Jose Romero Ethics-002-301 The Moral-Permissibility of Abortion Judith Thomson clearly points out that most opposition to abortion

relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. While this premise is arguably false, in that a newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree, for the sake of argument, this premise can be succeeded and the fetus can be accepted to be a normative person. It is after settling this, what will become trivial issue, that it is possible to finally analyze the essence of abortion. It is under this closer examination that we can realize that regardless of whether or not the fetus is a normative person, abortion is morally permissible, under what will be subsequently explained conditions. It seems that the reason that most opponents to abortion argue for the normative status of the fetus is to go on to argue that the fetus has a right to life. The argument against abortion then goes on to state that regardless of the mothers right to decide what happens in and to her body, a persons right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mothers rights over her body, and so outweighs the mothers right. Thus, the fetus cannot be killed, and an abortion cannot be performed. To illustrate the fallacies in this argument, Thomson creates the analogy of the violinist. In this scenario, an individual wakes up only to discover that they have been kidnapped and by no choice of their own, attached to a violinist who requires the use of their kidneys to survive. Assuming the individual is the only person who the violinist can be attached to, to survive, we

can see here that the issue of abortion is not a clear-cut conflict of rights, but rather something more fundamental. The violinist has the right to life, just like the presumably normative person fetus has a right to life. This right however, does not grant entitlement in and of itself. What this means is that to deprive someone of what they have a right to is in fact treating them unjustly, however in the case of the violinist, the individual in question never granted the violinist the right to their kidneys. Thus, the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. With this issue of rights made clear, it is possible to argue for what in fact constitutes a morally permissible abortion. Abortions are morally permissible under the following conditions: 1. Every plausible form of pregnancy-prevention had been attempted; 2. The purpose is for the women to reclaim that which was not given away by her; 3. The preservation of life is the top priority, so long as the life in question does not rest on a non-granted entitlement. The significance of criterion 1 stems from the importance of differentiating between granting and not-granting entitlement. To illustrate this, Thomson uses the example of peopleseeds. In this example, people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if someone opens their window, a people-seed may drift in and take root in their carpets or upholstery. Thus, to combat this, the individual installs fine mesh screens, the best someone can buy. These screens however, are not 100% guaranteed and thus, on very rare occasions, a seed manages to drift through the screen and take root. The significance of this example in the case of abortions,

stems from the fact that while it is certainly possibly to eliminate a womans possibility of getting pregnant (i.e. hysterectomies, complete refrain from sexual intercourse etc.), the extreme nature of getting something like a hysterectomy, or a life devoid of sex, is enough to indicate that intention must be taken into account. Some however, argue that sex is a purely optional activity and thus, refraining from it over a lifetime is not an unreasonable precaution to take. It is also argued that the right granted in the people-seed case would be access to one's house, while the right granted in the pregnancy case would be access to one's body. The former sort of access is presumably easier to justify than the latter (because the burden is smaller). On the other hand, the person in the people-seed case is not partially causally responsible for the seed's need, only its ultimately getting into the house. The person in the abortion case is partially causally responsible for the fetus' need, not just its getting into the body. Both of these differences however, are addressed by the following driving case, which can be used to make Thomsons point more forcefully than the people-seeds case. Driving is a normal activity in industrialized societies. It is certainly possible to live without driving, but one would be seriously reducing ones options for jobs, where to live, etc. Yet those who drive know that it is possible to injure pedestrians by driving and that the only way to absolutely assure that one does not injure them is to not drive. Nevertheless, if a driver who knows these facts and explicitly avoids hitting pedestrians then hits one, it is not then accepted that this special connection shows that the driver consented to give up his body in restitution to the victim or more generally that the special connection entitles the victim to the drivers body in order to stay alive (with failure to give access constituting murder). If someone were to accept that the driver does not owe their body to the

