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Is abortion morally permissible? While most arguments for and against abortion focus on the moral status (personhood) of the unborn, Judith Jarvis Thompson argued that abortion may be morally permissible, even if the unborn are persons with a right to life. She uses several analogies to argue this point, the most famous of which is the violinist analogy. However, the violinist analogy does not in any way prove that abortion is morally permissible, and Thompson fails to adequately take into account important issues like personal and parental responsibility. Her arguments misrepresent the reality of abortion and depend on disputed and faulty assumptions.Personhood and the right to lifeThompson questions whether the pro-life arguments for personhood are good ones and whether they imply that abortion is morally permissible.She says,“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 Thompson has not fairly criticized the pro-life argument for personhood, because she isolates this argument from the context of the other arguments which strengthen and establish our conclusion. We believe it is one’s intrinsically valuable human nature that makes one a person, not some accidental property. This fundamental essence never changes so long as a human exists, so a human is a person from the beginning of that human’s existence, which is at conception. We point out the arbitrariness of claiming personhood begins when a human begins to function in a certain way or acquire certain characteristics, or reaches a certain level of development, in order to show that they have the wrong view of personhood—one which is arbitrary—and to show that there is no morally relevant difference between the born and the unborn that would justify killing them then, but not now. Hence if it is prima facie wrong to kill them now, it is prima facie wrong to kill them in the womb.Thompson asks “How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there [the unborn are persons] to the conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible?” You don’t have to be a philosopher like Thompson to understand how to get to that conclusion. It’s morally impermissible to intentionally kill an innocent person. Abortion intentionally kills an innocent person, so abortion is morally impermissible. How could Thompson not see this?A clump of cells?“A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree.”But “it is a misnomer to refer to this entity as a “fertilized ovum.”, as As F. Beckwith points out. “For both ovum and sperm, which are genetically parts of their owners (mother and father, respectively), cease to exist at least at the moment of conception and perhaps earlier in the fertilization process. For that reason, it may not even be correct to refer to the sperm and egg as “uniting,” for, as philosopher Robert Joyce points out, “that suggests that they remain and form a larger whole.” But that is not accurate, for they are not like machine parts cobbled together to form something larger though remaining identifiable parts. Rather, “the nuclei of the sperm and ovum dynamically interact,” and “in so doing, they both cease to be. One might say they die together.”--(Defending Life, p.66)“a newly implanted clump of cells”An embryo is not “a clump of cells,” but rather a distinct, whole, and self-developing human organism, with each of its parts functioning for the good of the whole. As embryologists Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Müller state, “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed...The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.” (Human Embryology & Teratology.)Embryos are “living creatures with all the properties that define any organism as distinct from a group of cells; embryos are capable of growing, maturing, maintaining a physiologic balance between various organ systems, adapting to changing circumstances, and repairing injury. Mere groups of human cells do nothing like this under any circumstances.” (Maureen Condic, “Life: Defining the Beginning by the End.”)“is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree.”But this argument presupposes, rather than proves, that the unborn are not persons, so those who use this analogy are begging the question. There is no biological justification for any of Thompson’s descriptions.The violinist analogyBut here is the most important section.“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.”*(Mathew Lu make the interesting point that Thompson has confused the “right to decide what shall happen in and to her body” with bodily self-ownership. He argues that the latter is false and that there is no inconsistency in holding to the former, and at the same time not holding to the moral permissibility of abortion. See “Diffusing the Violinist Analogy”)[1]“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 is now 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? …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.”Thompson’s “analogy” is strongly disanalogous to both pregnancy and abortion, and ignores important issues. I propose a counter analogy to help bring that out.Suppose you decide to kidnap a famous violinist, give him a drug that gives him a potentially fatal kidney ailment, and hook him up to yourself. In doing so, you put him into a coma. Unless you continue to support him for some definite period of time (no longer than 9 months, but perhaps shorter), he will die. But it's even worse than that. You cannot simply "withdraw support" or "unplug" him. The only alternative is to crush him and cut him in pieces or throw him in a chemical solution that will burn and kill him. Since you were responsible for him being in that state in the first place, wouldn't you bear the personal responsibility to keep him alive? and would not the alternative be immoral? Or would you object "My bodily autonomy trumps his right to life, so kill him! Besides, my giving him that drug (even though I knew what it usually causes) wasn't my decision to put him in a coma!"