Qual

Abortion And Special Responsibilities
Michael Vossen

Are there any “special responsibilities” that would prevent a woman from having an abortion, assuming the fetus is a child? Judith Thomson, in her essay “A Defense of Abortion”, argues that there are not. Thomson claims, “Surely we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly.”1In this essay, I will consider whether this claim is correct, and whether abortion opponents could use such “special responsibilities”, which I take to be those responsibilities towards a child that come from standing in a certain relation to the child2, to establish their claim that “... the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.”3In doing so, I will show that special responsibilities towards a child allows for a stronger argument against abortion than Thomson recognizes. First though, I will look closer at the abortion opponent’s conclusion to determine what constitutes successfully establishing it, and consider the extent to which Thomson has defended against it.

In outlining the basic argument against abortion, Thomson writes that the conclusion to the abortion opponent’s argument is “So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.” 4As stated, the conclusion is unclear as to the sense in which abortion may not be performed. Does it hold that abortion may not be performed in the sense that it is impossible to perform an abortion? Surely not, since the opponent seeks to prevent women from having abortions, and it is silly to talk of preventing something from happening that can’t happen. So the conclusion is weaker than this.

As just suggested, the “may not” could be taken to mean that abortions should be prevented. While this is clarifies things, it still leaves unclear what should prevent abortions; is it the agent’s ethical motivations that should prevent her from having an abortion, or is it something outside the agent’s motivation that should prevent her from having an abortion? The former consideration falls under what is morally required or permissible for the agent. Call an action morally required if the action ought to be done insofar as the agent is a good person; it is the action that a good person needs to take in a situation to become or remain a good person. Likewise, call an action morally permissible if it is an action available to the agent in the situation given that she aims at being a good person.5 The later consideration falls under what is civically required or permissible for the agent; what actions an agent is required or permitted to do as a citizen under a nation’s laws. While Thomson does not seem to clearly distinguish between moral and civic requirements, such a distinction helps clarify her position.
Given this distinction, Thomson can be seen as holding that an abortion opponent must establish that an abortion is civically impermissible, and not merely morally impermissible.

One of Thomson’s central claims is that a child’s right to life does not entail the child’s right to use a woman’s body to live. While Thomson seems to establish this claim, she seems wrong to further conclude from it that “Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right to demand it [use of a woman’s body]-and we were leaving open the possibility that there may be such cases-nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.”6 Given that this principle is supposed to hold even in cases where all a person has to do to save a life is walk across a room and place their hand on another’s forehead, it is clearly false. There is a difference between a child having no right to share the woman’s body and morality not demanding of the woman that the sharing be done. While it may be true that a child has no right to demand that the woman let it live in her, the child has no claim to her body, given situations where the demand has little threat to the agent, such as simply walking across a room and touching another person, the agent ought to walk across the room and touch the forehead in so far as they are trying to be a good person.7 A person who knowingly allows another to die given that a minimal amount of action would save the other person is not acting as a good person would, and is probably acting immorally. Thus, the action is morally required, not because the child has a right, but because failing to perform the action is inconsistent with what the agent ought to do as a good person.

All this shows is that a woman who refuses a child use of her body in circumstances where the child’s life depends on that use and the use neither hinders her health nor sovereignty is not acting as morally as she could. As Thomson points out, there is nothing legally preventing people from not behaving as morally as possible. As such, Thomson should have claimed that while in certain situations abortion is morally impermissible; a woman who is trying to behave morally ought to help the child out, not out of any right of the child, but of her conscience, the moral impermissibility does not entail that abortion should then be civically impermissible too. While the women who choose to help the children are acting excellently, it is not civically required that they do so.

Thomson may have recognized this, but failed to state it clearly, for her discussion of a Good Samaritan and Good Samaritan laws recognizes that a person is acting less excellently when they do nothing to prevent someone from dying than when they help that person. 8Thomson seems to be arguing here that there should be Minimally Descent Samaritan laws-laws that set standards for how minimally moral a person must act- even though there currently are none, although this is not clear from the text. If she is making such an argument, it would explain why she takes herself to have shown that “There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below.”9, and abortion should not be allowed in these cases.