victim, then Thomsons argument can be taken as correct and intention becomes significant. Furthermore, the significance of the opposite scenario, in which a driver deliberately injures a pedestrian, should be explained relative to abortion. In this second scenario, the driver has not granted irrevocable entitlement to their body, but does assume responsible for the accident. In the case of pregnancy, if a woman were to deliberately get impregnated, she has granted entitlement to the fetus to gestate within her body, because it is her fault that the fetus is there in the first place. She left the proverbial window open; she hit the victim; she is the one responsible for its presence in her body. In the case of the driver, generally restitution would not be of a bodily exchange, but rather a monetary one. The fetus, however cannot be paid the only way to pay the fetus is to grant it entitlement into the womens body. This is not to extricate any other party from responsibility, such as the male who would have provided the sperm to fertilize the egg, but rather by mere of deliberately attempting to get pregnant this indicates that it was her choice because it is her body and other scenario would be analogous to rape. Furthermore, this entitlement cannot be revoked because of the fact that by allowing it to gestate in the first place, she has into sequence a positive-trajectory for the fetus, which if she were to take away would be kin to murder and morally impermissible. This scenario results in a positive-trajectory for the fetus, while the accidental pregnancy has a negative trajectory because of the fact that in the accidental pregnancy, no entitlement was ever given to initiate a positive trajectory. To illustrate this, one can think of a lung transplant recipient and the donor of the lung. Say a donor gives one of their lungs to an individual who requires a lung or they will die. The person in need of the lung already has a negative trajectory before the donor even comes into play. If the donor were to give the individual in need one of their lungs, they would

then set the recipient on a positive trajectory. However, if 1 year were to pass and the donor were to want their lung back, they have lost entitlement to that lung because they gave it to the recipient and to take it back would result in the recipients death and be murder. While there are arguable differences between the lung transplant scenario and pregnancy, it does establish the significance of establishing a positive trajectory.

The significances of criterions 2 and 3 are very interrelated, but the purpose of criterion 2 is to essentially explicitly state that the abortion must have a reason. If a pregnant women were to simply be walking down a street and come across a clinic that was promoting abortions at no cost, this promotion by itself is not enough to warrant an abortion. As is commonly accepted by both sides of the abortion issue, most women have justifications for their abortions that are more fundamental than mere spur of the moment, and thus criterion 2 would rarely be an issue. Criterion 3 however, may seem to be the most controversial in that an abortion is generally associated with the murder of the fetus. It is however important to clarify that the argument being made for abortions does in fact hold the preservation of life as the crux to any argument. To make it clear, the purpose of an abortion is not to kill the fetus, but rather to reclaim that which was not willingly given away. Furthermore, it should be stated that a woman does not have the right to end a fetus life anymore than an individual has the right to shoot the violinist (from the aforementioned violinist example) if, having separated him from their kidneys, the violinist miraculously lived. Thus, since all a woman has is a right to separation and

not the death of the fetus, a woman must separate in a way which preserves the fetus life, if possible. It is here that the significance of a parents responsibilities to a child must be elucidated. Thomson states that, "Surely we do not have any 'special responsibility' for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it." The vague and confusing nature of this response must therefore be clarified and established in order to properly fit with the premise of this paper. It should be further noted that the final sentence of her argument must be somewhat rebuked because of the fact that while there is no simple biological relationship that grants responsibility for the child, but there is a granting of entitlement that makes the parents responsible for the child. There is an ambiguity in the phrase putting the child out for adoption, that when clarified will elucidate on the parents duties the child. As it stands, the statement implies that not putting a child out for adoption is tantamount to assuming special responsibility (extending positive benefit rights) for the child. This is troubling because it further implies that putting a child out for adoption is tantamount to not assuming special responsibility (with the further implication that such a child has not yet received positive benefit rights, at least from the mother and father). As set out in criterion 3, the preservation of life must be the top priority in any abortion and thus it needs to be established that putting the child out for adoption, means securing a caretaker for the

child (whether institution or familial). This is because by allowing the child to gestate and be born, it has been set on a positive trajectory that establishes responsibility for the child on both the parents. Thus, the only way that ties can be severed at all would be by transferring this responsibility to someone else. If one severs ties without any guarantee, then if the child dies, the parents assume responsibility because there was no transfer of responsibility. This can be further illustrated by the fact that this connection due to responsibility, is what gives particular women the right to take home from the hospital particular babies; in the scenario that a woman gives up her child for adoption immediately after it is born, the adopting individual or individuals would have the right to take that particular baby home, despite a lack of biological connection because there was a transference of responsibility to preserve to the positive trajectory, which overrules the biological connection. Thus we see that the parents, do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it," but they have established a positive-trajectory for the child which must be preserved, otherwise the death of the child should be considered murder on the part of the parents. With the aforementioned established, it is here that critics argue against the fundamental reasons for morally permissible abortions. Critics such as Philippa Foot argue against the established notions of trajectories argued for in this paper. What this means is that, in accordance with the premise of this paper, Foot argues that it is morally impermissible to initiate a fatal sequence. Foot however, diverges from the arguments in this paper and goes on to argue that the morally relevant distinction between killing and letting die shows why there is no analogy between the violinist and pregnancy cases. To illustrate this concept of agency, Foot