? Would that not be outrageous? Further, what if this violinist is your own biological son? This shows then that there is something quite wrong with her claim. The right to life coupled with personal responsibility and especially family responsibility trumps bodily autonomy.This is more comparable to the actual situation than Thompson’s analogy.There are a number of problems with Thompson’s analogy1. It uses the term “kill” in an overly-broad way. Simply not choosing to continue to support him would be “killing” him. I do not mean that the term cannot be used in that way, but that’s not what we usually mean when we say one person “killed” another, and it’s not the way we use it in the context of abortion.2. You aren’t violating his bodily integrity. You might cut the cords between you or unplug yourself, but you wouldn’t be violating his body. To separate yourself from him wouldn’t involve, for example, poisoning him or dismembering him up. In abortion, however, the bodily integrity of the unborn person is violated.3. It does not actually grant the pro-life view of personhood. Francis Beckwith explains. “What Thomson is granting is not the pro-life view of personhood, but a view of personhood consistent with the pro-life position only insofar as it is aligned with her own liberal and minimalist understanding of autonomy and choice. The success of her case, and the case of those who offer support for her argument, depends on assuming a view of the person that isolates the individual from other persons except as those relationships arise from the individual’s explicit choice. It is, in the words of Michael Sandel, the “image of the self as free and independent, unencumbered by aims and attachments it did not choose for itself.” But if this is Thomson’s understanding of personhood, as it seems to be, then it is that understanding she is stipulating when she grants to the abortion opponent, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person. But that is not the pro-life view of personhood. The pro-life view is that human beings are persons-in-community and have certain natural obligations as members of their community that arise from their roles as mother, father, citizen, child, and so on. Therefore, the success of Thomson’s case and those of her allies depends on begging questions of philosophical anthropology that are derived from an understanding of personhood that is necessary to arrive at the conclusion that abortion is a fundamental right even if the fetus is that sort of person.”-- (ibid, p.175-6) (See also “Does Judith Jarvis Thomson Really Grant the Pro-Life View of Fetal Personhood in Her Defense of Abortion?)[2]4. It assumes that a mother has no more duty to her child than to a stranger, a very cold view of parenthood. This goes along with the previous point. This is a point of contention, yet Thompson simply takes this point for granted.5. You weren’t responsible for getting him in that situation in the first place. In the average pregnancy, it is your actions that naturally lead to pregnancy, and with your knowledge.6. It presents an unrealistic and exaggerated view of pregnancy. Most women aren’t bedridden for 9 months. They can still walk and talk, and visit places, and do all kinds of things that Thompson’s analogy wouldn’t allow for. It makes pregnancy out to be worse than a prison sentence.7. It assumes (along with a lot of other pro-abortion arguments) that pregnancy is a prima facie bad, rather than a natural, and prima facie good. Abortion defender David Boonin makes his own analogies, almost always involving some kind of disease or pathology, which seems to be a reflection of the attitude many pro-choicers tend to have toward pregnancy.8. In the case of the violinist, he is sick and dying, but this is not analogous to most pregnancies in which the unborn child is living, healthy, and likely to flourish.9. It seems inconsistent to hold you could unplug him but he couldn’t unplug you if his doing so would cost you your life. For example, if he woke up from consciousness, and discovered there is now a machine that can save his life, so he decides to get himself plugged into that instead. He could argue that he wasn’t responsible for your neediness, and so he could go ahead and pull the plug on your life. After all, his right to control his body is unlimited and absolute. It might be a “kindness” to let you live, but he’d rather exercise his bodily autonomy rights. Which shows “withdrawing support” isn’t always justified, even in the name of bodily autonomy.10. We may have a moral responsibility to save other's lives even though it may cost us something. There are at least some cases in which this is so, though not in all. The Good Samaritan parable seems to illustrate this (though she did not intend it to).11. Since it happened without your consent, it applies at most to pregnancies resulting from rape. But abortions due to cases of rape account for less than 1% of abortions. That leaves 99% of abortions without a defense, if it defends anything.12. We cannot conclude from the violinist analogy that abortion is morally permissible. It is in no way analogous. Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being, not simply “unplugging” or “withholding support.” You wouldn’t be directly, and intentionally killing the violinist. In abortion, the unborn human being is dismembered, or crushed, cut up, or chemically burned, etc. Not even criminals are executed in this way! This constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” for the innocent! It is a false analogy to compare abortion to “unplugging” or “withdrawing support.” The unborn child is actively,deliberately killed.13. His death would be foreseen, but not intended, or actively brought about. Christopher Kaczor observes: “So when you “unplug” yourself from the violinist it is rather akin to a medical team not taking extraordinary measures to save someone’s life. The team certainly may use such measures, they may go above and beyond the call of duty to try to save human life, but there is no obligation to do so. Likewise, you certainly could have saved the violinist but, since you didn’t go the extra mile, he will die from his own illness. Put another way, the analogy suggests that the death of the violinist is a foreseen but not intended result of your action, and often we can justify causing death to others in such cases. But it is hard to imagine that the forms of abortion most frequently used (suction curettage, dilation and evacuation, dilation and extraction or partial- birth abortion, and induction) do not constitute intentional killing.”(The Ethics of Abortion, p 163.)14. It assumes that a mother does not have a special responsibility toward her children simply in virtue of the fact that she is the mother, and the child is her child. There seems to be a deep moral connection between a mother and her child, an intuition which cannot lightly be dismissed by a remark such as “surely we do not.”15. It takes for granted—like other bodily autonomy arguments—the unproven assumption that the unborn child has no right to his/her mother’s body. But given that the womb’s only purpose is for the unborn child, and that pregnancy (and parenthood) is natural, the burden of proof lies on them to prove this fundamental assumption. After all, Pro-lifers do believe the unborn child has a right to be in his/her mother’s body, so we find her analogy unconvincing and irrelevant.Life of motherAfter giving this analogy, Thompson goes on to argue against the view that killing is impermissible under any circumstances, and one cannot even intervene to save the mother’s life (perhaps because of her misunderstanding of how the personhood argument makes abortion wrong.) But I and most pro-lifers already concede the permissibility of that to save the mother's life. As Beckwith explains:“when I say that killing a member of the human community is prima facie morally wrong I mean to say that in ordinary circumstances no one is morally justified in killing another human being. However, this does not mean that it is always wrong in every circumstance to kill someone who is fully human. There could be circumstances in which killing is justified, such as in cases of self-defense or just war. In the case of abortion, the killing of an unborn entity is justified if her presence in her mother’s womb poses a significant threat to her mother’s life. For if the unborn entity is not surgically removed (which will undoubtedly result in her death if performed early on in the pregnancy), then both mother and child will die. The specific intention is not to kill the unborn entity but to save the life of the mother. The child’s death is an unfortunate, though anticipated, consequence that cannot be avoided unless one is willing to let both mother and child die. Such a decision is the result of applying pro-life principles: it is prima facie a higher good that one human being should live rather than two die if one cannot save both.” (ibid, xiii)What does the right to life imply?Thompson says: “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.”She objects to this view. “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 frolic [sic]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 [sic] the use of your kidneys...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.”It may be responded to this, in the first place, that even if Thompson is correct (that the right to life doesn’t necessarily preclude refraining from unplugging), consent, personal responsibility, and special duties are enough to guarantee that his life continues to be sustained. But even if that weren’t the case, then in the second place, it should be added, abortion is still not morally permissible. She is making a false analogy. Even if we don’t consider it unjust to unplug oneself from this unfortunate man because of the great inconvenience it would cause us, it does not justify intentionally killing him. In abortion, the fetal human is actively and directly killed, not “unplugged.”Objections to responsibilityShe questions that there are any cases in which a child has been given the right to use her mother’s body, but then looks at the possibility 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? 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? If so, then her aborting it would be more like the boys taking away the chocolates [another analogy of hers], 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.”Here Thompson seems to concede our argument from responsibility, which is a big concession, and Thompson realized this. So she went on to give further arguments, attempting to ward off this objection.But she objects that the responsibility argument doesn't include children due to rape. Hence, unless some further argument is available, aborting those babies is not unjust killing. But Thompson seems so wrapped up in her analogy that she seems to have forgotten basic moral principles, such as that it is prima facie wrong to kill. This means that even in the absence of other arguments against killing those babies, it would still be unjust killing. I remind you also of my argument that it is wrong to intentionally kill innocent persons. The fact that they are persons with a right to life (as in this argument she claims to concede), intrinsically valuable, and members of a family (even if they were originally unwanted), is enough to guarantee that they not be killed. Personal responsibility isn’t the only reason why it is wrong to kill.Thompson