Should more people read Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense of Abortion?

I mostly just want to say that people should at least talk about this piece more.

I was sitting around with my roommates the other night celebrating what had happened in Kansas and one of them was like, its just so fucking frustrating that like, if someone’s just like “abortion is murder” you just kinda can’t argue with it.

I said something like, it’s true. It’s just like, a definitional thing. There’s not scientific solution. It’s so fucking annoying and painful. Either way, on either side of it, the claim is basically philosophical. There’s no common ground between “abortion is murder” and “abortion is not murder” which is why it’s such a good issue to polarize people on. Or like, within that issue frame it’s a polarizing issue.

And then I remembered Judith Jarvis Thomson’s A Defense of Abortion, which idk…I feel like more people should read, or at least know about. It’s not perfect, but the beauty of Thomson’s argument is that she concedes that abortion is murder right away. In this way, it shifts the moral frame of the issue. It’s a scary step for anyone on the choice side of the issue (me), but I think it’s a concession that in some cases we might be wise to make if we’re gonna ultimately get what we want, which is for women to have control over their bodies and their families.

So, Thomson basically says, sure you’re right—abortion is murder. Or at least abortion is the ending of a life, and despite that it is still a totally ethical thing for individuals to decide to do. What’s so nice here is that the whole how many months thing is gone, all the scientists weighing in is gone…and we get back to a quite serious moral question. Her argument follows a little parable that goes something like this:

You wake up in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of you. You look left and these tubes are going into the body of another person on another bed to your left. There’s a third person there in the room, milling about, and they say that they are from the Society of Music Lovers and this person to your left that you’re attached to is a famous violinist who is very very ill. Last night folks at the Society for Music Lovers kidnapped you in your sleep after discovering that you were a perfect match to bring this famous violinist back to health. It’s only going to take nine months for the violinist to be healthy again. If you stay in the hospital for nine months, the violinist will come to life, if you leave he will die. The ethical question here becomes: do you have the ethical authority to leave, even if it effectively means ending the life of (murdering!) the famous violinist whose circulatory system your heart is now pumping?

Personally, my answer is fuck yes I have the authority to leave. I was fucking kidnapped by you violin dipshits and my veins were hooked up against my will to this person I’ve never met and who seems to be dying anyway. Look like, I didn’t ask to be here, and to be honest what y’all did was literally illegal. You literally kidnapped me. I have shit to do. Staying here’s gonna fuck up my job. And by the way my leaving, regardless of whether this old violinist dies or not, is totally morally sound, totally ethical, and I’m pretty sure this is a consensus opinion amongst most people on Earth. It doesn’t even seem like a controversial thought at all.

And for sure, there must be no one around that would say the government should pass a bill to force me to stay here against my will. Right? You kidnapped me and then made me biologically responsible for the life of another individual human who, without me, might die. It doesn’t matter at all if you want to stand there and call me a murderer.

The guy milling about says that “We at the Society of Music Lovers think that if you leave and pull the tubes out you’re a murderer. And it’s not just us. The Federal Government now believes that despite them having the authority to prosecute us at the Society for Music Lovers for kidnapping you, they do not have the authority to say clearly that you can leave if you want. You’re stuck here now."

For me Thomson’s thought experiment is an incredible workaround to the typical irresolvable trenches of whether abortion is murder or not. It elegantly says, if you are someone that believes in individual autonomy, then you must be pro-choice.

Thoughts?