uses the scenario of a runaway trolley. Suppose a runaway trolley is heading toward a track on which five people are standing, and that there is someone who can possibly switch the points, thereby diverting the trolley onto a track on which there is only one person. It seems that he should do this, just as a pilot whose plane is going to crash has a duty to steer, if he can, toward a less crowded street than the one he sees below. But the railway man then puts the one man newly in danger, instead of allowing the five to be killed. Foot asks why does not the one mans right to noninterference stand in the way of the man diverting the trolley, as one persons right to noninterference impeded by the manufacture of poisonous fumes when this was necessary to save five? Foots answer to this is that this is a case of diverting a fatal sequence, not the starting of a new one. So we could not start a flood to stop a fire, even when the fire would kill more than the flood, but we could divert a flood to an area in which fewer people would be drowned. Furthermore, Foot states that in the issue of agency versus allowing, there is a relevant difference whether one originates a sequence or only allows it to continue, although the allowing is with deliberate intent. For example, it may not be permissible to deprive someone of a possession which only harms him, but it may be reasonable to refuse to get it back for him if it is already slipping from his grasp, thus establishing her critic of this papers premise. Foot would argue that the premise of this paper relies heavily on the analogy between the violinist and pregnancy scenarios and that the violinist case is a case of a refusal to save a life and not the initiation of sequence resulting in death because the violinist is dying (not intrinsically able to survive on his own and so has a downward trajectory). Thus, the case of abortion is completely different because the fetus in the womb is not dying (does not have a

downward trajectory) and so having an abortion initiates a fatal sequence. It is not a case of a refusal to save a life and thus, morally impermissible. Despite Foots eloquent criticism however, it is possible to see that there is logical fallacy in her argument. Assuming that Foot is correct in her account of agency, Foot is mistaken that her view shows a disanalogy between the violinist and pregnancy cases. There is nothing in her distinction which shows that the abortion case is completely different. The fetus/fertilized embryo, has an intrinsically downward trajectory just as the violinist has. It cannot live without the womans support just as the violinist cannot live without his unwilling benefactor. Only if one considers the woman and the fetus/fertilized embryo as a single unit, is it correct to claim that the fetus/embryo has no downward trajectory. By the same token however, the benefactor and violinist can be considered a single unit, meaning the violinist does not have a downward trajectory either. If the fetus (or fertilized embryo) intrinsically has a downward trajectory, then an abortion does not initiate a sequence resulting in death. It allows a sequence resulting in death to take its course, as is true in the violinist case. In order to claim that a woman and a fetus is a single unit and the violinist and benefactor are not one, one needs to claim that the fetus is entitled to the womans body in a way that the violinist is not entitled to his benefactors body. This is however, explained in prior sections of the paper discussing the criterion for morally permissible abortions, in that by allowing the fetus to gestate, a positive trajectory is initiated and entitlement granted. Thus, Foots criticism is false. It is thus, that we can see that that the issues of abortion are fundamentally those of entitlement and agency. The former leads to latter, in that once entitlement is granted it

cannot be simply taken back and so abortion when entitlement is given is morally impermissible. It is important to note that the premise in this paper is not merely a recapitulation of Thomsons argument, but an expanded and improved version. This is because Thomsons argument leaves open to interpretation that parents may not be responsible for their children, an argument that is untenable and insufferable. In line with this, are the aforementioned criterions for morally permissible abortions: 1. Every plausible form of pregnancy-prevention had been attempted; 2. The purpose is for the women to reclaim that which was not given away by her; 3. The preservation of life is the top priority, so long as the life in question does not rest on a non-granted entitlement. Only when these criterions are applied together can an abortion be morally permissible. It is however important to admit that as Thomson said, there are arguments and arguments, and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong one. Thus, from the aforementioned discussion, it would seem that the criterions established in this paper are the best fit for establishing a morally permissible abortion.