ABSTRACT
In her 1971 article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson defended the following thesis: the impermissibility of abortion does not follow from the premises that every fetus is a person and that every person has a right to life. Her principal argument in support of this thesis turned on the claim that cases of a woman carrying a pregnancy to term should be subsumed under the broader category of Good Samaritanism. From the moral point of view, that is, a woman who carries a pregnancy to term is like a person who generously offers, at some considerable cost to herself, to provide what another needs but does not have the right to, while a woman who terminates a pregnancy is like a person who declines to offer such assistance. It is not the case that abortion violates the requirements of morality, therefore, but rather that continuing to incur the burdens involved in pregnancy goes beyond them. And her principal argument in sup port of this claim in turn rested on your sharing her response to a now (in)famous example:
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. 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 is now 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.”1
