Editor’s note: This post is part of the Blog of the APA’s continued engagement with arguments related to the topic of abortion. Posts providing alternative perspectives can be found here, here, and here.
Roe has fallen. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an increase in attention given to the ethical and legal status of abortion. Even less surprisingly, this has raised passions about abortion—pro-life folk see this as a turn toward justice, pro-choice folk as a turn toward injustice, and each side has made its feelings known. Of course, before Roe fell, philosophers had made impassioned statements about abortion. For example, Kate Manne once complained that the position that abortion is wrong and should be restricted
requires a refusal to empathize with girls and women facing an unwanted pregnancy.
So, philosophers have some pretty strong views about abortion, to say the least. Indeed, in what can only be described as puzzling, a recent survey showed that philosophers are more confident that early abortion is morally permissible than that ethical statements have a truth value!
In light of this, I want to consider one popular argument for the moral permissibility of typical abortions: Judith Thomson’s bodily autonomy argument. I’ll argue her examples don’t show that typical abortions are permissible. And, moreover, I’ll suggest that—assuming fetuses are persons—typical abortions are wrong.
The ethics of abortion isn’t easy or obvious: it’s difficult. One particularly tough issue is that of fetal personhood: there’s no decisive argument for any particular view on this matter. (If there were, then there wouldn’t be disagreement about whether early fetuses are persons!) However, Thomson made a clever attempt to circumvent the issue of personhood: she argued that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is a person. To support her argument, she asks us to consider the following case:
The Famous 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 the violinist is unplugged from you, he’ll die. But if he remains attached for nine months, he’ll recover and can be unplugged safely.
Thomson expects the reader’s reaction to The Famous Violinist to be that it’s permissible to detach oneself from the violinist in this case: even though this results in the death of the violinist, it’s permissible to do so. Importantly, she thinks, The Famous Violinist is analogous to some cases of abortion. And so in cases like these, abortion is permissible even if the fetus is a person. More generally, taking into account other thought experiments Thomson employs, we can think of Thomson’s thesis as being (roughly) that even if the fetus is a person, abortion is typically permissible.
Now, both pro-choice and pro-life philosophers have pointed out serious disanalogies between The Famous Violinist and pregnancy and abortion. But let’s set these issues aside for the moment. Let’s grant that Thomson has shown that there are cases in which one need not use her body to sustain the life of another, and this means that the ethics of abortion isn’t decided if the fetus is a person—to show that abortion is wrong, we need to do more than show that fetuses are persons.
Notice that this doesn’t necessarily undermine the pro-life view: that there are cases in which one may permissibly decline to use her body to sustain the life of another doesn’t entail that abortion is typically permissible. To see this, consider the fact that there are clear cases in which one must use her body to sustain the life of another.
Let’s start with a warm-up case: parents must use their bodies to sustain the lives of their children—they must labor so that they can provide food and shelter for their children. And this is true even if they don’t want their children and even if doing so is burdensome. Of course, this case arguably doesn’t matter with respect to abortion since parents need not use their bodies in as direct a way as pregnant women do to sustain the lives of their children.
Let’s now consider a case like one I’ve used elsewhere:
The Cabin Case: Sarah is out hiking on a mountain. She’s 9 months pregnant. However—as occasionally happens to pregnant women—she doesn’t know she’s pregnant, let alone 9 months pregnant. Unfortunately, she gets caught in a snowstorm and forced to take residence in a cabin. The snow continues to come down, and she becomes trapped in the cabin. She goes into labor and gives birth to a healthy child. She’s dumbstruck by these events, and does not want to care for her infant—she’s always dreamed of living a childless life. In a stroke of luck, the cabin is stocked with plenty of solid food. But it has no baby formula. As such, the only way for her infant to survive is if Sarah breastfeeds her (the infant).
