by Judith
Jarvis Thomson
Most opposition to abortion
relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the
moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well.
Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the
development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is
continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this
development and say "before this point the thing is not a person, after
this point it is a person" is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for
which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that
the fetus is. or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment
of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be
said about the development of an acorn into an oak trees, and it does not
follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are. Arguments
of this form are sometimes called "slippery slope arguments"--the
phrase is perhaps self-explanatory--and it is dismaying that opponents of
abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.
I am inclined to agree,
however, that the prospects for "drawing a line" in the development
of the fetus look dim. I am inclined to think also that we shall probably have
to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth.
Indeed, it comes as a surprise when one first learns how early in its life it
begins to acquire human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it
already has a face, arms and less, fingers and toes; it has internal organs,
and brain activity is detectable. On the other hand, I think that the premise
is false, that the fetus is not a person from the moment of conception. A newly
fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no more a person than an
acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss any of this. For it seems to me
to be of great interest to ask what happens if, for the sake of argument, we
allow the premise. How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there to the
conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible? Opponents of abortion
commonly spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and
hardly anytime explaining the step from there to the impermissibility of abortion.
Perhaps they think the step too simple and obvious to require much comment. Or
perhaps instead they are simply being economical in argument. Many of those who
defend abortion rely on the premise that the fetus is not a person, but only a
bit of tissue that will become a person at birth; and why pay out more
arguments than you have to? Whatever the explanation, I suggest that the step
they take is neither easy nor obvious, that it calls for closer examination
than it is commonly given, and that when we do give it this closer examination
we shall feel inclined to reject it.
I propose, then, that we
grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the
argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right
to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to
decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But
surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the
mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it.
So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible. 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.
In this case, of course, you
were kidnapped, you didn't volunteer for the operation that plugged the
violinist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I
mentioned make an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can
say that persons have a right to life only if they didn't come into existence
because of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but
that some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those
who came into existence because of rape have less. But these statements have a
rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether you have a right to
life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn't turn on the question of
whether or not you are a product of a rape. And in fact the people who oppose
abortion on the ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence do
not make an exception in case of rape.
Nor do they make an
exception for a case in which the mother has to spend the nine months of her
pregnancy in bed. They would agree that would be a great pity, and hard on the
mother; but all the same, all persons have a right to life, the fetus is a
person, and so on. I suspect, in fact, that they would not make an exception
for a case in which, miraculously enough, the pregnancy went on for nine years,
or even the rest of the mother's life.
Some won't even make an exception
for a case in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely to shorten the
mother's life, they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother's
life. Such cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do
not accept this extreme view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a
number of points of interest come out in respect to it.
1.
Let us call the view that
abortion is impermissible even to save the mother's life "the extreme
view." I want to suggest first that it does not issue from the argument
I mentioned earlier without the addition of some fairly powerful premises.
Suppose a woman has become pregnant, and now learns that she has a cardiac
condition such that she will die if she carries the baby to term. What may
be done for her? The fetus, being to life, but as the mother is a person too,
so has she a right to life. Presumably they have an equal right to life. How
is it supposed to come out that an abortion may not be performed? If mother
and child have an equal right to life, shouldn't we perhaps flip a coin? Or
should we add to the mother's right to life her right to decide what happens
in and to her body, which everybody seems to be ready to grant--the sum of
her rights now outweighing the fetus's right to life?
The most familiar argument
here is the following. We are told that performing the abortion would he directly
killings the child, whereas doing nothing would not be killing the mother,
but only letting her die. Moreover, in killing the child, one would be killing
an innocent person, for the child has committed no crime, and is not aiming
at his mother's death. And then there are a variety of ways in which this
might be continued. (1) But as directly killing an innocent person is always
and absolutely impermissible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (2) as
directly killing an innocent person is murder, and murder is always and absolutely
impermissible, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (3) as one's duty to
refrain from directly killing an innocent person is more stringent than one's
duty to keep a person from dying, an abortion may not be performed. Or, (4)
if one's only options are directly killing an innocent person or letting a
person die, one must prefer letting the person die, and thus an abortion may
not be performed.
Some people seem to have
thought that these are not further premises which must be added if the
conclusion is to be reached, but that they follow from the very fact that an
innocent person has a right to life. But this seems to me to be a mistake, and
perhaps the simplest way to show this is to bring out that while we must
certainly grant that innocent persons have a right to life, the theses in (1)
through (4) are all false. Take (2), for example. If directly killing an
innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother's
directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is
impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother
performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot seriously be said
that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death.
