We had this in our philosophy class last year. Uhm, basically, it was an analogy that only worked in the case of rape. This has actually pissed me off enough to dig out my philosophy folder! I couldn’t remember the details and it was driving me mad. right. here we are:

It was an analogy written by Judith Jarvis Thomson to show that even if said foetus is considered a person you’re morally justified in killing it – i.e. you don’t have to accept the premise foetus != person (as I do, but hey.)
The only significance of the piano player (or as we had it, violinist – musical theme seems to be quite common!) being famous is that it makes slightly more sense (i.e. this is a person of world-renown they are desperate to keep alive, not just some random old guy off the street). Thomson’s analogy is that it is flawed in that it only applies to cases of rape (as the sex was not consensual, you had no way of knowing it would happen).
This analogy was modified by Jane English, who amended it to the scenario that this was an occasional happening in the world (i.e. people who go out and are rendered unconcious are aware that their body could be hijacked in such a fashion, should they happen to have an accident that causes them to lose conciousness), which makes the analogy work in cases of conventional sex – whilst you accept there is a risk this could happen and it makes sense to do everything to minimise this risk, i.e. take contraceptives (or in the analogy I don’t know, something like don’t walk across roads with your eyes closed, drink till you pass out, run into walls repeatedly, etc) you would still be entitled to unhook yourself.

So, there you go. It was actually intended as a pro-choice example, not just a philosophical thought experiment, especially in it’s current incarnation by English (the original was limited to cases of rape).

:)

If he could live and I detached him and let him die without medical treatment, clearly that would be a stark moral wrong. But if the only way that he could live was to be attached to me forever, and you think that me insisting that he be detached is murder, I think that’s absolutely fucking insane.

You seem to be implying that you think you’d have no obligation to someone that you put in deadly peril; but I don’t believe that you really think that, because you don’t seem to be the incredibly cold-hearted human being that you’d have to be.

If you had read my comments re: responsibility vs. punishment, you wouldn’t think that I was implying that. But I don’t really how to even begin responding to that and don’t see it going anywhere good, especially since I already covered your self-defense angles and certainly never advocated torturing a fetus, though even if I did my position would still hold as it would be no more right to torture the fetus formed by rape than the fetus caused by consensual sex. So I’m just going to have to walk away from this conversation.

If you injured an old man in a way that resulted in his being attached to you (not through human intervention, I mean, but somehow that’s how the accident turned out), and you then decided to detach him and let him die, that would at the very least be manslaughter, and I think it would probably be murder.

You seem to be implying that you think you’d have no obligation to someone that you put in deadly peril; but I don’t believe that you really think that, because you don’t seem to be the incredibly cold-hearted human being that you’d have to be.

As for “either the fetus has rights or it does not”, I disagree. Even real-me disagrees, as opposed to hypothetical anti-abortion me. Not all rights are absolute; I have a right to not get injured, but if I come at someone with a knife, they’re within their rights to defend themselves, even in a way that might injure me. In those circumstances they’re not under any obligation to protect my right to non-injury. (But if they knock me out, take my knife, and slit my throat, that’s probably murder.) And I think a fetus probably has a right not to suffer during an abortion any more than is actually necessary to perform the abortion safely (though I guess I’m venturing back into the hypothetical, since it’s unclear whether feti are capable of suffering). Actually, I suppose the same is true of animals: I think it’s O.K. to eat meat (though I myself choose not to), but I don’t think it’s O.K. to go after a deer and run it down with your car.

I think that if feti had rights (which anti-abortionists presumably believe they do), then a woman who had consensual sex and got pregnant would bear some responsibility for upholding those rights, in a way that a woman who was raped would not. By having consensual sex, she’d have taken on the risk of creating a fetus that she had to protect. It would suck, obviously, and it would be unfair (I mean, accidents usually have unfair results, but this would be up there), but she’d have that responsibility.

Again, either the fetus has rights or it does not. There is no self-defense with a fetus in either of these cases, assuming that we’re thinking of a hypothetical woman who could safely carry to term. Murder is murder is murder. But I think that your “risk of creating a fetus she had to protect” is revealing. Under this theory, you are essentially saying that het men innately have more sexual rights than het women.

