The part of Christopher Kaczor’s book that I put in the readings does two things.
Laying out the core of his case against abortion rights.
Criticizing Thomson’s argument.
His case against abortion boils down to arguing that fetuses are persons with the right to life. His argument, in a nutshell, is that there is no satisfactory point in the development of a fetus that marks the difference between being a person with the right to life and not being a person with the right to life. The one bright line, in his opinion, is drawn at conception: before that, you clearly do not have a person (or anything, really) and afterwards, you have a person.
Of course, Thomson granted that fetuses have the right to life for the purpose of her argument. So none of that is really relevant to her argument. For that reason, we will concentrate mostly on the criticisms of Thomson. If Kaczor is successful there, then the next step would be to look more carefully at questions about when fetuses become persons, for moral purposes.
Thomson considers two kinds of reasons why abortion might be wrong.
It’s unjust. As she understands justice, this means it would violate someone’s rights.
It’s indecent. Indecency is a broad category, but, as she sees it, it includes at least selfishness and a refusal to act as a minimally decent samaritan would.
She argues that abortion is never unjust. This is what she believes the violinist example shows. Even if a fetus had the same rights as an adult, it would not have the right to use anyone’s body in order to stay alive. If abortion cannot violate anyone’s rights, it cannot be unjust.
Thomson concedes that some abortions might be indecent. Someone who wants an abortion in the seventh month so she does not have to postpone a trip would be acting indecently (Thomson 1971, 48).1
There are two questions about that. First, what counts as indecent behavior? Second, does “that would be indecent!” amount to “you have no right to do it!”?
The first question concerns how to draw the line between decent and indecent behavior. Thomson says that we should look at the distinction between what she calls Good Samaritanism and Minimally Decent Samaritanism. She thinks that we do not require people make the kinds of sacrifices for others that the Good Samaritan made: he took an injured stranger home and nursed him to health. We do require people to be Minimally Decent Samaritans. If you come across an injured stranger, you have to help.2 But almost no one thinks that you would have to spend nine months of your life nursing the stranger back to health. She takes it that this shows we do not really think that early abortions would be indecent. Or, at least, that it is not consistent with other things we believe.
That brings us to the second question about indecency. What if having an abortion would be indecent? Would it follow that there is no right to have one? Thomson thinks the answer is yes, there would be no right. It is true that she says that the boy with the chocolates has a right to hoard them even though doing so is selfish (Thomson 1971, 60). But she clearly regards indecent abortions as wrong. Sometimes, she says, “carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother” and this, she insists, is “a standard we must not fall below” (Thomson 1971, 65). I think it is clear that she is conceding both that there is no moral right to have such an abortion and also that it would be legitimate for the law to forbid it.
Kaczor has four criticisms of Thomson’s argument. They are all directed at the violinist example.
The first two challenge her assumption that you could unplug yourself from the violinist without violating the violinist’s rights.
The third and fourth arguments seek to show that the violinist case is different from abortion cases. Even if you agree with Thomson’s analysis of the violinist case, he thinks, you need not accept her conclusions about abortion rights.
Bodily integrity: abortion interferes with a fetus’s right to decide what happens in and to its body (Kaczor 2018, 150–51; compare Thomson 1971, 48), So at best there is a tie between two equal rights.
Consistency: suppose the violinist case was partly reversed and the violinist wants to disconnect from you in a way that would kill you. (Suppose there is a more congenial person to be connected to in the next bed.) If it would be wrong to do that to you, as he assumes you will agree, it would be wrong for you to do it to the violinist (Kaczor 2018, 151).
Intention vs. foresight (also known as killing vs. letting die): abortion involves intentionally killing whereas disconnecting from the violinist only involves foreseeably letting the violinist die from his kidney ailment. Since intentional killing is worse than foreseeably letting someone die, you cannot move from “it is OK to disconnect from the violinist” to “it is OK to have an abortion” (Kaczor 2018, 151–52; compare Thomson 1971, 64–65).
