Why is it absurd?
Why not put her in jail?
If her pimples are so bad that she is suicidal, and decides that it’s OK to deform her baby to get rid of her pimples, then maybe she shouldn’t be having a baby.
The crux of the argument seems to be 1). The anti-abortion argument is that 1) is true, and the pro-choice argument, at least mine, is that honest people differ on whether 1) is true, and, since it is undecidable (outside of the fetus chatting like in the comics) people should be able to make their own decisions.
Given 1), I could even argue for 4 in the case of a fetus, since the violation of bodily autonomy could be said to happen at conception. We could then get into a very interesting birth control argument.
I don’t think it’s that absurd. Her choices (first to take the medication, second to carry the fetus to term) sentenced a person to a life of horrible deformities. She had two chances to avoid that outcome, one of which still would have gotten rid of her suicide pimples. If she attacked the baby moments after birth and caused the same deformities, we’d all recognize that as atrocious; I don’t think she deserves any credit for doing the same thing a few months before birth.
You’re apparently referring to Judith Jarvis Thompson’s analogy. I think it fails to adequately capture the horrificness of the abortion issue for numerous reasons. Among other things, it treats the fetus as a stranger who has deliberately imposed himself on the woman, rather than the woman’s own innocent child – a being that was created by the woman herself, and who had no choice in the matter. (Dr. Francis Beckwith discussed this analogy more thoroughly here, and in his classic text, Politically Correct Death.)
And of course, the ‘horrificness’ is contingent on 1) the foetus is a person which, as Martin points out, looks increasingly silly as we gradually move back in time to the life that is the seperate sperm and egg.
Singing ♪♫ “It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to…”
The point is that Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “famous violinist” argument simply does not hold water. She claims that one is justified in killing the unborn even if it is a person, but her arguments are fatally flawed for numerous reasons that Francis Beckwith enumerated.
Now, if you want to argue that the unborn is not a person, or not a human being (depending on your choice of battleground), then that’s a separate matter altogether. Either way though, the “famous violinist” argument becomes irrelevant.
zev_steinhardt your conjoined twins example led me to a contradiction, as the answer seems to be that the twins must decide for themselves. But then who speaks for the fetus? If the mother has such authority then it would seem that she should be able to decide if they (mother and fetus) can come to a mutual decision to end the fetus’ life.
If we deem the state can supercede on this decision then they should be able to decide, which we do have precedent on this as parents authority can be superceded by CPS’s.
Can you list some of those arguments for those of us who don’t want to buy that book?
Already listed in the previous article that I cited. If you’d rather not buy the book, then may I recommend a public library? Any decent US library should be able to procure this text, since it’s fairly well known.