Jarvis Thomson

A Defense of Abortion
Author(s): Judith Jarvis Thomson

Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 47-66
Published by: Wiley
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JUDITH JARVISTHOMSON A Defense of Abortion'
Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a

human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise
is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most
common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of
a human being from conception through birth into childhood is con-
tinuous; 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 con-
cluded that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it is, a per-
son from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not fol-
low. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn
into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or
that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes
called "slippery slope arguments"-the phrase is perhaps self-explana-
tory-and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so
heavily and uncritically.
I am inclined to agree, however, that the prospects for "drawing a
line" in the development of the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think
also that we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already
become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it comes as a sur-
prise when one first learns how early in its life it begins to acquire
human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it already has
i. I am very much indebted to James Thomson for discussion, criticism, and
many helpful suggestions.

48 Philosophy & Public Affairs
a face, arms and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and
brain activity is detectable.2 On the other hand, I think that the prem-
ise is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of con-
ception. A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is
no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss
any of this. For it seems to me to be of great interest to ask what
happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise. How, pre-
cisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abor-
tion is morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion commonly
spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and
hardly any time explaining the step from there to the impermissibility
of abortion. Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious to
require much comment. Or perhaps instead they are simply being eco-
nomical in argument. Many of those who defend abortion rely on the
premise that the fetus is not a person, but only a bit of tissue that
will become a person at birth; and why pay out more arguments than
you have to? Whatever the explanation, I suggest that the step they
take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination
than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer
examination we shall feel inclined to reject it.
I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person. from the
moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Some-
thing 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.
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
2. Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (New York, 1970),
p. 373. This book gives a fascinating survey of the available information on
abortion. The Jewish tradition is surveyed in David M. Feldman, Birth Control in
Jewish Law (New York, i968), Part 5, the Catholic tradition in John T. Noonan,
Jr., "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in The Morality of Abortion, ed. John
T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

49 A Defense of Abortion
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 now is 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? No
doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But
do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine
years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says,
"Tough luck, I agree, but you've now got to stay in bed, with the vio-
linist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember
this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted
you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a
person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in
and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him." 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.
In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you didn't volunteer
for the operation that plugged the violinist into your kidneys. Can
those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an excep-
tion for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that per-
sons have a right to life only if they didn't come into existence because
of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but that
some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those
who came into existence because of rape have less. But these state-
ments have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether
you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn't
turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a rape.
And in fact the people who oppose abortion on the ground I men-
tioned do not make this distinction, and hence do not make an excep-
tion in case of rape.

Nor do they make an exception for a case in which the mother has
to spend the nine months of her pregnancy in bed. They would agree
that would be a great pity, and hard on the mother; but all the same,
all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a person, and so on. I sus-
pect, in fact, that they would not make an exception for a case in
which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine years,
or even the rest of the mother's life.
Some won't even make an exception for a case in which continua-
tion of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the mother's life; they regard
abortion as impermissible even to save the mother's life. Such cases
are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do not accept
this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a number
of points of interest come out in respect to it.
i. Let us call the view that abortion is impermissible even to save
the mother's life "the extreme view." I want to suggest first that it does
not issue from the argument I mentioned earlier without the addition
of some fairly powerful premises. Suppose a woman has become preg-
nant, and now learns that she has a cardiac condition such that she
will die if she carries the baby to term. What may be done for her?
The fetus, being a person, has a right to life, but as the mother is a
person too, so has she a right to life. Presumably they have an equal
right to life. How is it supposed to come out that an abortion may
not be performed? If mother and child have an equal right to life,
shouldn't we perhaps flip a coin? Or should we add to the mother's
right to life her right to decide what happens in and to her body,
which everybody seems to be ready to grant-the sum of her rights
now outweighing the fetus' right to life?
The most familiar argument here is the following. We are told that
performing the abortion would be directly killing3 the child, whereas
doing nothing would not be killing the mother, but only letting her
die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be killing an innocent
person, for the child has committed no crime, and is not aiming at
his mother's death. And then there are a variety of ways in which this
3. The term "direct" in the arguments I refer to is a technical one. Roughly,

what is meant by "direct killing" is either killing as an end in itself, or killing
as a means to some end, for example, the end of saving someone else's life. See
note 6, below, for an example of its use.