Presumably, Sarah must feed her infant in The Cabin Case—at least until she’s freed from the cabin and able to transfer her baby to someone else’s care. Presumably, this is true even though this involves using her body, even though it’s burdensome, and even though she doesn’t want to care for her infant.
But now we’re in a tough spot: The Famous Violinist tells us that we aren’t always obligated to use our bodies to sustain the lives of others and The Cabin Case tells us that sometimes we are. So, if we assume that fetuses are persons, how should we think about the ethics of abortion? Should The Violinist Case guide us or should The Cabin Case guide us?
In brief: The Cabin Case should guide our thinking here. It’s far more similar to pregnancy and abortion than The Violinist Case: it involves a woman who just gave birth and an infant who requires the use of her mother’s body in order to survive. That’s about as close to pregnancy as you can get without the example just being a case of pregnancy. Indeed, it will likely be more akin to pregnancy and abortion than any other case. And since we’re considering the ethics of abortion, the similarity of a case to pregnancy is crucial.
Of course, there are ways that one might respond here. For example, one might just deny that Sarah must feed her infant in The Cabin Case. That’s one move that could be made. This route seems to me unpromising: it has the effect of making morality implausibly permissive. The annoying thing about morality, after all, is that it’s demanding!
A more plausible route is to argue that typical pregnancies are substantially more burdensome than The Cabin Case. For example, in The Cabin Case, Sarah only has to use her body to sustain her infant’s life until she’s dug out and able to transfer her infant to another person that’s willing and able to care for her (the infant). However, a typical pregnancy lasts 9 months and is far more burdensome than a few days of breastfeeding an infant.
One problem with this sort of objection—which usually comes from childless men—is that breastfeeding is a burden that’s additive: the longer a woman must breastfeed, the more burdensome it is (i.e. it’s more burdensome to breastfeed an infant for one month than to breastfeed an infant for one day, it’s more burdensome to breastfeed an infant for two months than one month, and so on). So, suppose that in The Cabin Case, it will be 18 months until Sarah is able to be dug out. Suppose, furthermore, that none of the solid food in the cabin can be made into baby food, and that the infant (for whatever reason) won’t be able to eat solid food until she’s 2 years old. This means that Sarah will have to breastfeed the infant for the whole 18 months in order for her (the infant) to survive. This is probably more burdensome than typical pregnancies. Nevertheless, it would be morally wrong for Sarah to let her infant starve—she must use her body to sustain the infant’s life. And this is true even though it’s probably more burdensome than typical pregnancies. So appeals to burdensomeness are on shaky ground.
Again, one might deny this. One might claim instead that the burdensomeness of breastfeeding an unwanted infant for 18 months is so great that it’s permissible for Sarah to let her infant die. This objection seems to me to rely on far too permissive a morality—morality requires us to sustain the lives of others even when doing so is very burdensome. For example, consider the fact that we must sustain the lives of severely disabled people who require assistance with eating, toileting, showering, and so on—it’s wrong to not provide them with care—even though doing so can be very burdensome. But despite its burdensome nature, providing care for disabled people is something we’re morally required to do—even if we don’t want to provide such care. Indeed, providing this care for the entire life of a severely disabled person is going to be more burdensome than a typical pregnancy. And so morality requires that we take on substantial burdens—even if it involves using our bodies to sustain the lives of others and even if we don’t want to.
Of course, other objections can be raised to my argument here. And my argument shares a defect that plagues all other philosophical arguments: it isn’t decisive and it can be rationally resisted. Moreover, I’ve only considered the ethics of abortion on the assumption that the fetus is a person. Perhaps one thinks that early fetuses aren’t persons and therefore that early abortion is permissible, and so my argument here doesn’t matter in the case of early abortion. That’s one route that can be taken here. But if the fetus isn’t a person, this won’t settle matters either, since it might be that abortion’s wrong even if the fetus isn’t a person.
