PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Minehan, Matthew John
TI  - Moral status of the fetus and the permissibility of abortion: a contractarian response to Thomson’s violinist thought experiment
AID  - 10.1136/medethics-2020-106810
DP  - 2022 Jun 01
TA  - Journal of Medical Ethics
PG  - 407--410
VI  - 48
IP  - 6
4099  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/48/6/407.short
4100  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/48/6/407.full
SO  - J Med Ethics2022 Jun 01; 48
AB  - Judith Jarvis Thomson famously argued that abortion is permissible even if we accept that a fetus qualifies as a person and possesses a right to life. The current paper presents two arguments that undermine Thomson’s position. First, the paper sketches a contractarian argument that explores Thomson’s violinist thought experiment from behind a veil of ignorance, which suggests that if we had an equal likelihood of being an unwanted fetus and a pregnant woman, it would be rational for us to oppose abortion. Second, the paper discusses the hypothetical self-aborting fetus, a thought experiment that reverses the dependence relationship between a woman and a fetus. It is argued that in this scenario, where fetuses have agency of their own, Thomson’s position would counterintuitively prohibit a woman from temporarily curtailing the freedom of her fetus even to save her own life.There are no data in this work