Recently I came across a mention of an essay from 1971 by someone named Judith Jarvis Thomson called “A Defense of Abortion.” I can’t even remember where I saw it mentioned, but after looking into it, I discovered that, apparently, this was "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy." For someone that takes a pretty keen interest in the abortion issue, and has both read and participated in countless debates and discussions over it, you would think I’d have heard of this thing!

And yet I never had until now, when I’m long past the point at which I thought I’d already seen every possible argument a million times. My first thought is that this speaks to the enormity of the generational gap between those of us who grew up with the Internet and the older generations. My second thought was: Why didn’t any of these arguments survive into the Internet era? I have seen arguments sort of like these a few times, but never made with any real conviction. Abortion supporters default to the “clump of cells” narrative almost one hundred percent of the time, and when I see them do anything else, it is usually some anon going for the “haha yes killing babies is based” piss take that I covered previously.

The whole premise of Thomson’s essay is that abortion is still fine even if we accept that a fetus is a person. So if it was really so influential, you would expect more supporters of abortion to cite it, yet in my experience they don’t. This hints at the fact that the “clump of cells” defense is actually much more workable than the mental gymnastics attempted by Thomson, which lines up with my original post on abortion.

I finished that post by saying that I was not aware of any rebuttals to what I laid out, operating under the assumption that if the “clump of cells” defense fails then the entire pro-abortion position collapses from there. I believe I may have briefly mentioned in broad terms the concepts from “A Defense of Abortion” but dismissed them pretty much out of hand, considering them too flimsy to even warrant a serious response. “A Defense of Abortion” however does seriously try to grant the personhood of the unborn and yet then still permit abortion, it is a “steelmanning” of that position you could say.

So I feel that it’s worthwhile to be thorough and give it some attention. I apologize if some of these points seem trite, obvious, or done to death a million times, but again, you have to keep in mind—I have never seen anyone actually try these arguments seriously! So for me, they are at least somewhat novel, and I have watched enough abortion conversations to feel confident that many others may be ignorant of them also. Thomson’s first thought experiment is The Violinist:

“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. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”

One funny response noted on Wikipedia is that Peter Singer argued that under utilitarianism you have an obligation to stay hooked up to the violinist in the name of increasing utility, which is obviously true if you actually believe in utilitarianism. That aside, there are a lot of fundamental problems with this comparison, the two most obvious being:

1.      The coercion aspect of the example. Pretty much all pregnancies are uncoerced (i.e. the woman has not been raped), so a better comparison would be if a person voluntarily agreed to this arrangement but then changed their mind and wanted to back out of it later, which changes the nature of the situation completely.

2.      The relationship to the dependent individual. The special responsibility that parents bear towards their offspring is one of the most basic, hard-wired moral intuitions out there—after all, this is why people who lose their kids to CPS are universally (and rightly) viewed as failures and bad people.

#1 touches on what I said in my first abortion post, that “what about rape?” is probably the strongest pro-abortion argument, and other than life of the mother (which pro-life people including myself agree is an allowable exception), this is the situation which comes the closest to making abortion permissible. Anyways, the point of the thought experiment is to defend “bodily autonomy,” so #2 is the more relevant distinction to focus on.

#2 means that the better thought experiment would’ve been “what if your child is going to die, but by hooking up your circulatory system to theirs for 9 months, you could save them and they could live a normal life afterwards?” How many parents would respond to that with “nah I’d just let them die?” I think it’s pretty much unquestionable that parents have a duty not to let their children simply die by denying them sustenance which is well within the parent’s ability to provide. We prosecute that as criminal child neglect.

This distinction alone is enough to ruin the thought experiment. We can easily agree that if you come across a random stranger on the street, and they appear to be starving or otherwise distressed, you are not necessarily obligated to care for them. But what if you came across your own child in such a situation? Well, then people would start asking questions about how you even let your child get into such a state to begin with. There is another distinction that is also important, however:

3.      There is a difference between simply refusing a life-saving intervention and actively killing a person who is otherwise healthy.