While there are ways one can resist the argument I’ve given here, I hope to have shown that one can’t just sweep the ethics of abortion aside with The Violinist Case, appeals to bodily autonomy, or by invoking burdens associated with pregnancy: abortion is complicated, and philosophers shouldn’t pretend the ethics (or politics) of abortion is easy or obvious.
Perry Hendricks
Perry Hendricks is an unrestricted free agent on the philosophy job market, and you should hire him immediately. He’s also a father of three daughters and one son, and an aspiring trophy husband—although, he doesn’t work out enough to be a real trophy husband, nor does he have the face for it. He has published articles on abortion, medical ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His book, Skeptical Theism, was recently published by Palgrave MacMillan, and everyone should cite, buy, and read it. He once got stuck on an elevator. He now takes steps to avoid that.
I was in college before Roe was decided and volunteered for a children’s crusade to canvass for the liberalization of state abortion laws. As a philosophy major I thought I could set people straight by informing them about the Lockean distinction between PERSONS and HUMAN BEINGS.
In our ‘training’ organizers however cautioned that we should not be inveigled into ‘philosophical arguments’. We were just to repeat that we were just advocating the right for women to control their own bodies and ‘if you believe in women’s rights you should support the right to abortion’. This was considered to be smart politics. But we’ve seen the results, as a large minority of the public played modus tollens instead of modus ponens, particularly in recent years once abortion came to be perceived as the signature feminist issue.
I’m no ethicist. I’m just a simple Utilitarian and a bog-standard Neo-Lockean. Of course embryos and fetuses are alive; of course they’re organisms. So are bacteria, slugs, fish, and frogs. The slogan that abortion is just a matter of controlling one’s own body promoted for political purposes evades the issue of how we should treat organisms that aren’t Lockean persons. I myself have no problem with abortion or, for that matter, with euthanizing defective newborns. On that last point I’m sure the public doesn’t go along with me but their fundamental assumption is comparable: they recognize that abortion is not uncontroversially self-regarding action and that the stage of fetal development matters crucially.
The villianization of pro-life advocates has alienated people of good will and driven them to the political right. To make matters worse pro-choice activists, with the best intentions, to see to it that abortion is legal and available, pushed the Noble Lie that pregnancy was a big deal and that giving up a child for adoption was traumatic and unthinkable given ‘the investment of pregnancy’, aka ‘maternal instinct’. This was an appeal to sexist Victorian notions that worked for political purposes. Millions of women have given up children for adoption and gotten on with their lives without trauma. I am not advocating compromise on abortion rights or suggesting that adoption is as good as abortion but suggesting that activists should have refrained from promoting Noble Lies that appealed to popular sexist notions to achieve desirable political ends.
I speak as someone who has had an abortion and is glad of it, and someone with three kids who can assure you that pregnancy was nothing close to being hooked up to a comatose violinist. If I didn’t want any of those kids I would have put it up for adoption, without trauma or regret–and so could any woman who wasn’t propagandized by myths about the ‘investment of pregnancy’ and other sexist notions.
The mismanagement of the public discussion of abortion, the perceived centrality of abortion as a feminist issue, and the noble lies invoking sexist notions, have been politically disastrous.
This post begins by saying that the ethics of abortion is complex (a point I agree with) but the discussion that follows doesn’t explore that complexity. Instead of discussions of the mental and physical health of the pregnant person; the socioeconomic, physiological and psychological ramifications of gestation, labor and delivery; and the many many other actual factors that make each pregnant person’s decisions regarding their own pregnancy incredibly morally complex, the author gives a few simple and unrealistic scenarios. Philosophy doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to hide behind simple thought experiments and analogies. In truth, one of the things that makes abortion and pregnancy itself so complex is that there really isn’t anything else like it to compare it to. And the other thing that makes it complex is the decision to carry a child to term is a very personal one, that will rationally vary for different individuals based on their different social locations, physical and psychological health, and a whole host of other factors.
