Louisiana, for the first time in 15 years, is trying to outlaw abortion. Emboldened by the appointments of conservative justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, anti-abortion activists everywhere are beginning to get antsy. But you can bet that this next round of abortion battles is going to be the same old fight, with the same old stalemate, unless both sides do some rethinking.
To guide us toward that, it might help to look back on the history of the abortion debate in order to determine exactly what needs to be changed and who needs to do it.
Judith Jarvis Thomson became a regular in philosophy textbooks everywhere when, in one of her more notorious thought experiments, she infamously likened pregnancy and the dilemma of abortion to being kidnapped in the middle of the night and waking up surgically attached to an unconscious violinist as his only means of life support.
Thompson, a modern icon among metaphysicists and moral philosophers, was attempting to obliterate once and for all the concept of the mother's "moral obligation" to the fetus. This alleged "moral obligation" has always been and will continue to be among the most intrinsic cornerstones of the pro-life argument.
I guess a more contentious point of debate -- or at least, the more simplistic and thus more commonly referenced one -- is whether or not a fetus is a human life in the first place.
But, just as Thomson does in her argument, let's assume for now that we can successfully argue that it is. At some point, surely, it does become one and, though the precise moment has still been left ambiguous by modern science, we can nonetheless extrapolate and argue within that realm.
Thomson and opponents of proposed partial-birth abortion bans contend that it does not necessarily follow from the fact that a fetus is a human life, as fragilely as we may be able to establish such a fact, that that fetus has the unfettered moral claim to the biological and emotional resources of its often unwitting mother. If the mother doesn't want to carry a kid around for nine months, she shouldn't be "morally obliged" to do so.
This is where the violinist comes in. Thomson argues that, just as if the Society of Music Lovers had hired a physician to surgically attach a famous violinist to your kidneys in order to save him from an otherwise (ambiguous) fatal condition, you have no "moral obligation" to provide him with free and open access to the resources of your body. This is especially true if it requires the kind of life-altering investment that pregnancy does.
I think the answer, much like the solution to the American pro-life movement's failure to gain any sort of traction in recent years, is fairly simple: fight the enemy on their own terms.
The pro-choice advocates are using much more widely appealing and universal concepts than their pro-life opponents, who often (and rightly so) come off as canonical kooks or dogmatically shortsighted cultists. Abortion rights advocates can reference a laundry list of alleged rights and democratic principles, like the "right to privacy," that any effort to criminalize abortion would surely and egregiously assault.
Pro-lifers, on the other hand, have equally potent ammunition at their disposal, but instead choose disastrously too often to flaunt a misguided devotion to religious fanaticism that makes them look less like legitimate players in an arena that includes icons like Judith Jarvis Thomson, and more like the self-righteous sideshow evangelists dispensing pamphlets outside the tent.
So what could abortion opponents be saying to people like Judith Jarvis Thomson?
There is a grossly neglected abundance of legitimate political and philosophical arguments the pro-life crowd could be making. Among them is the simple fact that, just as the very civil and democratic rights and liberties that pro-choice proponents love to invoke are derived solely from an agreement, or "contract," between two mutually willing parties, so is the "moral obligation" between mother and child derived from the fact that that child can only be and in fact was born into this world by his mother having engaged in an act solely intended to do so.
Arguments like these, of course, require a much more involved fleshing out than I can offer here: a flashy, absurdly stylized analogy embedded in a widely disseminated position paper on the moral philosophy of the topic will, as we have seen, do just fine.
--Sal Gentile is a sophomore Writing Seminars and philosophy major from Holmdel, N.J.