So now the proper thought experiment would be: “What if your child is going to die, but by hooking up your circulatory system to theirs for 9 months you could save them, and you agreed to this arrangement, but then you changed your mind partway through and the only way to get out of it was to actively kill your child via drugs or physical force, and you actually did that in order to get out of the whole deal?”

This is an analogy that actually sort of resembles abortion, at least elective abortions (which is y’know essentially all of them). I don’t know that I really need to keep arguing about the morality of things at this point. Once we get the thought experiment down to this proper degree of specificity, it pretty much speaks for itself.

So there goes the whole “bodily autonomy” thing. The issue with the “bodily autonomy” perspective is that restoring the mother’s “bodily autonomy,” as the anti-lifer conceives of it, necessarily requires not only violating the bodily autonomy of the child but actively killing them. Yet we all still recognize that children absolutely do retain the right to infringe upon the parent’s autonomy in every other possible way—upon their physical space, their finances, their time and attention, every aspect of their life for 18 years (closer to 19 if we include pregnancy).

Indeed, all but the most dogmatic anti-life absolutists oppose third trimester abortions which take place after the point at which the child could survive outside of the womb, so even most anti-life people grant that the child does in fact have the right to “infringe upon the mother’s bodily autonomy,” they are simply inconsistent about when this right exists or when it does not. I have yet to see any real reason for these inconsistencies other than the simple fact that liberal political values demand them. The coherent position is thus that a parent’s duty to care for their offspring (or at bare minimum not murder them) overrides any appeals to the parent’s “autonomy.”

Thomson’s second thought experiment is called the “Expanding Child,” and appears to make an argument for abortion in the case of “life of the mother,” in other words, the argument that abortion is allowable when it is medically necessary in order to save the mother’s life. This is a position shared by every pro-life person that I know of so it warrants no consideration.

The third thought experiment is perhaps the most novel, and also the one whose train of reasoning I have seen the least often. It is called the “people-seeds situation:”

“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.”

Thomson argues that in this hypothetical world, even if one of the screens fails and lets a “people-seed” into your house, you retain the right to remove the “seed” from your property. This analogy is even weaker than the violinist in my opinion, which is probably one reason why I rarely if ever see this sort of argument deployed in contemporary discourse. I believe this thought experiment fails even on its own terms.

Apparently part of Thomson’s argument here is that some people will yes-chad this situation by saying: "you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors." To which I say, yes, obviously people will say that. Imagine if you actually lived in a world where having carpet or upholstery carried this risk with it, the possibility that one day you might realize there is a fetus growing behind your couch? Even if the risk of this were very small, how many people would just not have these things, in order to avoid it? I think the pretty obvious answer is a lot, probably not all, but more than enough to demonstrate that avoiding the risk altogether is indeed a serious option.

More importantly, the fact remains that by choosing to have carpet and upholstery, you are voluntarily choosing to expose yourself to this risk. I think the idea behind Thomson’s set-up is to compare sex with something invisible that floats around in the air and sort of happens to you. This is, of course, not how sex works at all. Sexual intercourse is absolutely not something magically floating around in the air which is unavoidable by any means, much to the chagrin of today’s incels. When you decide to have sex, you are pretty clearly inviting the “people-seeds” into your “home.” It turns out that the semen does not just accidentally float in there on the wind.

Because sex is willful and voluntary, this means that you do not have a right to have sex consequence-free. In fact, you do not have a right to have sex at all. This is clearly true because, again—incels. It is therefore entirely consistent to advise people that, if they go there, there is always the risk that they might get pregnant, that there might be consequences which they have to accept responsibility for. The right to have sex without getting pregnant is like the right to drink alcohol without getting drunk. Neither one exists because nature itself does not permit them; to protest the fact that sex results in pregnancy is like complaining that liquor gives you a hangover.

This anti-life position that sex must be consequence-free is essentially an argument in favor of abortion as a form of contraception. Once again, even if we were to try and grant this premise, it proceeds to fail on its own merits, betrayed by revealed preferences. If abortion is a form of contraception (a belief that actually is consistent with the premise that an unborn child is not a person), why then is it never spoken of as such even by its defenders? Planned Parenthood itself has a page listing every modern means of contraception, yet if you scroll down the page, you will not find abortion mentioned anywhere.