If we’re going to begin from the premise that this is morally complex, then we need to wade into that complexity, instead of abstracting away from it!
The interesting thing to note is that breast feeding for 20 months reduces all cause mortality whereas pregnancy increases it. So unless you are a good Epicurean (death is nothing to me because wherever I am death is not, wherever death is I am not) or otherwise pro death, pregnancy is more burdensome then breast feeding. And we have to treat risk rather than outcome as a burden otherwise things get ridiculous.
For example if we treat outcome then if six people play a round of Russian roulette we would be forced to say the five who survive suffered no harm from the experience which is bizarre. The “typical” member of that group would be “unharmed” by being forced to play Russian roulette. But clearly both they are harmed and we count the death of the one player against the physical health of the other 5. The one that dies counts for a physical harm against all 6 participants. Likewise everyone who dies from pregnancy complications counts as a harm accrued by every pregnancy etc.
Also personally I’m unconvinced we would seek criminal charges against a mother who failed to provide the necessities of life in such a weird life boat scenario. I think we can see this if we imagine what if instead the father Bob was trapped with the infant. What if Bob had a magic drug that made him capable of lactating at about the volume of a typical mother and it also reduced his all cause mortality as standard breast feeding does, is Bob obligated to take the drug? Would we criminally charge him for not taking the drug? What if there is no drug, but it turns out Bob could produce appropriate liquid nutrients by baby birding (pre chewing the food and then vomiting it into the infant’s mouth), if Bob fails to baby bird and the infant dies again do we charge Bob with a crime? Seems unlikely I can’t see how if Bob has no legal obligation (and so no appropriately strong moral duty) then I don’t see how Sarah can.
Just in general we are indeed obligated to care for others in aggregate, this means we pay taxes and make other commodified institutional efforts to care for such people. However you have no duty to go find some particular person starving to death and feed and clothe them. We (our institutions) find someone willing to do it for love or money and enable them to do it. Parents accept a duty to provide the necessities but are given the ability to walk away from it and so on, no one individual person is dragooned into doing it (this would violate Americans sacred 3rd amendment rights).
The institutional questions about how we should organize society to actually achieve best outcomes of abortions and avoid moral hazards in reproductive practices (sex selective abortions and infanticide, eugenics, social determinants of health that mean poor people have worse pregnancy outcomes etc.) are indeed difficult. There is evidence that abortion restrictions fail to prevent abortions and succeed in increasing dangerous abortions, this makes opposition to abortions tricky. It seems as though policies that would reduce the number of abortions (better access to birth control, better sex education etc.) are often opposed by people who claim to be anti-abortion and so on. If one actually cared about abortion presumably you would address these difficult issues and not engage much with melodramatic scenarios that have limited aggregate impact. Although obviously there is the bare question of whether more or fewer aggregate abortions are optimal and that is also thorny, but if we can’t answer the institutional questions it won’t matter anyway since we can’t influence that aggregate number without plumbing those questions.
Breast feeding reduces all cause mortality: https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jgo.18.21000
Pregnancy increases all cause mortality:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520435/
I came here quite willing to hear out a cogent argument against abortion by a philosopher, and I was disappointed to see that the author could not even make it past his first paragraph without letting his misogyny show. Kate Manne, an accomplished professional philosopher, “complained” in an article? Really? She didn’t “argue” or “reason” or “defend the view”? This rather thinly veiled accusation of feminist shrillness rang out like a warning shot that the essay that followed would not, as I’d hoped, be a carefully reasoned take on the ethics of abortion that regards with any seriousness the specific experiences and rights of pregnant people.
And sure enough, the essay ran aground numerous times. Early on, the author makes an undefended claim that “parents must use their bodies to sustain the lives of their children,” a bizarre way to discuss the parental responsibilities of housing and clothing their children… unless one has in mind that this claim can serve as the basis for a demand that a woman nurse a baby that she bears under remarkably strange and implausible conditions because “she must use her body to sustain the infant’s life.”