These considerations show that the conclusion of the abortion opponent’s argument needs to show that abortion is civically impermissible, and not merely morally impermissible for the argument to be successful.10 Thus, to meet Thomson’s demands, an argument based on “special responsibility” needs to establish that abortion is civically impermissible. Is there an argument that can do this?

Thomson seems to think that there is not, for she holds that “Surely we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly”.11 Thomson motivates her claim with the example of a burglar climbing into a woman’s house through an open window as a metaphor for a woman becoming pregnant because she chose to have intercourse. Thomson considers whether the woman has any special responsibility for the burglar, given he has entered her house against her will. Thomson concludes from this analogy that women who don’t want the burglar in their house don’t have any responsibility for the burglar, as the women are not opening the windows for the sake of burglars, but for a more pleasurable house.12 In other words, women who do not desire children are not responsible for children resulting from intercourse.

There are two problems with this claim. The first is that it appears false that the only responsibilities a person has are the responsibilities that he assumes. The second problem is that it focuses too much on the special responsibilities of the woman involved to the child, and not on special responsibilities anyone else might have to the child; it is not the case that the woman’s lack of desire for responsibility towards the child is the only desire that counts.
Regarding the first problem, sometimes people have responsibilities due to what they are despite their desires. For example, the argument that “I didn’t choose to be born” is not a defense against having the moral responsibilities that a human has. True, you may not care to have those responsibilities, but you have them nonetheless, and you are a good human or not depending on how you meet them, independent of your desires. In this case, responsibilities cannot be denied simply because the agent wants the world to be another way, because the responsibilities are demanded of the agent through what he is, not how he wants the world to be. The agent can certainly choose to ignore his responsibilities, but this does not prevent him from being judged as a bad human.

In a similar vein, sometimes people are entered into certain relations despite their desires. For example, a child sometimes says when told to share with their sibling “I don’t want him to be my brother, I wish he wasn’t born.” We might say that despite the child’s wishes, he is his sibling’s brother, and as a brother, he might have certain responsibilities towards his sibling. Whether this scenario is possible and what his responsibilities are depends on what it is to be a brother; if a person is a brother merely through a biological relation, than it is possible, and if sharing is constitutive of being a good brother, the brother qua brother should share.13

Such considerations present problems for Thomson’s burglar analogy. In Thomson’s example, suppose the burglar is not just some random person, but an uncle of yours. Although you don’t want that uncle in your house, do you still have no responsibility whatsoever to allowing him use? Perhaps more than the burglar, at least, for the uncle is family. Further, suppose it is a more immediate family member. Your mother has taken ill, and needs to spend twelve months in your house to recover, during which you’ll have to take care of her. Do you still have no responsibility towards this person, even though they have come over uninvited and unwanted? The burglar analogy seems less intuitively appealing when the person in the house is family.
Does being a mother give a woman any special responsibilities towards a child? To answer this, it should be asked what it is to be a mother. What makes a person the mother of a child? Well, it seems minimally true that a person is the mother of a child if they nurture and raise the child as it ages. Here, nurturing consists in part of providing for the child’s welfare. While this can be done better or worse, it is surely inconsistent with providing for the child’s welfare to knowingly let the child die when it is possible to prevent this. Further, a person is a good mother if she does the things that make her a mother well, and a bad mother if she does not. As letting a child die when it is possible to prevent this is a failure in nurturing the child, if a mother allows this to happen, she is not mothering well, and hence is not a good mother.14 Thus, if a person is the mother of child, they have a responsibility towards the child insofar as they are trying to be a good mother.

Thomson would probably agree with this analysis, but may disagree if it was added that a woman is mother in virtue of her biological relationship to the child. A biological relationship may not be essential to being a mother; a person may have to choose to be a mother to be a mother.15 Further, a pregnant woman may chose not to be a mother; after all, she took precautions against this. To this argument an abortion opponent might reply that not all responsibilities are chosen; it may very well be that the woman who is with child is still a mother despite her wishes. If this argument is motivating, then an abortion opponent has room to argue that a woman has responsibilities as a mother to avoid the abortion. Also, if mothers are civically required to provide for their children to a certain extent, then there is reason to hold that some abortions may not be performed. Given that the biological relation establishes motherhood, this would preclude abortions due to rape.

