The Point

The Point: Abortion and the Violinist

11/24/17

John Stonestreet

Don’t get played by this smooth argument. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

If you’ve ever dug deeply into the debate over abortion, you may have heard Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous violinist argument for the pro-choice position.

You awake in a hospital and find yourself hooked up to a famous violinist, who needs your body to survive for nine months. If you unplug, the violinist will die.

Thompson compared this to pregnancy, and says a woman should be able to choose to remove her body from her baby’s. But as my friend, Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason says, the violinist analogy for abortion is not analogous.

For example, parents shouldn’t be surprised when sex results in babies. If the act was consensual, the parents are responsible for that baby’s existence, whether they intended pregnancy or not. No one just wakes up pregnant.

And for more on how to unstring this tough-sounding argument for abortion, come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary. I’ll link you to an article by Koukl, and one by my BreakPoint colleague, Shane Morris.

 

Image: iStock and pat138241

 

 

 

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