A second and more decisive problem with the essay is its reliance on an (again, totally undefended) standard of what is “morally permissive.” The author breezily demands that a person in Sarah’s position “must” nurse this baby — regardless, it seems, of any extraordinary burden it may place on her — because to allow her not to would simply be too “morally permissive.” This seems like a strange point to leave totally undeveloped, as it’s the very crux of the author’s argument. Sarah only has this obligation if the author has shown what makes a refusal to nurse the baby immoral. But the author’s answer is more or less just based on vibes: “I dunno, morality’s demanding sometimes!” What??
Finally, the author makes the claim that we should adopt the Cabin Case rather than the Violinist Case as a guide for evaluating the ethics of abortion because Sarah nursing a baby is “closer” to pregnancy than the analogy of the person who finds their body connected to the famous violinist. I gather that the author thinks it is “closer” because there’s a baby involved…? Although his attempt to actually provide a reason backing up one of his claims is a welcome new development, unfortunately his reasoning here is faulty. Abortion has to do with ending a pregnancy. Pregnancy involves being inextricably, physically connected to another growing organism, directly supporting their growth by sharing physical resources at a cellular level uninterruptedly for nine months. The mechanics of the Violinist Case is a better analogy for this experience than more periodic experience of nursing — even if the actual demands of nursing are a much more complicated task than the author seems willing to acknowledge.
Hey Jess,
Thanks for your comment!
Here’s a brief response to your “more decisive” objection. When thinking about the demands of morality, I’ve found it helpful to consider what we owe disabled people – and it turns out we owe a lot! So, when we’re considering what we owe to fetal persons, it might well turn out that we owe them a lot as well, and that might have a result that makes abortion impermissible. (This is talked about at the end of the post.) Now, you might disagree here (e.g. either because you don’t think we owe disabled people much care or you don’t think that fetal persons are relevantly similar), but hopefully this helps you see what I was (trying to) get at.*
*You also might find Gina Schouten’s (very good) article “Fetuses, Orphans, and a Famous Violinist” helpful when thinking about issues of burdensomeness.
As for your accusation of misogyny: this charge is serious, but I don’t believe it’s applicable to me. There’s no secret message I’m trying to relay by saying “complains.” For whatever it’s worth, I considered using other words, such as “pretended” or “hyperbolically claims” (since the claim is known to be false).
Again, thanks for your comment – it was helpful to read.
I initially appreciated the editors note, but after reading other articles it seems that it is unlikely these sorts of notes generally appear on articles covering controversial issues.
In particular, it does not seem that these editorial notes appear on any other article about the ethics of abortion, including those the editors decided to link to. This includes an article by Elizabeth Harman who argues that explicitly racist research – which she acknowledges should not exist – should be allowed to be published without reprimand.
In light of this it is hard to see this note as something other than a form of blatant editorial bias. This is possibly even a subtle way to poison the well against this piece.
This is a big shame on the editorial team. I expect better from the APA.
This type of “cabin case” is a poor analogue to embryos and beginning fetuses.
The baby is a psychological being, a person, who can be harmed, and that contributes to why the baby has a right to be fed, even if that requires the intimate use of some else’s body.
An embryo or beginning fetus is not like that and so has no right to anything here and nobody is obligated to do anything “for” it, so to speak.
So what’s true of the cabin case doesn’t transfer to most abortions.
Hey Nathan,
I’m assuming fetal personhood for the sake of argument, since I’m considering Thomson’s case here.
The salient difference between the cabin case and pregnancy is that pregnancy demands that another person be permitted to use and change the internal organs of an unconsenting person, whereas the cabin case does not involve internal organs. Shimp v McFall reinforces the principle that the need of one person to access the interior of another’s body to stay alive doesn’t confer the right to such access. Pregnancy is far more invasive, with far more serious consequences for the health of the mother, than is breastfeeding.