gives two other arguments against responsibility these two not related to rape).the burglar analogy“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.”This is another one of Thompson’s bad analogies.In the case of the burglar, the burglar is the cause of his being in the house, not you. You only removed an obstacle to his entering. But opening windows is not to burglary what consensual intercourse is to pregnancy. Pregnancy is almost exclusively the causal and natural result of intercourse. The burglar is not an innocent person, and he is accountable for his actions. The baby in the womb is not morally responsible and can’t be held accountable for anything. You are responsible for the child’s existence, but not for the burglar’s. The burglar does not belong in your house, but the unborn child only belongs in its mother’s womb. The baby is not an evil criminal, and an intruder, (though it is fashionable among some abortion defenders to portray things in that way.)What if it is only an innocent person who enters your house?Under normal circumstances, it would be justified to expel even an innocent person from your house, but there are exceptions. Suppose you live in the wilderness, and someone stumbles into your house in the middle of a raging blizzard. Of course, he may not have a right to your house, but it would be unjust to send him out if there was no place he could go. Expelling him would likely result in his death, and though you were not responsible for his neediness, nor for his entering the house, nor even for his existence, it would be wrong to expel him, for that would be killing him, even if indirectly.But suppose it is just a lazy man who enters your house. He has no need to be there. Sending him away would not be harming him. He has no right to be there and you have no responsibility for him. Of course, he does not have to stay. But does that make it okay for you to intentionally kill him? Certainly not.Even pro-choicer Mary Anne Warren admits:“Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death.--On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.”the people-seeds analogyThompson gives another argument as an objection against responsibility.“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 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.”This is a dehumanizing analogy. One might just as well argue “If a swarm of bugs invades your home you have the right to kill them, so too if a crowd of people enter your house you have the right to murder them.” Plants are not intrinsically valuable and do not have the right to life. We cannot gain moral insights by comparing humans to non-humans, for then the dynamic completely changes. This is the common rhetoric employed by human rights violators, such as when a slave-owner talks about his “property” and what he may do with it, or a Nazi talks about killing the “pigs.” Such analogies ought to be avoided as they result in moral confusion.Even putting that aside, she misrepresents the real state of affairs. For she represents pregnancy as something beyond parents’ control. She speaks as though they do not cause the child’s existence; it happens despite every attempt to guard against it (except abstinence—the sure way of avoiding pregnancy), and as though it is like people who enter your house despite making every effort to keep them out (and for whom you probably bear no responsibility for taking care of.)Her analogy is an attempt to argue that there is no personal responsibility for pregnancies one tries to avoid. But still, that does not permit one to intentionally kill, as I have argued above. We may also object that mothers have a special duty to care for their children even if they were originally unwanted.She is mistaken that one does not bear responsibility for pregnancy. Contraception does not always work, and by consenting to the “risk” or pregnancy, no matter how small, they are still taking responsibility for it.A gambler may not intend to lose a game and may do everything to guard against that. But he still risks losing the game, and if he does, he cannot just say that he did his best to avoid that and then kill the other person so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his debt.Possible exceptions to the permissibility of unpluggingIf the violinist only needed to use your kidneys for one hour, it would be indecent to refuse, says she. Same with pregnancy, even those resulting from rape. Still, she says, they would have no right to it.One may ask then, how hard does the burden of pregnancy have to be before we may kill the unborn? Is it a matter of personal taste? What if pregnancy lasts 10 hours? Or 30 weeks? Does inconvenience alone justify killing? If so, can we apply the same reasoning to infants?Thompson believes abortion may be justified because it is not unjust to withdraw support from someone who has no right to it. But pro-lifers do believe the child has a right to use the mother’s body in virtue of the mother-child relationship. So she builds her case on a disputed premise, so she is begging an important question.The Good Samaritan and the Minimally Decent SamaritanShe appeals to the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), and argues that we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans (e.g. have to save someone else’s life, even if it may cost us something), but only “Minimally Decent Samaritans” (e.g. calling the police when someone is being murdered, or saving the violinist if it doesn't cost us anything.).She argues that going through with pregnancy is being a Good Samaritan, and since one doesn't have to be a Good Samaritan, one may end a pregnancy if one chooses.However, her appeal to this parable undercuts her own case, since Jesus said “Go, and do thou likewise.” That seems to indicate that we are morally required to be Good Samaritans. In