Let us look again at the case of you and the violinist There you are, in bed
with the violinist, and the director of the hospital says to you, "It's
all most distressing, and I deeply sympathize, but you see this is putting an
additional strain on your kidneys, and you'll be dead within the month. But you
have to stay where you are all the same. because unplugging you would be
directly killing an innocent violinist, and that's murder, and that's
impermissible." If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not
commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to your
back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.
The main focus of attention
in writings on abortion has been on what a third party may or may not do in
answer to a request from a woman for an abortion. This is in a way
understandable. Things being as they are, there isn't much a woman can safely
do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do, and
what the mother may do, if it is mentioned at all, if deduced, almost as an
afterthought, from what it is concluded that third parties may do. But it seems
to me that to treat the matter in this way is to refuse to grant to the mother
that very status of person which is so firmly insisted on for the fetus. For we
cannot simply read off what a person may do from what a third party may do.
Suppose you filed yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean
a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child--you are already up against the
wall of the house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child on
the other hand won't be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from
growing he'll be hurt, but in the end he'll simply burst open the house and
walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it if a bystander were to say.
"There's nothing we can do for you. We cannot choose between your life and
his, we cannot be the ones to decide who is to live, we cannot intervene."
But it cannot be concluded that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack
it to save your life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to
wait passively while it crushes you to death Perhaps a pregnant woman is
vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the right of
self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be remembered that
she is a person who houses it.
I should perhaps stop to say
explicitly that I am not claiming that people have a right to do anything
whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there are drastic limits to
the right of self-defense. If someone threatens you with death unless you
torture someone else to death, I think you have not the right, even to save
your life, to do so. But the case under consideration here is very different.
In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened,
and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is not
threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not threaten
because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we bystanders cannot
interfere. But the person threatened can.
In sum, a woman surely can
defend her life against the threat to it posed by the unborn child, even if
doing so involves its death. And this shows not merely that the theses in
(1) through (4) are false; it shows also that the extreme view of abortion
is false, and so we need not canvass any other possible ways of arriving at
it from the argument I mentioned at the outset.
2.
The extreme view could of
course be weakened to say that while abortion is permissible to save the mother's
life, it may not be performed by a third party, but only by the mother herself.
But this cannot be right either. For what we have to keep in mind is that
the mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house
which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns
the house. The fact that she does adds to the offensiveness of deducing that
the mother can do nothing from the supposition that third parties can do nothing.
But it does more than this: it casts a bright light on the supposition that
third parties can do nothing. Certainly it lets us see that a third party
who says "I cannot choose between you" is fooling himself if he
thinks this is impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a certain
coat, which he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs
to keep him from freezing, then it is not impartiality that says "I cannot
choose between you" when Smith owns the coat. Women have said again and
again "This body is my body!" and they have reason to feel angry,
reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after
all, is hardly likely to bless us if we say to him, "Of course it's your
coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose between you and
Jones who is to have it."
We should really ask what it
is that says "no one may choose" in the face of the fact that the
body that houses the child is the mother's body. It may be simply a failure to
appreciate this fact. But it may be something more interesting, namely the
sense that one has a right to refuse to lay hands on people, even where it
would be just and fair to do so, even where justice seems to require that
somebody do so. Thus justice might call for somebody to get Smith's coat back
from Jones, and yet you have a right to refuse to be the one to lay hands on
Jones, a right to refuse to do physical violence to him. This, I think, must be
granted. But then what should be said is not "no one may choose," but
only "I cannot choose," and indeed not even this, but "I will
not act," leaving it open that somebody else can or should, and in
particular that anyone in a position of authority, with the job of securing
people's rights, both can and should. So this is no difficulty. I have not been
arguing that any given third party must accede to the mother's request that he
perform an abortion to save her life, but only that he may.
I suppose that in some views
of human life the mother's body is only on loan to her, the loan not being one
which gives her any prior claim to it. One who held this view might well think
it impartiality to say "I cannot choose." But I shall simply ignore
this possibility. My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior
claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And
perhaps this needn't be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the
arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman has a
right to decide what happens in and to her body. But although they do grant it,
I have tried to show that they do not take seriously what is done in granting it.
I suggest the same thing will reappear even more clearly when we turn away from
cases in which the mother's life is at stake, and attend, as I propose we now
do, to the vastly more common cases in which a woman wants an abortion for some
less weighty reason than preserving her own life.
3.
Where the mother s life is
not at stake, the argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a much
stronger pull. "Everyone has a right to life, so the unborn person has a
right to life." And isn't the child's right to life weightier than
anything other than the mother's own right to life, which she might put forward
as ground for an abortion?