Let us grant Thomson’s argument for the moment though. Even if a woman is not a mother unless she chooses to be, special responsibilities still present a problem for the defender of abortion. This is due to the second problem with Thomson’s claim; a mother is not the only person who new special responsibilities come about with the existence of the child. A man may also have special responsibilities to the child as its father. These at least include the same responsibilities of the mother; the father is responsible for the child’s welfare too. Thus, the father of the child will want to prevent the abortion insofar as he is a good father, and ought to do what is in his power to prevent it. Further, by the child’s very existence, mothers become grandmothers, fathers’ grandfathers, brothers’ uncles and sisters’ aunts. All of these people now have a relation to the child, and they may gain special responsibilities towards the child’s welfare that may demand of them that they do what is in their power protect the child. While kidnapping is probably inconsistent with these people’s moral responsibilities, putting pressure on civic leaders to enact laws to prevent abortion is not.

Finally, there is still one other entity with a special responsibility to the child: the state. If protecting the welfare of citizens is constitutive of being a good state, and fetus is a citizen of the state, then it is the responsibility of a good state to protect the welfare of its unborn children. And unlike Thomson’s moral requirements, the state can demand that a person make large sacrifices of health, interest and concerns, other duties and commitments for a long period of time. The state regularly asks of citizens that they submit themselves to draft where in the case of war they are required give up commitments, interests, concerns, other duties, and possibly health. If the state is justified in asking that citizens suited for war go to war in order to protect the welfare of its citizens, it would also be justified in asking woman to allow children to use their bodies for a period of time, in the interest of protecting the new citizens.
So, even if a woman who does not desire a child has nothing morally requiring her not to have an abortion, a state that desires the child will have responsibilities towards it, and this may require the state to take measures to prevent the women from having an abortion. True, the woman is not required to accede to the state’s demands, but the woman’s refusal does not give her any special status; she is as any other person who refuses the state’s demands. The state requires people to be good citizens of the state, not good human beings, and people are bad citizens in failing to meet the demands of the state, and bad people in failing to meet the demands of morality.

Thus, I have argued that “special responsibility” considerations provide a stronger argument for abortion opponents than Thomson acknowledges. An abortion defender dissatisfied with this argument would need to consider what is constitutive of a good state and show that there is a conflict between the state’s responsibility to both the child’s welfare and the woman’s autonomy, and that the conflict should be resolved by in favor of the woman. Further, they might consider whether the state is justified in demanding citizens make sacrifices, and what responsibility a citizen has towards state. Finally, as Thomson’s notes, all this is under the assumption that a fetus is a child, and abortion defenders still can deny this.16

Notes

1. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 65.

2. I take special responsibilities to be those responsibilities towards a child that come from standing in some relation to the child, such as being the child’s mother. See pg 64 for support, esp. “...but that it (the child) is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother.”

3. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 48.

4. Ibid, pg. 48.

5. Thomson sometimes talks as if it is the event that is morally permissible, and not an action an agent. I think it is clearer to talk about the actions of the agents involved in the event, as it seems awkward to think of an event having permission to happen.

6. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 61-62.

7. Thomson even seems to agree with this claim, for she writes that in an analogous situation with a violinist“...you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he needs...”Pg. 61. It is unclear in what sense you ought to do this other than a morally required ought.


8. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 62-63.

9. Ibid, pg. 62-63.

10. At least by Thomson’s standards. Thomson’s defense of abortion would not work against a modest abortion opponent, who is trying to show that abortion is merely morally impermissible.

11. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 65.

12. Ibid, pg. 59.

13. It should be noted that in these cases, conclusions about people’s actions as brothers do not necessarily tell against them as humans, unless it is constitutive of being a good human to be a good brother.

14. Given that it may be easier or harder to provide for the child’s welfare, in circumstances of great difficulty-such as putting the mother’s life at risk, it may not be that much of a failure, as there is not much that the mother is safely able to do; the mother can fail in varying degrees, and this may make her more or less of a bad mother. Likewise, circumstances beyond her control do not affect her status as a mother.

15. A Defense of Abortion, pg. 64: “But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it.

16. Ibid, pg. 66.

Works Cited

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion”. Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Autumn, 1971), pp. 47-66.