Answering the Strongest Pro-Abortion Arguments
The Unconscious Violinist & Back Alley Abortions
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Introduction:
For most Christians, their pro-life position is a given – a self-evident fact which simply cannot be refuted. And this confidence isn’t entirely misplaced. Most leftist “arguments” for abortion amount to mindlessly shouting nonsensical slogans (and don’t even get me started on their non-arguments). More sophisticated arguments are harder to come by, but also far more difficult to grapple with than the vapid screeching of your average feminist. And today, that’s what we want to consider: pro-choicers’ most formidable arguments.
The Unconscious Violinist:
In my opinion, this is the strongest pro-choice argument because it recognizes the humanity of the preborn child. The argument was designed by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson in her 1971 book, “A Defense of Abortion.” After summarizing a common pro-life argument (that a fetus’ right to life outweighs the mother’s right to govern her body), she presents her argument as follows:
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 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.” 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 now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist 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.
As an argument from analogy, it thus stands or falls on the validity of the analogy. The first difficulty her analogy faces is that pregnancy is virtually always voluntary unlike the situation with the violinist. If the subject of her analogy asked for the violinist to be plugged into them, then the subject unplugging the violinist and leaving them to die would, of course, be immoral. So the argument can only parallel rape, but even then, there are difficulties. The baby is just beginning its life whereas the violinist’s life is meeting a natural, if unforeseen close. Thus, forcibly maintaining the violinist’s life is vampiric in a unique sense. To put it more succinctly, allowing someone to meet their natural death is not morally equivalent to taking their life from them by force. But the argument treats these as moral equivalents.
The Unconscious Violinist Argument is so persuasive because it masterfully narrows the focus to the moral dilemma of unplugging the violinist or not. But keep in mind the moral responsibility accruing to those people who kidnapped and plugged the violinist in to the subject. Under the terms of the Mosaic law, all parties to that crime deserve the death penalty (Ex. 21:16). The only outlet for justice presented is unplugging the violinist, and since, being created in God's image, people generally want to see justice done, they gravitate towards allowing that option. But no such dichotomy is necessary; indeed, one can hold that the subject is under the moral obligation to remain hooked up to the violinist while maintaining the perpetrators are deserving of capital punishment.
Another reason for the persuasiveness of this argument is that the entire discussion is couched in terms of “rights” whereas the commensurate duties are nowhere to be found. And trying to apply a set of ethics derived purely from “rights” to such a complex moral issue is sure to be confounding. We ought to remember the positive moral commands of God in the law and realize the foolishness of conceptualizing morality purely as a horizontal matter.
Some may be dissatisfied with the idea that a rape victim should still be forced to carry the child. They might say justice could only be served if the situation can be “reversed” via allowing the mother to kill the preborn child. However, not only would this compound the sin, the mere suggestion reveals a deeper error, which is believing that perfect justice can be done by sinful humans. The Christian understanding of final judgement and the resurrection to eternal death or eternal life allows us to acknowledge that the situation cannot be made perfect and thus enact the best approximation we can while looking forward to the final administration of perfect justice.
Back Alley Abortion Argument:
You’ve probably heard a line like this before: “I’m personally against abortion, but I think it should be safe, legal, and rare because if fully banned, more women and babies will die in botched back alley abortions.” Libertarians will often make a similar economic argument: “As long as the demand for abortion exists, the supply will rise to meet it, if necessary, through the black market.” These arguments resonate strongly with Christians because we value preserving life and want to see the number of abortions decrease, but is there any merit to them?
First, the ideal of abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” is quite ridiculous. If abortion is wrong, it should be an incredibly risky undertaking. And if making it illegal resulted in the deaths of some people trying to procure abortions, would it really be a bad thing? If a murderer dies in a car crash while fleeing the scene, should we mourn or thank God for cutting his life short? Obviously the latter.
But is it even true that prohibiting abortions wouldn’t reduce the number of them? Prohibition in the early 20th century is often cited as an example of the ineffectiveness of such bans and an illustration of the economic principles articulated by the libertarian objection. But Prohibition reduced the consumption of alcohol drastically. Similarly, the empirical data shows nations with restrictive abortion laws have correspondingly low abortion rates. What the economic argument leaves out is the effect prices have on demand. When price increases, quantity demanded decreases. Legal consequences are, for all intents and purposes, part of the price of obtaining an abortion. By enacting these legal consequences, the government effectively raises the price of abortions, and people lower the quantity of abortions demanded. To put it in economics terms, the demand for abortion is far more elastic than the libertarian argument budgets for. Thus, this argument fails as well.
Conclusion:
Hopefully this has been a thought-provoking refutation. If there are other more sophisticated pro-abortion arguments you’d like for us to take on, feel free to comment down below.
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Great piece refuting the "Unconscious Violinist" argument. Would be interested in a follow-on article on the Biblical basis for when life begins (e.g. before conception, at conception, at heartbeat, at some other milestone, unknowable, etc).