A little more than a month ago, a woman named Savita Halappanavar from Ireland died when she was refused an abortion and died from her miscarriage days later. Ms Halappanavar had gone to the hospital in severe pain and told she was going to miscarry the baby. The doctors told her the miscarriage would be over in a matter of hours, but the hours dragged on and she was still in pain. They asked for an abortion to expedite the miscarriage, but was told that Ireland was a "Catholic country" and they had to wait until the fetus' heartbeat had stopped before they could do anything. The fetus died three days later and was removed, but shortly after, the mother died from a blood infection. The husband is now suing the Ireland government.
This tragedy has sparked protests and re-examines Ireland's legislation for abortions.
 |
| Ms Halappanavar's death has sparked protests both in Ireland and worldwide. |
It is difficult to address the abortion on one level, because there are so many debates and views going on at the same time. Between pro-life views alone, there are different levels such as abortion impermissible only after the first trimester (as in the case of Roe vs Wade), abortion impermissible except in the cases of rape, or abortion impermissible except in the cases where the mother's life is in danger.
Judith Jarvis Thomsom makes a compelling argument for pro-choice in her paper "In Defense of Abortion." She relies on her now famous violinist argument, which is here:
"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. ... 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."
This is meant to be an analogy of the relationship between a mother and a child and a random person and a famous violinist. You're not obliged to keep him alive. It would be a nice gesture, it would be kind, but it is certainly not an obligation. So given the assumption that many advocates of abortion have made, that all persons have the right to life, that right to life outweighs your right to decide what you do with your body. What if it wasn't nine months, but was nine years instead? Would you be obligated to have a violinist latch onto you for nine years? Twenty years? Your entire life? That kind of conclusion seems a little preposterous.
An argument that proponents for the view that abortion is impermissible even when the woman's life is in danger is the argument that performing an abortion would be directly killing the child, whereas doing nothing would technically not be directly killing the mother.
But to complete the analogy with the case of the woman in Ireland, Thomson further elaborates with an extension of her original violinist argument:
"There you are, in bed with violinist and the director of the hospital says to you, “It’s almost distressing and I deeply sympathize, but you see this is putting an additional strain on your kidneys, and you’ll be dead within a month. But you have to stay where you are all the same. Because unplugging you would be directly killing an innocent violinist, and that’s murder and that’s impermissible.”
Can it seriously be argued that the woman must refrain and sit passively by and wait for her death? I constitute this as killing someone. I feel as if passive inaction is an action within itself (but that's a whole other debate).
Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, these are undoubtedly compelling arguments that as a philosophy major, I urge you to take a look at. There are too many debates based solely on faulty logic, ("Abortion is wrong because it is wrong." Have you ever heard of circular reasoning?), emotion ("Abortion is wrong because it's killing a baby! And babies are cute little humans!"), or religion ("Abortion is wrong because God tells us that all persons have the right to life, no matter what."). It wouldn't hurt to dig a little deeper and visit some of the philosophical debates regarding abortion before making a formulated opinion on abortion.
No comments:
Post a Comment