The Violinist Argument is a famous thought experiment by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson in her 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion.” It’s often used by pro-choice debaters to trip up conservatives by presenting a double standard.
The truth is, the argument is flawed from the very get-go. This article will outline the conservative response to the Violinist Argument for abortion.
Table of Contents
The Violinist Argument
Imagine you are kidnapped and you wake up next to a famous violinist. You notice that you are strapped up to her because she needs your blood to survive, and your blood is the only blood she can accept.
The doctor walks in and informs you that if you remain connected for nine months, the violinist will recover and you can be disconnected without harm to her. However, if you choose to disconnect yourself before she recovers, the violinist will die.
The key question is: Do you have an obligation to remain hooked up to the violinist against your will, or do you have the right to disconnect and let them die?
The argument from Thomson is that if you have a right to disconnect from the violinist (a right to bodily autonomy), it shows that a person’s right to life does not automatically grant them the right to use someone else’s body to sustain that life. And by this logic, a fetus’ right to life does not automatically grant it the right to use the mother’s body.
At first glance, this argument sounds very convincing and tricky to get past for the conservative, but it’s actually super simple to get past.
The Conservative Response
This argument falls short in two main ways:
- Abortion is the intentional killing of another life, not just declining support: In the Violinist Argument, the intention is different. By willingly disconnecting yourself from the violinist, you are merely declining to save. Abortion is intentionally killing the baby. Unlike the passive act of disconnecting from the violinist, abortion is an active act of taking the life of the unborn child.
- The cause of death for the violinist is the illness, the cause of death for the baby is killing: When disconnecting yourself from the violinist, you’re simply returning the violinist to the state that she was before you connected to her, which leads to death. By contrast, almost every common abortion procedure, whether surgical (vacuum aspiration, D&E) or chemical (mifepristone + misoprostol), is designed to bring about the fetus’s death as the immediate goal, not a side-effect of withdrawing support. In abortion, the death of the baby is caused by an active intervention, not a mere return to a previous condition. Left alone the baby would be born.
Overall, the Violinist Argument really isn’t a solid justification for bodily autonomy in the case of abortion. Bodily autonomy ends where the baby’s life begins.
The Bottom Line
- Abortion is the intentional killing of another life, not just declining support.
- The cause of death for the violinist is the illness, the cause of death for the baby is intentional killing.