Recently, as part of our Pro-Life 101 series, Ben did a deep dive into bodily rights arguments. I highly recommend checking out that post before having a read of this one, as well as Ciara’s post on some responses to the Violinist argument. I want to come back to some of the common pro-life responses to bodily rights arguments that Ben dealt with in his post, and examine a few more.

One of the pro-life responses Ben addressed is the idea that in the case of pregnancy, the relationship is between a woman and her own child, and that parents have particular responsibilities towards their children that they do not have to others – especially to strange violinists that are hooked up to you against your knowledge and consent. Interestingly, Thompson herself addressed this concern – and didn’t address it the way Ben addressed it in his post.

…[the mother] has a special kind of responsibility for it [the foetus], a responsibility that gives it rights against her which are not possessed by any independent person–such as an ailing violinist who is a stranger to her.

On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother’s body only if her pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person whose existence is due to rape.

This, I think, is a strange response to the argument that a woman must remain pregnant against her will because she is pregnant with her child, and not with someone unrelated to her. First of all, it seems that the objection Ben pointed to in his post is far more intuitive and also more likely to be valid: yes, parents have special responsibilities to their children, but this responsibility does not extend to legally requiring parents to give bodily support to their children via organ or blood donation. The law imposes obligations on parents, but it stops short of imposing on their bodily autonomy, at least in those cases. If you want to argue that the law can impose the obligation of remaining pregnant on parents, then you have to justify why that imposition on bodily autonomy is justified while imposing on bodily autonomy by requiring organ donation is not (Ben outlines our justification in our other post).

Apart from the fact that we have a better objection, however, Thompson’s objection doesn’t seem to make much sense even on its own terms. She is asserting that parental responsibilities only apply when someone has consented to be a parent – but this is quite a claim, and is not justified. In fact, I would argue that people who aren’t parents often have responsibilities that we did not agree or consent to. For example, do children have any obligations to care or provide for their elderly parents? No one chose to be born, or to have parents who might need extra care as they age. Do we have any obligation to provide this care? Perhaps we do, perhaps we don’t – but I think it’s unlikely that the obligation would hinge entirely on whether or not we chose to have parents who require care.

To take another example, if someone is pregnant with a child, but did not consent to pregnancy, they can exercise their right to an abortion. On the other hand, if someone else is pregnant with your child, but you did not consent to that pregnancy, you cannot exercise any such right. In fact, should the baby be born, you are partly responsible for caring and providing for that child, and if you refuse, the law can and does intervene to require you to fulfill those obligations to your child, even if you never consented to having a child in the first place. This seems like a clear case of requiring a parent to discharge their responsibilities to their child, even if they did not choose to have this child. Again, you might argue that responsibilities to give bodily support are different from responsibilities to give financial or practical support – but once again, this argument rests on the assumption that it’s bodily support in particular that cannot be required without consent, rather than support of a child in general that cannot be required without consent. Again, this assertion should be justified, and we argue that it can’t be.

However, Thompson’s argument that consent to pregnancy is a relevant factor when determining the responsibilities towards the foetus is still quite popular…with pro-life people. In fact, this is another pro-life response to bodily rights arguments that crops up an awful lot. Quite often, when pro-lifers are searching for a reason to show why bodily rights in the case of the violinist cash out differently to bodily rights in the case of pregnancy, they point to the fact that pregnancy is a forseeable consequence of an action freely taken by the woman/couple: having sex. The idea is that when you consent to something, you consent to all the natural, forseeable consequences of something, and so pregnancy is very different from waking up and finding yourself hooked up to a violinist without your consent.

There are a few problems with using this argument against bodily rights based cases for abortion. First of all, as Thompson herself points out, this means abortion in the case of rape is perfectly permissable. This has a number of tricky implications for pro-life people. Secondly, Thompson again points out that consent to an action is consent to all forseeable consequences of an action has some pretty wide-ranging consequences:

If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house–for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.”

Of course, you can argue that the cases are not the same, and pregnancy as a consequence of sex is quite different from burglary as a consequence of opening the window – but again, why? What is the difference and why is it relevant?

This is not to say of course that the objections above are insurmountable – unlike the parental responsibilities argument, I remain open to the idea that you might be able to make a water-tight case of why consenting to sex means consenting to pregnancy and so explains why you can unplug from the violinist but can’t have an abortion. However, I am far more confident that it’s far easier, and more persuasive, and more defensible, to use the argument Ben made: the relevant difference between the violinist case and pregnancy is not actually anything to do with whether anyone consented or not. The relevant difference is the violinist case involves not saving someone, while an abortion involves killing someone. After all, I’d hazard a guess that Thompson, like almost all pro-choice people, does not believe that finding yourself hooked up to a violinist without your consent allows you to pick up a gun and shoot the violinist – you can unplug, sure, but you can’t turn around and murder him. Just as the fact that you’re involuntarily hooked up to the violinist does not justify killing the innocent, pregnancy, whether voluntary or involuntary, also does not justify killing the innocent.

Muireann