might be continued. (i) But as directly killing an innocent person is

always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be per-
formed. Or, (2) as directly killing an innocent person is murder, and
murder is always and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not
be performed.4 Or, (3) as one's duty to refrain from directly killing an
innocent person is more stringent than one's duty to keep a person
from dying, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (4) if one's only
options are,directly killing an innocent person or letting a person die,
one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an abortion may not
be performed.5
Some people seem to have thought that these are not further prem-
ises which must be added if the conclusion is to be reached, but that
they follow from the very fact that an innocent person has a right to
life.6 But this seems to me to be a mistake, and perhaps the simplest
way to show this is to bring out that while we must certainly grant
that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (i) through
(4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an inno-
cent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother's
directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is
4. Cf. Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage, St. Paul Edi-
tions (Boston, n.d.), p. 32: "however much we may pity the mother whose health
and even life is gravely imperiled in the performance of the duty allotted to her
by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any
way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing
with here." Noonan (The Morality of Abortion, p. 43) reads this as follows:
"What cause can ever avail to excuse in any way the direct killing of the inno-
cent? For it is a question of that."
5. The thesis in (4) is in an interesting way weaker than those in (i), (2),
and (3): they rule out abortion even in cases in which both mother and child
will die if the abortion is not performed. By contrast, one who held the view
expressed in (4) could consistently say that one needn't prefer letting two per-
sons die to killing one.
6. Cf. the following passage from Pius XII, Address to the Italian Catholic
Society of Midwives: "The baby in the maternal breast has the right to life imme-
diately from God.-Hence there is no man, no human authority, no science, no
medical, eugenic, social, economic or moral 'indication' which can establish or
grant a valid juridical ground for a direct deliberate disposition of an innocent
human life, that is a disposition which looks to its destruction either as an end
or as a means to another end perhaps in itself not illicit.-The baby, still not
born, is a man in the same degree and for the same reason as the mother"
(quoted in Noonan, The Morality of Abortion, p. 45).

impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the

mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot
seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by
and wait for her death. Let us look again at the case of you and the
violinist. There you are, in bed with the violinist, and the director of
the hospital says to you, "It's all most distressing, and I deeply sym-
pathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain on your kid-
neys, and you'll be dead within the month. But you have to stay where
you are all the same. Because unplugging you would be directly kill-
ing an innocent violinist, and that's murder, and that's impermissi-
ble." If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not commit
murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to
your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.
The main focus of attention in writings on abortion has been on
what a third party may or may not do in answer to a request from a
woman for an abortion. This is in a way understandable. Things being
as they are, there isn't much a woman can safely do to abort herself.
So the question asked is what a third party may do, and what the
mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, is deduced, almost as an after-
thought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But it
seems to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant
to the mother that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on
for the fetus. For we cannot simply read off what a person may do
from what a third party may do. Suppose you find yourself trapped
in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a
rapidly growing child-you are already up against the wall of the
house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child on
the other hand won't be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop
him from growing he'll be hurt, but in the end he'll simply burst open
the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it
if a bystander were to say, "There's nothing we can do for you. We
cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the ones to
decide who is to live, we cannot intervene." But it cannot be concluded
that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your
life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to wait pas-
sively while it crushes you to death. Perhaps a pregnant woman is
vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the

right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be

remembered that she is a person who houses it.
1 should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming that
people have a right to do anything whatever to save their lives. I think,
rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self-defense. If
someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else
to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do
so. But the case under consideration here is very different. In our case
there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened, and
one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is
not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not
threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we
bystanders cannot intervene. But the person threatened can.
In sum, a woman surely can defend her life against the threat to
it posed by the unborn child, even if doing so involves its death. And
this shows not merely that the theses in (i) through (4) are false; it
shows also that the extreme view of abortion is false, and so we need
not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at it from the argu-
ment I mentioned at the outset.
2. The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while
abortion is permissible to save the mother's life, it may not be per-
formed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But this can-
not be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is that the
mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house
which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the
mother owns the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensive-
ness of deducing that the mother can do nothing from the supposition
that third parties can do nothing. But it does more than this: it casts
a bright light on the supposition that third parties can do nothing.
Certainly it lets us see that a third party who says "I cannot choose
between you" is fooling himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If
Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat, which he needs to
keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from
freezing, then it is not impartiality that says "I cannot choose between
you" when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and again
"This body is my body!" and they have reason to feel angry, reason to
feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is

hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, "Of course it's your coat,
anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you
and Jones who is to have it."
We should really ask what it is that says "no one may choose" in
the face of the fact that the body that houses the child is the mother's
body. It may be simply a failure to appreciate this fact. But it may be
something more interesting, namely the sense that one has a right to
refuse to lay hands on people, even where it would be just and fair to
do so, even where justice seems to require that somebody do so. Thus
justice might call for somebody to get Smith's coat back from Jones,
and yet you have a right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on Jones,
a right to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be
granted. But then what should be said is not "no one may choose,"
but only "I cannot choose," and indeed not even this, but "I will not
act," leaving it open that somebody else can or should, and in particu-
lar that anyone in a position of authority, with the job of securing
people's rights, both can and should. So this is no difficulty. I have
not been arguing that any given third party must accede to the moth-
er's request that he perform an abortion to save her life, but only that
he may.
I suppose that in some views of human life the mother's body is only
on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her any prior claim
to it. One who held this view might well think it impartiality to say
"I cannot choose." But I shall simply ignore this possibility. My own
view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at
all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this
needn't be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the argu-
ments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman
has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.
But although they do grant it, I have tried to show that they do not
take seriously what is done in granting it. I suggest the same thing
will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from cases in
which the mother's life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we now
do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman wants an
abortion for some less weighty reason than preserving her own life.
3. Where the mother's life is not at stake, the argument I men-
tioned at the outset seems to have a much stronger pull. "Everyone

has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life." And isn't
the child's right to life weightier than anything other than the moth-
er's own right to life, which she might put forward as ground for an
abortion?
This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic.
It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.
For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a
right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a
right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued
life. But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs
for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If
I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the
touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the
same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand
on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from
the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt
well meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast and carried
Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against any-
body that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I
told earlier, the fact that for continued life that violinist needs the
continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right
to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no
right against you that you should give him continued use of your kid-
neys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give
him such a right; and nobody has the right against you that you shall
give him this right-if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys,
this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from
you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they
should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no
right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him
into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself,
having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in
bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent
you, in order to see to it that he is given something he has a right to
be given.
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. 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 from 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 the use of your kidneys. I shall come
back to third-party interventions later. 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.
The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right to life. It
reappears in connection with all the other natural rights; and it is
something which an adequate account of rights must deal with. For
present purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would
stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life-
quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we must
place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn
out in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life.
I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee hav-
ing either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed con-
tinued use of another person's body-even if one needs it for life itself.
So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very
simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would.
4. There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordi-
nary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to is to
treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother are jointly
given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the
box and refuses to give his brother any of the chocolates, he is unjust
to -him, for the brother has been given a right to half of them. But

suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in

bed with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are
not being unjust to him, for you gave him no right to use your kid-
neys, and no one else can have given him any such right. But we have
to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violin-
ists, like everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in the view we
were considering just now, the right not to be killed. So here you do
what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not act
unjustly to him in doing it.
The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right
to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right
not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never
mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violinist has a
right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward him in
unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him
unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder
you do him no injustice.
But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the argument against
abortion stares us plainly in the face: it is by no means enough to
show that the fetus is a person, and to remind us that all persons have
a right to life-we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates
its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?
I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case of pregnancy
due to rape the mother has not given the unborn person a right to the
use of her body for food and shelter. Indeed, in what pregnancy could
it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person such a
right? It is not as if there were unborn persons drifting about the
world, to whom a woman who wants a child says "I invite you in."
But it might be argued 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 preg-
nancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part respon-
sible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person
inside her? 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?7 If so, then her aborting it would be more like the boy's taking
away the chocolates, 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.
And then, too, it might be asked whether or not she can kill it even
to save her own life: If she voluntarily called it into existence, how
can she now kill it, even in self-defense?
The first thing to be said about this is that it is something new.
Opponents of abortion have been so concerned to make out the inde-
pendence of the fetus, in order to establish that it has a right to life,
just as its mother does, that they have tended to overlook the possible
support they might gain from making out that the fetus is dependent
on the mother, in order to establish that she has a special kind of
responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against her
which are not possessed by any independent person-such as an ailing
violinist who is a stranger to her.
On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a
right to its mother's body only if her pregnancy resulted from a volun-
tary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy
might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person
whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some fur-
ther argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn
persons whose existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their
mothers' bodies, and thus that aborting them is not depriving them of
anything they have a right to and hence is not unjust killing.
And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this argu-
ment really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are cases
and cases, and the details make a difference. 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
7. The need for a discussion of this argument was brought home to me by
members of the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy, to whom this paper
was originally presented.

burgle." It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars
installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from get-
ting 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. 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.
It seems to me that the argument we are looking at can establish
at most that there are some cases in which the unborn person has a
right to the use of its mother's body, and therefore some cases in
which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much discussion
and argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we should side-
step this issue and leave it open, for at any rate the argument cer-
tainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.
5. There is room for yet another argument here, however. We
surely must all grant that there may be cases in which it would be
morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of his
life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine years
of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life is to
spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting him
use your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health in the
slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give

