Abortion Essays (1768 words) - Fertility, Abortion,

Abortion "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 have 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 is now plugged into you. To unplug him 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?" (Judith Thompson) Judith Thompson goes on to argue that the fetus, like the violinist, has no right to use your body unless you give it to him. Therefore, abortion, in the case of rape at least, is permissible. Let us grant that one may indeed unplug oneself from the violinist. May one take a gun and shoot him in the head? May one cut him into pieces? May one poison him if by doing so he will disconnect in the process? Of course not, that would be immoral. Possibly, you will ask why, because he will die in both cases. Yes, you are the cause of his death in either case. However, in spite of these similarities there is a difference. The man is sick. If you unplug yourself from him, he will die from his sickness. For if, he was not sick, he would not die from being disconnected. Nevertheless, if you shoot him, then he dies of the bullet you have put in his brain, and not of his sickness. For even if he were well, he would still die of the damage done by the bullet. Moreover, you are not responsible for this man's sickness from his bad kidneys. If you were, you would have to let him use yours. However, you are, of course, responsible for the bullet in his brain, for the damage you caused to his body. Thus, supposing that the violinist does not have a right to be hooked up to you, still the case is that you may do whatever you want to him. Judith Thompson, stated, "The man has a right to his life," She focuses her attention on whether he has a right to what it would take to sustain his life. However, what she fails to notice, is that even if he does not have a right, this does not imply that whatever one does to him is morally permissible. In the same way-that the fetus does not have a right to use the woman's body unless she gives it to him-does not imply that whatever one does to the fetus is morally permissible. Rather, just as one may not stab the violinist in the throat or shoot him in the head, causing such severe damage to his body that death occurs, furthermore, one may not cut the fetus into pieces or poison him to death. Thus, all Judith Thompson can hope to infer from the violinist example is that one may "disconnect" oneself from the fetus providing one does not fatally damage his body in the process. This means that of the six methods of abortion only those cases of prostaglandin chemical abortion (where the woman's uterus is stimulated to contract and expel the fetus whole) in which the fetus is born alive and is not decapitated or fatally damaged by the violence of the contractions, and those cases of cesarean section abortion where the fetus dies of neglect rather than by the knife, that only these cases are possibly morally permissible types of abortion. Only those cases where the fetus is not fatally damaged by the procedure might be permissible (on Judith Thompson's showing), for only such procedures might be cases of "disconnecting" oneself from a person. The other methods of abortion, dilation and curettage, dilation and evacuation, suction or vacuum aspiration, and salt poisoning, cause the death of the fetus by dismembering him or by poisoning him, and therefore are parallel to cutting the