This argument treats the
right to life as if it were unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to
be precisely the source of the mistake.
For we should now, at long
last, ask what it comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having a
right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one
needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact IS the bare minimum a
man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given?
If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch
of Henry Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow. then all the same, I have no
right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow. It
would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it.
It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to
the West coast and brought Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at
all against anybody that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the
story I told earlier, the fact that for continued life the violinist needs the
continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be
given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you
that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any
right to use your kidneys unless you give him this right--if you do allow him
to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something
he can claim from you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else
that they should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no
right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in
the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that
you will otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in
the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is given
some thing he has a right to be given.
Some people are rather
stricter about the right to life. In their view, it does not include the right
to be given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed
by anybody. But here a related difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain
from killing that violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a great
many different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his
throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him--and everybody must refrain
from unplugging you from him. But does he have a right against everybody that
they shall refrain from unplugging you frolic him? To refrain from doing this
is to allow him to continue to use your kidneys. It could be argued that he has
a right against us that we should allow him to continue to use your kidneys.
That is, while he had no right against us that we should give him the use of
your kidneys, it might be argued that he anyway has a right against us that we
shall not now intervene and deprive him Of the use of your kidneys. I shall
come back to third-party interventions later. But certainly the violinist has
no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys.
As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and
not something you owe him.
The difficulty I point to
here is not peculiar to the right of life. It reappears in connection with all
the other natural rights, and it is something which an adequate account of
rights must deal with. For present purposes it is enough just to draw attention
to it. But I would stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right
to life--quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the primary control we must
place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn out
in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life. I am
arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee having either a
right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another
person s body--even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will
not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which
they seem to have thought it would.
4.
There is another way to
bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone
of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small
brother are jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy
takes the box and refuses to give his brother any of the chocolates, he is
unjust to him, for the brother has been given a right to half of them. But
suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed with
that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being unjust
to him, for you gave him no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have
given him any such right. But we have to notice that in unplugging yourself,
you are killing him; and violinists, like everybody else, have a right to life,
and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to be killed.
So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not
act unjustly to him in doing it.
The emendation which may be
made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to
be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk
of circularity, but never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the
violinist has a right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward
him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him
unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you do
him no injustice.
But if this emendation is
accepted, the gap in the argument against abortion stares us plainly in the
face: it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person, and to
remind us that all persons have a right to life--we need to be shown also that
killing the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust
killing. And is it?
I suppose we may take it as
a datum that in a case of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not given the
unborn person a right to the use of her body for food and shelter. Indeed, in
what pregnancy could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person
such a right? It is not as if there are unborn persons drifting about the
world, to whom a woman who wants a child says I invite you in."
But it might be argued that
there are other ways one can have acquired a right to the use of another
person's body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a
woman voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue
in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible
for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person inside? No
doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn't her partial responsibility for its
being there itself give it a right to the use of her body? If so, then her
aborting it would be more like the boys taking away the chocolates, and less
like your unplugging yourself from the violinist--doing so would be depriving
it of what it does have a right to, and thus would be doing it an injustice.
And then, too, it might be
asked whether or not she can kill it even to save her own life: If she
voluntarily called it into existence, how can she now kill it, even in
self-defense?
The first thing to be said
about this is that it is something new. Opponents of abortion have been so
concerned to make out the independence of the fetus, in order to establish that
it has a right to life, just as its mother does, that they have tended to
overlook the possible support they might gain from making out that the fetus is
dependent on the mother, in order to establish that she has a special kind of
responsibility for it, a responsibility that gives it rights against her which
are not possessed by any independent person--such as an ailing violinist who is
a stranger to her.
On the other hand, this
argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother's body only if her
pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the
chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn
person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some further
argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose
existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their mothers' bodies, and
thus that aborting them is not depriving them of anything they have ~ right to
and hence is not unjust killing.
And we should also notice that
it is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it
purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details make a difference.
If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar
climbs in, it would be absurd to say, "Ah, now he can stay, she's given
him a right to the use of her house--for she is partially responsible for
his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in
full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.''
It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed outside
my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got
in only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine
it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or
falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the
air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root
in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your
windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen,
however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens
is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who
now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not--despite the
fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets
and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective.
Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have
a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life
with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this
won't do--for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by
having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!)
army.
It seems to me that the
argument we are looking at can establish at most that there are some cases in
which the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother's body, and
therefore some cases in which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for
much discussion and argument as to precisely which, if any. But I think we
should sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any rate the argument
certainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.
5.
There is room for yet another
argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may be cases in
which it would be morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the
cost of his life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine
years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life is
to spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting him use
your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health in the slightest.
Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give anyone permission
to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me plain you ought to allow
him to use your kidneys for that hour--it would be indecent to refuse.
Again, suppose pregnancy
lasted only an hour, and constituted no threat to life or health. And suppose
that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not
voluntarily do anything to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she
did nothing at all which would give the unborn person a right to the use of her
body. All the same it might well be said, as in the newly amended violinist
story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour--that it would be
indecent of her to refuse.
Now some people are inclined
to use the term "right" in such a way that it follows from the fact
that you ought to allow a person to use your body for the hour he needs, that
he has a right to use your body for the hour he needs, even though he has not
been given that right by any person or act. They may say that it follows also
that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of the term is
perhaps so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to me
to be an unfortunate loosening of what we would do better to keep a tight rein
on. Suppose that box of chocolates I mentioned earlier had not been given to
both boys jointly, but was given only to the older boy. There he sits stolidly
eating his way through the box. his small brother watching enviously. Here we
are likely to say, "You ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your
brother some of those chocolates." My own view is that it just does not
follow from the truth of this that the brother has any right to any of the
chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother any he is greedy stingy.
callous--but not unjust. I suppose that the people I have in mind will say it
does follow that the brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and thus
that the boy does act unjustly if he refuses to give his brother any. But the
effect of saying, this is to obscure what we should keep distinct, namely the
difference between the boy's refusal in this case and the boy's refusal in the
earlier case, in which the box was given to both boys jointly, and in which the
small brother thus had what was from any point of view clear title to half.
A further objection to so
using the term "right" that from the fact that A ought to do a thing
for B it follows that R has a right against A that A do it for him, is that it
is going to make the question of whether or not a man has a right to a thing
turn on how easy it is to provide him with it; and this seems not merely
unfortunate, but morally unacceptable. Take the case of Henry Fonda again. I
said earlier that I had no right to the touch of his cool hand on my fevered
brow even though I needed it to save my life. I said it would be frightfully
nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide me with it, but that I had
no right against him that he should do so. But suppose he isn't on the West
Coast. Suppose he has only to walk across the room, place a hand briefly on my
brow--and lo, my life is saved. Then surely he ought to do it-it would be
indecent to refuse. Is it to be said, "Ah, well, it follows that in this
case she has a right to the touch of his hand on her brow, and so it would be
an injustice in him to refuse"? So that I have a right to it when it is
easy for him to provide it, though no right when it's hard? It's rather a
shocking idea that anyone's rights should fade away and disappear as it gets
harder and harder to accord them to him.
So my own view is that even
though you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he
needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so--we should say
that if you refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and
will give none away, self-centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not
unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a case in which a woman pregnant
due to rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour
he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so; we should say
that she is self-centered, callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses.
The complaints are no less grave; they are just different. However, there
is no need to insist on this point. If anyone does wish to deduce "he
has a right" from "you ought," then all the same he must surely
grant that there are cases in which it is not morally required of you that
you allow that violinist to use your kidneys, and in which he does not have
a right to use them, and in which you do not do him an injustice if you refuse.
And so also for mother and unborn child. Except in such cases as the unborn
person has a right to demand it--and we were leaving open the possibility
that there may be such cases--nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices,
of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments,
for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.
6.
We have in fact to
distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we
might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan. The story of the Good Samaritan, you
will remember, goes like this:
A certain man went down from
Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his
raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
And by chance there came
down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other
side.
And likewise a Levite, when
he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as
he journeyed, came where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion on him.
And went to him, and bound
up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and
brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And on the morrow, when he
departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him,
"Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I
will repay thee." (Luke 10:30-35)
The Good Samaritan went out
of his way, at some cost to himself, to help one in need of it. We are not told
what the options were, that is, whether or not the priest and the Levite could
have helped by doing less than the Good Samaritan did, but assuming they could
have, then the fact they did nothing at all shows they were not even Minimally
Decent Samaritans, not because they were not Samaritans, but because they were
not even minimally decent.
These things are a matter of
degree, of course, but there is a difference, and it comes out perhaps most
clearly in the story of Kitty Genovese, who, as you will remember, was murdered
while thirty-eight people watched or listened, and did nothing at all to help
her. A Good Samaritan would have rushed out to give direct assistance against
the murderer. Or perhaps we had better allow that it would have been a Splendid
Samaritan who did this, on the ground that it would have involved a risk of
death for himself. But the thirty-eight not only did not do this, they did not
even trouble to pick up a phone to call the police. Minimally Decent
Samaritanism would call for doing at least that, and their not having done it
was monstrous.