6o Philosophy & Public Affairs
anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me

plain you ought to allow him to use your kidneys for that hour-it
would be indecent to refuse.
Again, suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour, and constituted no
threat to life or health. And suppose that a woman becomes pregnant
as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not voluntarily do anything to
bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she did nothing at all
which would give the unborn person a right to the use of her body.
All the same it might well be said, as in the newly emended violinist
story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour-that it would
be indecent in her to refuse.
Now some people are inclined to use the term "right"in such a way
that it follows from the fact that you ought to allow a person to use
your body for the hour he needs, that he has a right to use your body
for the hour he needs, even though he has not been given that right
by any person or act. They may say that it follows also that if you
refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of the term is perhaps
so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to me
to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would do better to keep
a tight rein on. Suppose that box of chocolates I mentioned earlier had
not been given to both boys jointly, but was given only to the older
boy. There he sits, stolidly eating his way through the box, his small
brother watching enviously. Here we are likely to say "Youought not to
be so mean. You ought to give your brother some of those chocolates."
My own view is that it just does not follow from the truth of this that
the brother has any right to any of the chocolates. If the boy refuses
to give his brother any, he is greedy, stingy, callous-but not unjust.
I suppose that the people I have in mind will say it does follow that
the brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and thus that the
boy does act unjustly if he refuses to give his brother any. But the
effect of saying this is to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely
the difference between the boy's refusal in this case and the boy's
refusal in the earlier case, in which the box was given to both boys
jointly, and in which the small brother thus had what was from any
point of view clear title to half.
A further objection to so using the term "right"that from the fact
that A ought to do a thing for B, it follows that B has a right against A

6I A Defense of Abortion
that A do it for him, is that it is going to make the question of whether

or not a man has a right to a thing turn on how easy it is to provide
him with it; and this seems not merely unfortunate, but morally unac-
ceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda again. I said earlier that I had
no right to the touch of his cool hand on my fevered brow, even though
I needed it to save my life. I said it would be frightfully nice of him to
fly in from the West Coast to provide me with it, but that I had no
right against him that he should do so. But suppose he isn't on the
West Coast. Suppose he has only to walk across the room, place a
hand briefly on my brow-and lo, my life is saved. Then surely he
ought to do it, it would be indecent to refuse. Is it to be said "Ah, well,
it follows that in this case she has a right to the touch of his hand on
her brow, and so it would be an injustice in him to refuse"? So that I
have a right to it when it is easy for him to provide it, though no right
when it's hard? It's rather a shocking idea that anyone's rights should
fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them
to him.
So my own view is that even though you ought to let the violinist
use your kidneys for the one hour he needs, we should not conclude
that he has a right to do so-we should say that if you refuse, you are,
like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give none away,
self-centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust. And simi-
larly, that even supposing a case in which a woman pregnant due to
rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour
he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so; we
should conclude that she is self-centered, callous, indecent, but not
unjust, if she refuses. The complaints are no less grave; they are just
different. However, there is no need to insist on this point. If anyone
does wish to deduce "he has a right" from "you ought," then all the
same he must surely grant that there are cases in which it is not
morally required of you that you allow that violinist to use your kid-
neys, and in which he does not have a right to use them, and in which
you do not do him an injustice if you refuse. And so also for mother
and unborn child. Except in such cases as the unborn person has a
right to demand it-and we were leaving open the possibility that there
may be such cases-nobody is morally required to make large sacri-
fices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties

and commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order
to keep another person alive.
6. We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan:
the Good Samaritan and what we might call the Minimally Decent
Samaritan. The story of the Good Samaritan, you will remember, goes
like this:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell

among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded
him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and
when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and
looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was;
and when he saw him he had compassion on him.
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and
wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn,
and took care of him.
And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out two pence,
and gave them to the host, and said unto him, "Take care of him;
and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will
repay thee." (Luke I0:30-35)
The Good Samaritan went out of his way, at some cost to himself, to
help one in need of it. We are not told what the options were, that is,
whether or not the priest and the Levite could have helped by doing
less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they could have, then
the fact they did nothing at all shows they were not even Minimally
Decent Samaritans, not because they were not Samaritans, but
because they were not even minimally decent.
These things are a matter of degree, of course, but there is a differ-
ence, and it comes out perhaps most clearly in the story of Kitty
Genovese, who, as you will remember, was murdered while thirty-
eight people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help her.
A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to give direct assistance

