She suggests that a parent becomes morally obligated to the fetus when they decide to not have an abortion and do not try to prevent a pregnancy and therefore allow the baby to be born without efforts of adoption. When they take the baby home, they assume responsibility for the child and cannot withdraw support from the child. She believes that just because of biological relationships, there is no special obligation to it. They can choose to assume responsibility or they can choose to not take responsibility. Until they accept responsibility, it is morally permissible to have an abortion.…
The newly fertilized ovum is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. Suppose we assume, just for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person with the right to life from the moment of conception. It does not follow; she argues that abortion is never justified. She appeals to a series of imaginary cases, such as being kidnapped and plugged into a famous violinist, being trapped in a tiny house with a growing child, and having people seeds growing in your carpet. Reflection on these cases shows that the right to life is only the right not to be killed unjustly; it does not entail the right to use your body or to live in your house.…
Thomson tells us these arguments are called “slippery…
In this argument, the limitation placed on the right to life is taking resources from others. One example would be needing an organ transplant. Needing an organ to survive does not entitle you to take it from someone else, and it does not entitle you to certain other resources, like the best hospital or the soonest transplant time. Thomson follows this argument to its logical conclusion. If a fetus has a right to life, but the right to life has limitations on what resources you can take from other people, then the fetus has no right to the body of the woman carrying it.…
Don Marquis argues in his article An Argument that Abortion is Wrong that abortion, except in specific rare instances is seriously wrong. He bases this claim off of the principle that killing any innocent human being is wrong. While the central point of most pro-choice individuals is that women should have the right to control their body, Marquis argues that the right of the unborn fetus outweighs the right for a woman to control her body. Before supporting his thesis Marquis lays out one of the main problems in the abortion debate. People in favor of abortion often have a very narrow view on what constitutes a person and this is problematic because it leaves out infants, severely retarded and mentally ill individuals.…
Regardless, a person’s right to life is stronger than the mother’s right to her body Therefore, the fetus may not be killed and the abortion may not be performed The premise that Thomson rejects is premise 3 (Therefore, the fetus has a right to life.) It can also be said that Thomson rejects premise 3 by questioning what “right to life” in premise 1 (Every person has a right to life.)…
Abortion is the planned termination of a human pregnancy. Several philosophers and activists have argued over if it is permissible. The author of A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson, is correct about her argument that abortion is permissible even if the fetus is a person. This is because a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, which, combined with the woman’s own right to life, takes precedent over a fetus’s right to life. Even if people claim that she gave the fetus permission to be there, she should not be forced into going against her right to bodily autonomy.…
The premise that I consider to be especially well-supported is the fetus is a complete person in an immature phase of development. It gives many examples of Pro-Choice defender arguments and why they are invalid. I do not consider any premise in this chapter to be inadequately supported. All the premises were well defined and posed both stances of the argument. The important information that I would like to have seen included in this article is the first hand accounts of both women who have had an abortion and those who didn’t and their opinion or reasoning on the matter.…
She suggests that because a pregnancy is such a great sacrifice, that, while women should carry a child to term after becoming pregnant, we cannot require them to do so. This argument also requires that the fetus’ right to life is subject to the mother’s whim and does not carry as much weight as the first two arguments. Thomson concludes the article by saying that she is not attempting to delineate the circumstances in which a pregnancy might be morally permissible and those in which it isn’t, but rather to make it clear that even if we consider a fetus to be a person, that abortion can still be morally permissible. This weakens her argument a great deal, instead of providing a proscriptive criterion to base the morality of abortion on, she simply provides what may be a series of fringe cases to establish that while abortion is normally wrong, it isn’t always so. Thomson’s argument on abortion is fundamentally deontological.…
Disregarding the mother’s perspective can be compared to getting an arm amputated and declaring the action is immoral from the arms point of view. Abortion differs in each case and no situation is the same, to equate a case to another is immoral and unfair to the parties involved. Marquis writes “Since we do believe that it is wrong to kill defenseless little babies, it is important that a theory of the wrongness of killing easily account for this” although he is using emotional blackmail, it does not stray me from pointing out that embryos are not babies and due to the account of miscarriages and health issues it is not determined they will have a future. Pregnancy is a dangerous time for the mother and fetus and most miscarriages happen between 7 and 12 weeks. Killing is the worst of crimes except in the cases of self-defense.…
Thomson and Hursthouse both have come to the conclusion that abortion is impermissible but there are acceptable situations in which abortion should be permitted. In my opinion I agree with both Thomson and Hursthouse but in the end the conclusion of Hursthouse is the view I could see making both sides of abortion acceptable. When a woman and man conceive a baby knowingly, getting an abortion will only occur in the event of a health risk or the chances of the baby living after birth will be so minimum. By choosing abortion before letting the child get to full term is less painful than carrying the baby to full term and giving themselves false hope. It is understandable that some may want to fight for that chance but there is the option of abortion.…
She gives us the example of a famous violinist that has kidney failure and is hooked up to our body for nine months in order to survive. She continues to say that we did not volunteer to hook up our body. This was an interesting point to include as it relates to unplanned pregnancies and rape cases. This article focuses on the moral aspect of abortion. One of the big questions that Thomson argued was “who is more entitled to the right to life?”…
This analogy is challenging the more extreme view held by those in opposition to abortion. This view finds abortion “impermissible even to save the mother’s life.” Imagine a woman has become pregnant and in the same day learns of a newly developed heart disease that will kill her if she carries her baby to term. The baby has a right to life, but so does the woman. Thomson brings up the argument most familiar.…
Ayllin Ruvalcaba Mr. Brown English 3 / Period 2 October 02, 2015 God’s True Glory There are requirements within God’s glory and tasks for the gates of heaven. If one isn’t able to make their own path and impress the master behind creation then you shall let God guide into which ever path he wishes for you. In the poem “Huswifery”, by Edward Taylor; the speaker, is talking about the household task of cloth making and making a connation as if it’s God’s salvation.…
There are so many circumstantial situations, which should be acknowledged while making the choice whether one should proceed with terminating a pregnancy. Although it’s easy to make an opinion on how morally and ethically disgusting it is to murder just a child, there will never be proof that the fetus instead a woman’s body is a living being. Instead of judging these women for their choices, one should put themselves in their shoes and see just how much of an impact the choice of abortion or no abortion can make. All women deserve a second chance. It should be permitted to allow women to decide for themselves based on the impacts on themselves, their family and their unborn child, whether or not an abortion would be the best…