After telling the story of
the Good Samaritan, Jesus said, "Go, and do thou likewise." Perhaps
he meant that we are morally required to act as the Good Samaritan did. Perhaps
he was urging people to do more than is morally required of them. At all events
it seems plain that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-eight that
he rush out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life, and that it
is not morally required of anyone that he give long stretches of his life--nine
years or nine months--to sustaining the life of a person who has no special
right (we were leaving open the possibility of this) to demand it.
Indeed, with one rather striking
class of exceptions, no one in any country in the world is legally required
to do anywhere near as much as this for anyone else. The class of exceptions
is obvious. My main concern here is not the state of the law in respect to
abortion, but it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in no state in
this country is any man compelled by law to be even a Minimally Recent Samaritan
to any person; there is no law under which charges could be brought against
the thirty eight who stood by while Kitty Genovese died. By contrast, in most
states in this country women are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally
Decent Samaritans, but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them. This
doesn't by itself settle anything one way or the other, because it may well
be argued that there should be laws in this country as there are in many European
countries--compelling at least Minimally Decent Samaritanism. But it does
show that there is a gross injustice in the existing state of the law. And
it shows also that the groups currently working against liberalization of
abortion laws, in fact working toward having it declared unconstitutional
for a state to permit abortion, had better start working for the adoption
of Good Samaritan laws generally, or earn the charge that they are acting
in bad faith.
I should think, myself, that
Minimally Decent Samaritan laws would be one thing, Good Samaritan laws quite
another, and in fact highly improper. But we are not here concerned with the
law. What we should ask is not whether anybody should be compelled by law
to be a Good Samaritan, but whether we must accede to a situation in which
somebody is being compelled--by nature, perhaps--to be a Good Samaritan. We
have, in other words, to look now at third-party interventions. I have been
arguing that no person is morally required to make large sacrifices to sustain
the life of another who has no right to demand them, and this even where the
sacrifices do not include life itself; we are not morally required to be Good
Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another. But what if a man
cannot extricate himself from such a situation? What if he appeals to us to
extricate him? It seems to me plain that there are cases in which we can,
cases in which a Good Samaritan would extricate him. There you are, you were
kidnapped, and nine years in bed with that violinist lie ahead of you. You
have your own life to lead. You are sorry, but you simply cannot see giving
up so much of your life to the sustaining of his. You cannot extricate yourself,
and ask us to do so. I should have thought that--in light of his having no
right to the use of your body--it was obvious that we do not have to accede
to your being forced to give up so much. We can do what you ask. There is
no injustice to the violinist in our doing so.
7.
Following the lead of the
opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus merely
as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or not the argument we
began with, which proceeds only from the fetus's being a person, really does
establish its conclusion. I have argued that it does not.
But of course there are arguments
and arguments, and it may be said that I have simply fastened on the wrong
one. It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the
fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special
kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it
might be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant--for you do
not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist; Henry Fonda
does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. And our attention
might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to
provide support for their children
I have in effect dealt (briefly)
with this argument in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation
now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such "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, 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. They
may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to. And I am
suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it would require large sacrifices,
then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse--or anyway, a Splendid
Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so
would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so would
Henry Fonda, if he is a Good Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume
responsibility for me.
8.
My argument will be found
unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard abortion
as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible,
I do not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which
carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of
the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below. I am inclined to
think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a general yes
or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a
sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due
to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this
out is an insane law. And it also allows for and supports our sense that in
other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent
in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it,
if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance
of postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have been
drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion
in which the mother's life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought to have
made them suspect at the outset.
Second, while I am arguing
for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the
right to secure the death of the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these
two things in that up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not
able to survive outside the mother's body; hence removing it from her body
guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that
you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life
of that violinist, but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you
unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right
to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even if this costs
him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other
means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. There are some people who
will feel dissatisfied by this feature of my argument. A woman may be utterly
devastated by the thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption
and never seen or heard of again. She may therefore want not merely that the
child be detached from her, but more, that it die. Some opponents of abortion
are inclined to regard this as beneath contempt--thereby showing insensitivity
to what is surely a powerful source of despair. All the same, I agree that
the desire for the child's death is not one which anybody may gratify, should
it turn out to be possible to detach the child alive.
At this place, however, it
should be remembered that we have only been pretending throughout that the
fetus is a human being from the moment of conception. A very early abortion is
surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have
said here.
From Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1,
no. 1 (Fall 1971).
(Reprinted in "Intervention and Reflection:
Basic Issues in Medical Ethics," 5th ed., ed. Ronald Munson
(Belmont; Wadsworth 1996). pp 69-80.)