Parents have special duties: parents have duties to their children that exceed the duties anyone owes to a stranger. Again, what is true for a stranger like the violinist may not be true for your child and so the violinist example does not support her conclusions about the right to abortion (Kaczor 2018, 152–54).3
We are going to talk about those arguments.
I think that Thomson tries to put the duties of parenthood in the category of justice. She thinks that you gain the duties of a parent if you voluntarily take responsibility for a child and, when you do, then you have “given it rights” that you cannot take back (Thomson 1971, 65). That matches what she has been calling injustice: parents who do not take care of their children violate the children’s rights.
I wonder if Kaczor, when he is discussing parenthood, is operating in the territory of indecency. His discussion is all about the responsibilities of parenthood and has nothing to do with children’s rights, as far as I can see. He also thinks that these responsibilities are generated by a biological event: conception. That can happen, notoriously, even if no one willingly concedes any rights to anyone else.
Thomson thinks that no one is morally required to be a Good Samaritan.
Kaczor thinks that someone can be required to be a moral hero. That is why he thinks that abortion would be wrong even in cases of rape. It would be heroic to go through with such a pregnancy, he says, but it is still morally required (Kaczor 2018, 154–55).
How are we going to make progress here?
This is not something that we are likely to discuss, but since it comes up in the reading, I thought I would add a note.
Kaczor describes a case where abortion is necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life: the woman has a cancer that can be stopped only by a hysterectomy (Kaczor 2018, 155–56).
He says that operation would be morally acceptable even if the fetus died because the death of the fetus would be a foreseen side effect of the operation rather than the end (i.e. goal or aim) of the operation or even the means (i.e. way, necessary steps to achieving a goal) of saving the mother’s life (Kaczor 2018, 156).
I am going to leave it up to you to decide what you think of that argument. The only thing I want to point out is that this is not the only, or even the most common, kind of case in which abortion is needed to save the life of the mother.
I am not that kind of doctor, but based on a quick web search, it seems to me that preeclampsia is the primary threat to a mother’s life that is relevant to abortion. If you are curious, there is a good article in the New Yorker about it (Winter 2022). It was written because there was a spike of cases during the COVID epidemic, but it provides a helpful review of the condition in general that is accessible to laypersons. What I took away from it is that Kaczor’s kind of argument does not apply to abortions that are required to save the mother’s life from complications due to preeclampsia.
You might ask why we are not discussing Kaczor’s positive argument, about where to draw the line in fetal development between being a person with the right to life and not being a person with the right to life.
The answer is that it takes too long! His case involves taking up most of the proposed alternatives and arguing that they are all unsatisfactory. “The right to life begins at conception” is the winner not because there is a particularly strong case for believing it on its own; rather, it is the last position standing.
That is a fine strategy, but for classroom purposes, it would require us to consider at least a representative sample of the alternatives. That would take a while. Since we already have Thomson on record saying the whole debate is irrelevant, I decided that our time would be better spent on that arm of the argument.
If you are interested in Kaczor’s positive case, the book is available in the library. As a bonus, you can read an abortion rights advocate, Kate Greasley, who agrees with him about the shortcomings of Thomson’s argument. She argues with him about when a fetus becomes a person with the right to life. So you can see how the arguments about abortion are carried out by people who think that the question of when a fetus becomes a person really is the central one, contrary to what Thomson argued.
You will want to know Kaczor’s four arguments against Thomson.
The motive is important. It would be different if someone wants an abortion in the seventh month to avoid a significant risk of death.↩︎
This is certainly a moral requirement in our society. It is a legal requirement in some, but not all, jurisdictions.↩︎
Kaczor talks about an “intimacy argument” on page 154. I cannot find any reference to such an argument in his book. I think he is referring to an argument that he attributes to Dennis O’Brien. I think that the argument maintains that the decision to have an abortion should not be governed by the law because it is an intimate one. But that is conjecture on my part.↩︎