Resolved: Abortion is morally impermissible

Thank you Unitedandy for this challenge to debate the morality of abortion. It’s great to debate somebody as intelligent and well-read on this topic as you. In this first round I will provide my own argument for abortion and in the next round will present some objections to the arguments put forth by Pro.IntroductionIn this debate I will argue that abortion is generally morally permissible. My argument in defense of abortion will not rest on claims about the metaphysical or moral status of the fetus. I will grant, for the sake of argument, that the fetus has the same right to life you and I have. But deny that accepting this claim demonstrates that abortion is impermissible. With that said, let me begin.Prenatal Moral StatusMost arguments against abortion focus on the right to life of the fetus inside the woman’s body. Opponents of abortion claim that the fetus is a valuable human being with a right to life, and that abortion unjustly kills them. Thus, the central argument against abortion can be formulated as follows:P1) The human fetus has a right to life.P2) If the human fetus has a right to life, then ending its life is morally impermissible.P3) Abortion ends the life of the human fetus. C) Abortion is morally impermissible. If the fetus does in fact have a right to life, it would seem that abortion would clearly be very wrong indeed. However, I want to suggest that this belief is mistaken.The Violinist AnalogyThe argument I will present today comes from a philosopher by the name of Judith Thomson in her 1971 article entitled, “A Defense of Abortion.” In that article she puts forth an analogy in order to demonstrate how even if the fetus has a right to life, it doesn’t follow that this entitles the prenatal human to whatever is necessary to keep it alive. The analogy runs as follows:“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?" [1]The point of the analogy is to elicit the intuition that, even though the violinist has a right to life, this doesn’t mean you must go through a substantial burden in order to preserve his life. Other things being equal, Thomson claims we are not morally required to make large sacrifices of our bodily integrity in order to keep others alive. After presenting the analogy Thomson concludes that, just like it would be permissible to unplug oneself from the violinist, so it would also be permissible for a pregnant woman to remove the fetus from her body. It should be noted that virtually everybody, including those who oppose abortion, agree that it would be morally permissible to refuse to provide continued life support to the violinist. Therefore, if this argument is to be refuted, opponents of abortion must be able to point out a morally relevant difference between the violinist analogy on the one hand, and abortion on the other. Admittedly, most people, including those philosophers who are pro-choice, think the violinist analogy is a bad argument. They think there are too many morally relevant differences between it and abortion for the analogy to be successful. I myself used to think the same thing. However, now I think the disanalogies that people try to point out are not genuinely morally relevant, or are morally relevant but do not apply to abortion in the way that critics have claimed. [2]Conclusion In this debate I’ve presented Thomson’s violinist analogy as a moral justification for a woman’s choice to have an abortion. Unless my friend Unitedandy can give good reasons for believing this analogy is bad, it is reasonable to believe the argument demonstrates that abortion is morally permissible.Sources:[1] http://spot.colorado.edu...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org...