In her article “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson builds a compelling argument for the protection of women’s rights to abortion by referring to a hypothetical world-class violinist. The author introduces the idea of imagining a person suddenly finding themselves attached to a transfusion cord that keeps the violinist alive. In other words, the life of a violinist depends on the fact of being attached to the body of another human being. In this case, the violinist is a metaphor for a fetus, while a human to whom the violinist is attached represents a pregnant woman. Thompson argues that while it might be immoral to disrupt the chord between the person and the violinist, which would result in the violinist’s death, it is ethical for them to do so since the person has the right to live independently.
The most serious objection to Thompson’s argument might be the one addressing abortion as a killing of a child, given that the fetus is considered a human being from the moment of conception. In such a manner, the most ethical thing would be to preserve life instead of disrupting it. The way Thompson might respond to such an objection would include the articulation of the presence of multiple cases of pregnancy due to rape, which jeopardizes the well-being and life choices of a woman who did not volunteer to be a mother. Overall, it might be assumed that the objection will not succeed since the human-being status of a fetus is subject to objections, while the life of a woman who was raped and bears an unwanted child is objective. Despite the in-depth ethical discussion of the issue of abortion and women’s rights, this debate remains open.