response to this interpretation, she points out that the law doesn’t require us to be Good Samaritans, but Jesus’s point is a moral, not a legal one. So the parable of the Good Samaritan was a poorly chosen illustration to make her point.Thompson asserts “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.”Really? Does it follow that if we require that one not intentionally kill an innocent human life, then it is bad faith if we don’t also require people to save other people’s lives?Another way of looking at her Samaritan argument is to say that one is not obligated to be a hero, and since pregnancy is a heroic act, one is not obligated to continue a pregnancy. However, even if pregnancy is considered a heroic act, this would not be a choice between doing that which is permissible, and that which is heroic, and that which is morally wrong, but a choice between that which is heroic, and that which is morally wrong. And in that case, it may be said that we are morally obligated to be Good Samaritans.Another objection to responsibility“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”She is correct in this assertion but offers one last objection to this premise.“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, 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 wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to.”Thompson presents the premise“Surely we do not have any such "special responsibility" for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly.” as though it were a self-evident truth. But it is not self-evident, nor as I think, is it true.For example,“Suppose someone were to fail to care properly for his or her elderly mother, and when confronted were to say: “Of course, I have neglected my mother. But I never explicitly or implicitly took responsibility for her, so I owe her nothing more than I owe a stranger.” This excuse would compound the wrongdoing rather than excuse it. Obviously, the responsibilities of adult children to parents vary according to the situation. It could in fact be a responsible act, in some circumstances, to ignore a parent, even for long stretches of time. However, it would not be true, even in this case, that our responsibility for them is just the same as our responsibility to a stranger unless we voluntarily assume it. Similar remarks could be made about the special responsibilities siblings have towards one another. We don’t choose our brother or sister, but nevertheless we have special responsibilities for our siblings that we do not have for strangers, and these duties plainly do not arise simply from our implicit or explicit assumption of such duties. Partly for this reason, patricide, matricide, and fratricide are viewed as especially vicious because love is due particularly to parents and siblings precisely on account of this family relationship, one that is not created by our choosing (though in the case of adoption and voluntary procreation it is created by another person’s choosing).” --(The Ethics of Abortion, p.173)Nevertheless, parents have (implicitly, if not explicitly) assumed responsibility for their child when they conceived it, not at birth. To say the latter would be to assume that the unborn are not human beings, but that is false.At this point, it may be appropriate to ask whether, not just parents, but adults generally, have special duties to children. Thompson assumes they do not, but there is reason to think that they do, at least in some circumstances.For example, suppose you are in a cabin in the middle of a mountain wilderness. In the middle of a blizzard, a woman arrives carrying a newborn baby, but the woman shortly after dies. Wouldn’t you have an obligation to take care of it, at least until someone else can? Or can you throw it out into the snow? Assuming you are aren’t a moral monster, the answer is clear. Since non-parents can be morally obligated to take care of vulnerable defenceless children, how much more, then, do parents have a special obligation to their children?Also, if mothers do not have any responsibility for their children in virtue of their biological relationship, then much more do fathers not. Yet, as I understand, pro-choicers do support laws requiring men to pay child support. This would be undermined by their own arguments, though, especially if contraception was used. They also support, I think, child neglect laws, but some arguments for abortion make it perfectly acceptable to neglect caring for one’s child, and even to kill it.No right to abortionThompson says her “argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard abortion as morally permissible.”First, because she does “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” In some cases “It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it.”Second, while she is “arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child...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.” Yet that’s what abortion essentially requires you to do. “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. You have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him.” This is in contrast to some contemporary abortion supporters, who think the violinist analogy proves more than it even attempts to prove.Thompson’s analogies fail to justify the moral permissibility of abortion. She uses a number of faulty analogies, and her arguments are based on a faulty view of personhood that is not the pro-life position. Thompson does not grasp the full implications and reality of personhood, personal responsibility, and family relationships, nor does her analogy apply to abortion. Consequently, her analogies are irrelevant and do not represent abortion for what it is.Protecting the Defenceless - The Lifeguard InitiativeFootnotes[1] Defusing Thomson's Violinist Analogy[2] http://www.baylorisr.org/wp-content/uploads/Does_Thomson.pdf