Related Ideas

Review these ideas and then use the BACK key on your browser to go back to the page you were on.

Many critics have questioned Thomson's analogy. Think about these questions:

Does her analogy break down if a woman wanted to become pregnant and later changed her mind? Does her analogy break down if a woman did not want to become pregnant but took no steps to avoid it? What if the woman used birth control and then knowingly took the associated risk of becoming pregnant? Can she, in this case, deny all responsibility for conception? Does it matter? Does the analogy break down if the child (unlike the violinist) must be killed in order for the mother to withdraw support?

Some legal scholars have shown sympathy for Thomson's argument. Laurence Tribe, for example, has pointed out that American law seldom requires persons to sacrifice themselves for others. We would not require a parent to donate a kidney to a child even if the child needed it to live. Is this like the case of supporting the embryo or fetus?

But perhaps parents acquire obligations to their children that limit their other rights. Does a mother's right to control her body allow her to stop breast feeding her child and let it die? If not, why? And remember: we are asking if she has a right to do so, not whether it is a good thing to do. Is her right to withdraw her body limited by an obligation she acquired by placing the infant in a state of dependency? What about the fetus?

There have been many other criticisms of Thomson's argument. Baruch Brody agrees with part of what Thomson says. If an embryo were conceived in a laboratory and needed a woman's body to survive, no one would be obliged to donate her body. But this helps us very little in the case of natural pregnancy, where the woman must kill the child to regain the use of her body.

Michael Tooley, who is quite sympathetic to abortion rights, points out that unlike the case of the woman and the kidney patient, most women engage in sexual relations knowing that they may become pregnant. For this reason they bear at least some responsibility for their pregnancy and we cannot avoid considering whether the fetus is a person. What do you think?