A Winning Argument?
Abortion’s Most Popular Thought Experiment
Judith Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971) has proven to be the most persuasive pro-choice thought experiment in academic circles, and there is not a close second. If you are going to take down one pro-choice argument, Thomson must be your intended target.
I never tire of studying or discussing her article, which is very clever and reveals many directions for further research. It is the most anthologized of bioethics papers. I have half-seriously quipped that Thomson is one of only two people who would have been (internally) justified in choosing to have an abortion at the time they were defending abortion in print. The other is Jeff McMahan, the author of what I take to be the best book-length treatment of abortion, The Ethics of Killing (2002). Fortunately for those of us invested in the pro-life cause, Thomson is no longer able to get pregnant and McMahan never could.
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David Hershenov is a professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo and also the director of the university’s Romanell Center for Clinical Ethics and the Philosophy of Medicine.
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