold after he had fainted from sickness. Depue then sued the family
after he had lost some fingers to frost bite. The judge stated that the
family was not bound by any legal contract to let Depue stay overnight,
however humanity imposed that they do so because of his condition
(6.Noonan, CC2005, p 0182). By presenting this court case he suggests
that what the judge determined was what humanity is required to do in a
real life situation because he used his own human perception and moral
judgment to decide on the case.
He states that this case is much more similar to abortion than the
violinist analogy because Depue was a poor defenseless sick man who
needed the Flateau’s home and kindness for shelter and survival. As a
fetus is poor and defenseless needing a mother’s womb for protection
and survival. The Flateau’s throwing Depue out into the cold where he
was frost bitten and lost his fingers is similar to a mother aborting
her pregnancy leaving the fetus defenseless and out in the cold. A
mother that would do that to her fetus is unacceptable and inhumane
because she is obligated to keep this fetus alive and well inside her
womb because she can and is required to do so (7.Noonan, CC2005, p
0182). But what if keeping the fetus in her womb would threaten the
life of the mother? How can perception or sense experience solve this
problem when the values at stake are both the lives of the mother and
the fetus?
Noonan would look at the situation and determine what is at stake
such as the mother’s choice and how the fetus was conceived and how far
along the fetus is. Does the mother want to go through with the
pregnancy risking her own life? Of course pro-life mothers would choose
to go through with the pregnancy despite their death. They would think
of it as giving life since the fetus is the base of life they would be
prepared to die. Then that would solve the problem of who to save and
who knows there might be a chance that the mother will survive and
there wouldn’t have to be a loss of either lives. That is how he would
validate his belief. He feels it is a mistake to abort a fetus in any
situation be it rape or a physical deformity. It is all emotion that is
stopping this fetus from living life. It may be hard to go through
having a child that will forever be a product of rape or is physically
deformed. It is still tougher on the fetus if the fetus were a person
too; aborting would not solve any problem but would solely result in
the death of the fetus (8.Noonan, CC2005, p 0182).
If the mother, whose life is at risk if she went through with the
pregnancy, decides to abort at what point can we draw the line? When is
it ok to abort a fetus? Noonan states that there are too many stages at
which people adopt it as a line. When they do draw a line at a certain
stage they are asked why draw it there and not earlier or why not a
little later? The fact that there is never one real answer to where the
line is to be drawn is because someone would only draw the line where
they see fit; where the line would be most convenient to them. For
instance Judith Boss, author of Analyzing Moral Issues, would draw the
line at the first trimester because after that the fetus will develop a
brain and later become viable (9.Noonan, CC2005, p 0196). But then
someone could argue that even though there is a brain is the fetus a
person yet? Or a woman who was raped and took 4 months to decide
whether or not she would abort the pregnancy decides she will abort now
could set the line at 4 months. Since she has no connection with the
fetus and it will just remind her of a traumatic experience she would
draw the line the moment she made her decision no matter how far along
the pregnancy is because she feels she has no relation to the fetus. To
her it is still medically possible and she doesn’t think that a fetus
has reached personhood yet. Therefore the concept of where to draw the
line just distracts a mother from naturally making the moral decision
by her own perception (10.Noonan, CC2005, p 0185).
Jonathan Glover, author of Matters of Life and Death, criticizes
both Thomson’s and Noonan’s methods of reasoning abortion by saying
that both are too one dimensional. He believes that the reasoning a
pregnant woman should use for abortion would be her own free-will and
self-determination. She has every right to do what she wants with her
body.
Glover agrees with Noonan that we should draw the line at the moment
of conception because the other stages are so subtle it is hard to tell
when the fetus is actually a person. For those who draw the line at
viability, that isn’t a stable boundary because it changes with the
progress of technology. He states that two fetuses of the same stage of
development at two different hospitals might have different outcomes
depending on the level of technology provided by the hospital. One
might die because of lack of sufficient technology while the other
would live (11.Glover, CC2005, p 0002).
However he disagrees with Noonan’s method of using perception to
justify personhood. He states that it is wrong to link personhood with
being self-conscious because even newborns are not self-conscious. But
fetuses are accepted as an entity in the human community from the
moment of birth. Babies don’t become self-conscious until they learn to
want and realize a sense of self and that doesn’t happen until a great
while after birth. That is what Glover defines as personhood. To think
that they are lifeless matter before that moment of personhood is
irreconcilable because that would mean a newborn could be killed and
that would justify infanticide (12.Glover, CC2005, p 0003).
Noonan would counter Glover saying that he has drawn the line at the
beginning and that from the beginning the fetus is a person, a life. It
is true the self-realization defines a person but that doesn’t mean
that we can disregard the fact that the embryo is the foundation of
this self and without it we would never reach that point. Therefore by
considering the embryo a person at the point of conception is perceived
by human judgment.
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