It is taken for granted in our society that if you are having sex and you do not want to have children, then you should be using contraception (and again, here “contraception” is understood not to include abortion). Whether it’s the pill, condoms, IUD, whatever you might choose, no one ever assumes that you are having sex unprotected and just aborting any pregnancies that crop up, and if you spoke to someone about contraception options, no one would ever just nonchalantly list that option alongside condoms or the pill as if they are the same thing. Likewise, if you told someone that you don’t bother with contraception and just get abortions as needed, you would get some very concerned looks.

This includes all supporters of abortion except perhaps for a few truly crazed individuals that the anti-life side as a whole would surely wish to disown. Yet if we accept the premise that abortion is an allowable form of contraception, then why is all this the case? If anything, one would expect things to go in the opposite direction—that the libs would seek to aggressively normalize abortion in the same way that they do things such as transgenderism. But they don’t. There actually are cases of people using abortion in this way: Behold the tale of the Abortion Addict. You’ve probably never heard of this book by a woman who apparently got “a high” from her abortions.

Why haven’t you? If we really believed that abortion is merely contraception, what would be wrong with her behavior? If no one is harmed, then it isn’t clear why it would be wrong for someone to use the practice as a means of “getting high,” strange as the fetish might be. The clear takeaway is that most abortion advocates themselves do not really believe that abortion is a harmless practice tantamount to contraception, instead they simply trot out a façade of this belief to keep those gosh darn pro-life chuds at bay.

This is a good place to close my thoughts because it serves as a good example of why I think these arguments have not carried over well into modern discourse. Even if you are someone who believes that the Abortion Addict’s behavior should be legally allowable, you almost certainly cannot bring yourself to pretend that what she was doing was normal or healthy. Once you grant the premise that abortion does indeed entail the taking of a life, you have granted in turn that anyone who ever actually gets an abortion has committed a serious moral failing, with the possible exception of rape.

I don’t mean here that the abortion itself is the moral failing, although that’s certainly true as well. I mean that the need for an abortion is now a clear indicator that something has gone wrong in your life. Whether it’s irresponsible sexual behavior, uncertainty and anxiety over parenthood, financial worries, or whatever else, the simple fact is: If you Had Your Shit Together, you wouldn’t be doing this. Granting that abortion means ending a life also means granting that it is not something to be done casually; it is an emergency parachute to be deployed when you Done Fucked Up.

This shifts the focus of the topic onto the woman’s justification for why she must get an abortion, which is obviously an uncomfortable place for an anti-lifer to be. She can come up with copes about how she’s just not ready yet or how she still needs to work on her career or whatever else, and she might even believe them, but in most cases other people would be entirely fair to judge her actions as morally deficient.

This places abortion into a category similar to cheating on one’s partner or alcoholism—not criminal, but clearly wrong and destructive. Not something done by Good People. We can perhaps all agree that yes, you have the right technically speaking to drink twelve beers a day if you wish, but none of us are going to pretend that it isn’t a terrible idea and guaranteed to end badly. This is not the territory where you want to plant your flag when defending abortion against serious pro-life criticisms.

Thus, the shift in narrative over to “clump of cells” and the inexorable tendency from there to trend towards tacit approval of later term abortions. It is easy to see why things turn out this way once one has accepted as an absolute article of faith the premise that Abortion Must Be Allowed. It’s abhorrent, but if I put myself in those shoes and assign myself the task of holding the line against pro-lifers, the reasons to go there are very clear-cut. I therefore remain convinced that abortion hinges on the question of whether and why the unborn are people (they are), with even the “bodily autonomy” objection taking a secondary role.

It felt a bit surreal to learn about “A Defense of Abortion” and read its thought experiments that, to me in 2024, come across as so ham-fisted and poorly constructed. Yet I know that when the essay was published a little over 50 years ago, these must have seemed like striking insights to untold numbers of people, given how popular and influential it apparently was. It makes me wonder at how different the zeitgeist must have been at that time and how impossible it is to ever truly get your head around what the world was like in past times.