Let’s use your car example. We’re not talking about money, we’re talking about physical consequences. So the correct analogy would be a physical injury. In getting behind the wheel of a car, I take the risk of being injured in an accident. And yet, I in no way feel that I take on the risk of being injured, arriving at the hospital and having people tell me that I have no right to be treated because I willingly got behind the wheel of the car and am therefore responsible for my injuries. People talk about having an abortion like it’s some kind of super fun way to avoid “responsibility.” It’s not, it’s just another form of taking responsibility.

In having sex, the only responsibility I take on is to my partner — making sure that consent is obtained, no one gets hurt, no STDs are passed, etc. This is why I believe it’s punishment: because the person who is being held “responsible” did not do anything that assumed taking up that responsibility. There are reasonable limits to responsibility, and there is a point at which you go overboard and turn responsibility into punishment — I believe that forcing a woman to give birth against her will is way over that line. And even if a fetus was a life worthy of rights, we still go back to the old man example — if I injure that old man, no one has the right to attach me to him and no one would ask me to.

And I honestly am not sure that they believe the “personal responsibility” stuff, even if it is a big part of their politics. The term “personal responsibility” is one that I am exceedingly wary of in politics, because it is one that has been used to justify all sort of horrible actions, to justify racist and misogynist systems and to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. The politics of “personal responsibility” work in their favor and it sounds a lot nicer than “if poor black people can’t support themselves, they’ll just have to starve.” That’s the thing — in politics, “personal responsibility” is code for “punishment” (i.e. the war on drugs) and for “I don’t want to give a certain class of people rights I don’t think that they deserve” (i.e. welfare reform, abortion, affirmative action, and so on).

Your claim that responsibility = punishment makes no sense to me. If I crash into someone’s car and damage it, I have a responsibility to help them get it fixed (usually by paying money, usually via insurance companies); but if someone else crashes me into their car, I don’t have that responsibility. Is this responsibility therefore a punishment?

I do say “almost a person” because if the fetus were really totally a person, then it would really suck for pregnant women that their choice would be between (1) trying to carry the fetus to term and (2) having it murdered. And that would be true whether the woman was a rape victim or not. I’m not saying that all anti-abortion belief systems would allow rape exemptions, only that it would be possible to believe a woman can have a responsibility to her fetus without that being a “punishment” per se. (And I’m not just talking in the abstract here; anti-abortionists fall into the same general camp that’s always yammering on about personal responsibility. They really believe this stuff.)

Forcing someone to undergo birth is a bit more than unpleasant. And though I’ve never been through it, I can assure you that it is up there in my top ten, maybe top five list of fears and that it would indeed be punishing.

If I believed that a fetus was really almost a person, I think I’d probably be pro-life but with a rape exception: a woman who contributed to the creation of the fetus would bear some responsibility for its protection in a way that a rape victim would not.

But again, it begs the question; if the fetus is a living person with a right to life, why does a person’s responsibility towards it determine whether or not it gets to live. Disturbing but exceedingly accurate analogy: a woman has two young sons, one the product of a consensual relationship, the other the result of a rape. I can’t think of anyone who would argue that the woman has a right to kill the child born of rape, and certainly not that she has a right to kill him more than her other son. But if we are to believe that a fetus is a person or “almost person,” there really isn’t any difference between this and saying that abortion is morally fine for cases of rape but not consensual sex. If you’re basing (or would base) an anti-abortion stance off of “responsibility” rather than a right to life by the fetus, it is indeed enacting a punishment.

Of course, I strongly disagree with both reasons, but I do find the former to be far more ethically problematic. Particularly, of course, because it takes two people to create a fetus, but only the female one of them is going to receive that punishment. Being forced to pay child support — hardly a guarantee, anyway for multiple reasons — is not the same as having your body held hostage by the state. Biological inevitability or not, it’s not okay to hold one person more responsible than the other and until we find a way for persons with male sex organs to become impregnated as a common side effect of het sex, that is what an anti-abortion stance does.

If I believed that a fetus was really almost a person, I think I’d probably be pro-life but with a rape exception: a woman who contributed to the creation of the fetus would bear some responsibility for its protection in a way that a rape victim would not. (Even then I don’t think I’d support an actual law about it, though, since anti-abortion laws don’t seem to save fetuses anyway. And I’m not sure most pro-lifers are really thinking rape exemptions through logically anyway; they’re probably just going with their knee-jerk/gut reactions. After all, why think when you can lobby?)