against the murderer. Or perhaps we had better allow that it would

have been a Splendid Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it
would have involved a risk of death for himself. But the thirty-eight
not only did not do this, they did not even trouble to pick up a phone
to call the police. Minimally Decent Samaritanism would call for doing
at least that, and their not having done it was monstrous.
After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said "Go, and
do thou likewise." Perhaps he meant that we are morally required to
act as the Good Samaritan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do
more than is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain
that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-eight that he rush
out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life, and that it is
not morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life-
nine years or nine months-to sustaining the life of a person who has
no special right (we were leaving open the possibility of this) to
demand it.
Indeed, with one rather striking class of exceptions, no one in any
country in the world is legally required to do anywhere near as much
as this for anyone else. The class of exceptions is obvious. My main
concern here is not the state of the law in respect to abortion, but it is
worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in this country is
any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Decent Samaritan
to any person; there is no law under which charges could be brought
against the thirty-eight who stood by while Kitty Genovese died. By
contrast, in most states in this country women are compelled by law
to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans
to unborn persons inside them. This doesn't by itself settle anything
one way or the other, because it may well be argued that there should
be laws in this country-as there are in many European countries-
compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism.8 But it does show
that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the law. And it
shows also that the groups currently working against liberallzation of
abortion laws, in fact working toward having it declared unconstitu-
8. For a discussion of the difficulties involved, and a survey of the European
experience with such laws, see The Good Samaritan and the Law, ed. James M.
Ratcliffe (New York, I966).

tional 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.
I should think, myself, that Minimally Decent Samaritan laws
would be one thing, Good Samaritan laws quite another, and in fact
highly improper. But we are not here concerned with the law. What
we should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled by law to
be a Good Samaritan, but whether we must accede to a situation in
which somebody is being compelled-by nature, perhaps-to be a Good
Samaritan. We have, in other words, to look now at third-party inter-
ventions. I have been arguing that no person is morally required to
make large sacrifices to sustain the life of another who has no right
to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do not include
life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or any-
way Very Good Samaritans to one another. But what if a man cannot
extricate himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us to
extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are cases in which we
can, cases in which a Good Samaritan would extricate him. There you
are, you were kidnapped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie
ahead of you. You have your own life to lead. You are sorry, but you
simply cannot see giving up so much of your life to the sustaining of
his. You cannot extricate yourself, and ask us to do so. I should have
thought that-in light of his having no right to the use of your body-
it was obvious that we do not have to accede to your being forced to
give up so much. We can do what you ask. There is no injustice to the
violinist in our doing so.
7. Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have through-
out been speaking of the fetus merely as a person, and what I have
been asking is whether or not the argument we began with, which pro-
ceeds only from the fetus' being a person, really does establish its con-
clusion. I have argued that it does not.
But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may be
said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. 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, Henry
Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. And
our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both
are compelled by law to provide support for their children.
I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4
above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. 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, and then at the time
of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, 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 hav-
ing a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relation-
ship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsi-
bility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may
not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it
would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samari-
tan would not refuse-or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacri-
fices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good
Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so would Henry
Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and
assume responsibility for me.
8. My argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by
many of those who want to regard abortion as morally permissible.
First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not
argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which
carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritan-
ism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below. I
am inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not
give a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense
that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old
schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and
that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows
for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even
positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request an

abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh

month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postpon-
ing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have been draw-
ing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion
in which the mother's life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought
to have made them suspect at the outset.
Secondly, while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in
some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the
unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a
certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside
the mother's body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its
death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are
not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life
of that violinist; but 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. 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. There
are some people who will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my argu-
ment. A woman may be utterly devastated by the thought of a child,
a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again.
She may therefore want not merely that the child be detached from
her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion are inclined to
regard this as beneath contempt-thereby showing insensitivity to what
is surely a powerful source of despair. 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.
At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have only
been pretending throughout that the fetus is a human being from the
moment of conception. A very early abortion is surely not the killing
of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.


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A Defense of Abortion

Author(s): Judith Jarvis Thomson

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Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a

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This content downloaded from 129.215.17.188 on Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:17:19 AM

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3. The term "direct" in the arguments I refer to is a technical one. Roughly,

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might be continued. (i) But as directly killing an innocent person is

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impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the

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right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be

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suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in

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anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me

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that A do it for him, is that it is going to make the question of whether

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A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell

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against the murderer. Or perhaps we had better allow that it would

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This content downloaded from 129.215.17.188 on Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:17:19 AM

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abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh

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