ABORTION DEFENSE OF ABORTION

The main pro-life against abortion argument goes like this: Killing a human life is wrong and a fetus is a human life; therefore, killing a fetus is wrong. However, the debate is always surrounded by the second premise which is: at what point of a pregnancy is a fetus a human being. As medical science and technology progress, the line might shift back and forth. For the sake of this argument, I will neglect the second premise; I will say that a fetus is a human being at the time of conception. Now, we will have to re-examine the first premise. In this paper, to show that killing a human life is justified under some circumstances, I wish to use the experiments which were used in A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson while making some modifications to her experiments; therefore, I will show that abortion is justified under some circumstances.

In A Defense of Abortion, Thomson uses an experiment to illustrate pregnancy in cases of rape.