This metaphor was created by Judith Thompson in 1971 to explain why abortion is wholly acceptable even if the unborn child is every bit as human and has the same moral status as a born person. It is an argument of bodily integrity, and it goes like this:
“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 now is 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? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says: ‘Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’ “I imagine you would regard this as outrageous . . .”
(See this Journal of Medical Ethics link for the above crux of her argument and a summary of arguments pro and con, and read what appears to be the full essay here.)
It seems to me that we are now hearing the cry for “bodily autonomy” more and more. The focus on the “hard cases” is gone, as is the hardship women would face with unexpected pregnancies. Instead we hear, “women should be able to access abortion at any time and for any reason for the simple reason that that to be prevented from doing so is the equivalent of a ‘forced pregnancy’ or ‘forced birth’ which is a violation of the fundamental right of all people to bodily autonomy.”
At the same time, consider an anecdote, reportedly of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s assessment of what constitutes the beginning of civilization in ancient culture:
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. Broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.
This quote is almost as popular as her statement that we should “never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world,” and both of them have something else in common: there is no evidence that she actually said anything of the sort. (See this 2020 blog post, which observes that “Both are things she could have said, given her personality, but neither is fully attributed and that “The quote has a bit of ‘truthiness’ to it.” Another commentary observes that the first written source of this anecdote was a writer who had a practice of “remembering” anecdotes that would fit within his writings.)
But whether Mead said it or not, it resonates with us. I wouldn’t even call this a matter of a definition of “civilization,” and in that respect the anecdote fails, because in reality scholars already distinguish that people lived together in small bands well before there was anything like “civilization” which, after all, has as its root word “city.” It’s more fundamental — it’s a matter of “what does it mean to be human?”
Longtime readers with long memories will recall that back in my early blogging days, I wrote that what made humans exceptional was fundamentally, our morality, and that the Christian notion of “original sin” addresses this key turning point: if a lion has taken over a pride of lionesses and killed the cubs so as to impregnate the lionesses, no one would consider this a heinous, immoral deed. It’s just a part of the natural world. A man who abuses the child of his live-in girlfriend, on the other hand? We criminalize that behavior. At whatever point, far back in evolution, our distant ancestors become intelligent enough to make moral choices and to be held responsible for them, is that point at which we could reasonably say that those ancestors were “human,” in a far more meaningful way than whether they used tools or controlled fire or the like — it’s just that we have no way to time-machine our way back and define when that point would be.
And here’s another analogy.
Imagine that there are two survivors of a plane crash, or a boat marooned on a deserted island, Gilligan’s Island style. Think Tom Hanks in Castaway, but two — in particular, an adult and a child. Unrelated, mind you. Strangers. Imagine that the Adult Castaway, let’s call him AC, proclaims that she, or he, is a free person, and has no obligation to anyone. It’s hard enough to gather enough food and find fresh water for one person. It requires travelling all across the island, and the child is small, perhaps not even able to walk or at least not for long distances, and at the same time, the child can’t be left alone. Caring for that child is not impossible, but AC decides it is just not something that something he wants to do. The kid is whiny, wants his mom, etc.
But surely we would all agree that as a human being, AC has an obligation to care for that child, however much he would prefer not to be in that situation. There is no alternative caregiver and he cannot let the child die by failing to provide that care. Whether it is illegal or not is irrelevant because there is no legal system, but the simple fact of being a human being creates this obligation.
And so, too, is the case with pregnancy. The fact that there is a human being uniquely dependent on me creates the obligation to provide this care, because I am a human being.
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Are you persuaded?
To be honest, I drafted this post several months ago, and am now engaged in an effort to delete old tabs (among which are the links I used for this draft), but I never clicked “publish” at the time because the reality is that a distressingly large portion of the population is on board with abortion because they simply don’t believe any of it — that is, they don’t believe we have any moral obligations, that the law and social norms exist to ensure we have a relatively harmonious and functioning society, in a utilitarian sort of way. Yet at the same time, there is a considerable overlap between people who support abortion, at any time and for any reason, and those who advocate for social justice and decry oppression of every sort, and I can’t make too much sense of any of it. So there you have it — but I’m going to click “publish” and close out of those tabs and move on to the next draft until I have everything cleared out.
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