In her essay A Defense of Abortion Judith Thomson uses the example of someone being sick and needing Henry Fonda to touch them to save their life as an example of a need not representing an obligation on someone else’s part analogous to a fetus’ need for their mother’s body to live not meaning the mother is obligated to allow it use of her body.
Here’s the relevant excerpt:
“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.“
My question is is this a valid analogy for the moral permissibility of abortion?
If we disregard abortion and interpret the absurd scenario literally would Henry Fonda (or any other person) be morally obligated to touch someone if touching them was the only way to save their life?
No, but what bothers me about this analogy is that touching someone is a trivially easy act. Carrying a child to term and giving birth is several orders of magnitude more difficult.
It’s not valid at all. Henry Fonda has no part in this person’s life. Henry Fonda is not responsible for their well-being in any way.
It may be trivial for Henry Fonda to touch your brow and heal you but then how many brows can Henry Fonda touch? Since he cannot touch all brows how does he decide which to touch? Is Henry Fonda now obligated to touch all the brows he can for the rest of his life?
Hijack but when was this essay written? Because it seems weird for an essay recently written to refer to someone who’s been dead for a long while. On the other hand, I suppose it’s safe to say that his hands are cool.
There is no entirely valid analogy because there is nothing else quite like the situation of pregnancy.
When a person is pregnant, the embryo / fetus / baby is simultaneously a life form unto itself and a part of her own body.
I do remember reading the essay decades ago and thinking it was though-provoking and might have an impact among people who were brought up thinking abortion was evil.
Let’s see… if someone is hooked up to a comatose patient who needs a constant connection to that specific person’s circulatory system in order to recover, and that recovery will take nine months, should the healthy donor be required to remain hooked up for that entire time?
I think it’s an imperfect analogy but basically valid. Henry Fonda has autonomy over his own body, and he alone decides what he does with it. Henry, obviously, is the pregnant mother in this analogy, Judith the fetus, dependent upon his agreement to provide what’s needed for her survival.
And, of course, the analogy is enormously different in what is needed from the potential benefactor. I think that’s the point. However much we’d think it a shitty choice if ol’ Henry wouldn’t give up an afternoon to fly out and complete such a trivially easy task, most people would likely agree we simply can’t kidnap him and force him to. How much more of an ask, the analogy suggests, is requiring a mother to carry to term.
Another analogy: Someone is a perfect match to provide a stem cell transplant for a cancer patient, and he’s the only one. Again, we might be appalled if such a person refused such an easy request as providing a bit of blood. But I’d guess that most of us would still agree that it’s up to him.
It’s this logic (and specifically the second analogy when I read it in an abortion opinion piece) that brought me around to what is basically a pro-choice position. And I was a vociferous pro-life debater 20 years ago when I joined the board. I was literally a single issue voter as well.
In my heart, virtually every abortion is tragic. That’s my morality. I believe in natural duties, just as I do natural rights. Reducing suffering and / or protecting the innocent is an obligation I take seriously. I won’t even eat meat.
But that’s on me. If I wouldn’t legally compel someone to give up a bit of blood, I won’t compel someone to carry a fetus to term, however tragic that is to me. It’s not my body, and people get to decide for themselves what they do with their own.
Although I agree with some of the comments above, I’ll add that it doesn’t matter in the least. We can’t reason a solution to the abortion debate with philosophical arguments.
Seems perfectly valid to me. If I was sick and could be cured if Henry Fonda touched me non-stop for 9 months at risk to his own life or possibly never being able to touch anyone else and cure them then I’d expect him to spend that 9 months touching me. Especially if I were just going to die anyway. I would want the government to force anyone that can cure a person by touching them to do the same thing because I’m not only incredibly selfish but I want everyone else to act like they are that selfish also. The only flaw I see is the idea that that the ashes of someone who died over 40 years ago probably lack curative powers.
And so, for example, I don’t agree with the term “pro choice”. I don’t think abortion is a choice. Nobody wakes up and chooses to have an abortion. It’s an unfortunate outcome that results from bad circumstances. I’ve spoken in my life to a few women who have had the procedure; none of their memories were particularly pleasant.
