ABSTRACT
Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that even if the fetus is a person with a right to life, abortion (in most cases) is morally permissible. To make her case, she uses several thought experiments that are seemingly analogous to different causes and states of pregnancy. Among her thought experiments are the well-known stories of the famous unconscious violinist, the burglar, and the people seeds. She also argues that the moral intuitions that ground these stories align with Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. In defending her strategy in his 2019 book Beyond Roe, David Boonin uses a real-life legal case to shape his own thought experiments. The case, McFall v. Shimp, involves two cousins, one of whom (Shimp) refuses to donate his bone marrow to the other (McFall), even though he needs it to survive. Most critics of the Thomson–Boonin approach typically try to show that their thought experiments fail as analogies to pregnancy. Although there is great merit in that approach, this chapter takes a different tack. It simply raises the question as to why we even need an analogy to pregnancy in order to understand its meaning and the moral obligations that may arise from it.