And, yes, I believe that life begins at conception. It’s not sentient life, but it’s a more reasonable starting place than when the baby (by that point usually fully developed for some time) emerges from the mother.
But with that said, I’m still not in favor of criminalizing, or even outlawing, abortion.
Try to make it unnecessary? Yes, absolutely!
And that’s why I support making birth control (and the morning after pill - which prevents conception from happening after intercourse) readily accessible to all women of reproductive age. And we should give them, and their male peers, comprehensive sex education before reproductive age (yes, I meant what I wrote).
But make it hard for a woman to obtain a safe and effective abortion? Absolutely not! Circumstances will always arise to create the need, no matter how much you try to prevent it. And why should we add misery on top of medical necessity when a person seeks help?
So I say remove the stigma and make it available. And if you create better conditions for women, you can reduce the need, and ensure that the vast majority of abortions that do occur happen very early, before the fetus can experience pain.
I once worked as a tech under a pharmacist who refused to fill Plan B scripts. She didn’t confiscate the script, as one pharmacist would notoriously do later, but she’d turn away young women who came up to the counter. Some of them looked like they’d been roughed up; not assaults reported and Plan B administered at the ER along with the rape kit, just the usual sad story.
One morning, while we were filling in the overnight faxes, she told me how uncomfortable her policy made her feel. But her religion meant more to her than whatever her experiences caused to her. A hard line that wasn’t up for debate. On one side her concept of the divine, on the other a swirling noise of panging thoughts.
Me, Mr. Joe Useless College, tried to replace the concept of debate with that of dialectic. On one side a thesis, on another an antithesis. Instead of a victor, a synthesis. Find a way to plant the seed for a new viewpoint on the issue to grow.
She looked at me like I was pretending to translate Greek into Bantu.
I didn’t think it did. I was just trying to extrapolate on the point: you can believe in legal and accessible abortion and think it a tragic outcome for a pregnancy, one which we should be trying to minimize. But we certainly don’t do so by just outlawing it and hoping that solves the problem: it doesn’t, and we know it.
If I tried to analogize my feelings to the OP’s analogy, I’d say it’s like if Fonda, despite his best efforts at seclusion, finds himself stumbling upon a person trapped at the bottom of the gorge, having fallen off a cliff after going around the turn.
Should Fonda help? Sure, we hope he does. But we shouldn’t be relying upon Fonda, or any other random passerby, to be the solution to people falling off the cliff. Put up a damn guard rail, so people like Fonda aren’t so put upon.
I agree it is best to minimize the number of abortions via sex education and use of various forms of birth control.
I do not think it is always tragic though. Sometimes it is. But not always and I do not think it should be broadly characterized as such. It makes seeking an abortion an always bad thing. Which it isn’t.
I believe that every abortion ends a life. Perhaps not every death is tragic, but I would venture to say that few, if any, deaths are pleasant for those involved.
I know someone who had an abortion after being raped. The rape was tragic, that it caused a pregnancy was tragic, she did not consider the abortion tragic. Carrying the scum’s baby to term would have been far more tragic.
And it is telling that those who claim to be anti-abortion do not go full in on effective sex education or the easy availability of birth control. At least then they would be consistent.
That’s what my Mom did, and the results were pretty tragic. She’s always been pro-life, and when pressed, once burst out, “If I had to go through that, so should everyone else!”
I’m not saying I wish I hadn’t been born, because I don’t wish that. But I think I’m exactly the sort of case where abortion would have been a better option for all concerned, including me. If it’s going to take an unwanted child half of their natural life to finally feel like life is worth living, is that really something to aspire to?
Pro-lifers want babies to be born in a perfect world where they are desired and appreciated, but this is almost never the case when a consideration of pregnancy termination is on the table. It requires substantial cognitive dissonance to promote life in an environment that will be hostile to that life, as evidenced by a cousin of mine, who once announced, “It’s easier than ever to be a single Mom right now, there are so many supports and services available.” Because that’s what you have to believe in order to condemn an unwanted child to life.