Soleydi Minaya
HUM 2225
Prof Martinez
October 30, 2017
The Abortion
Mother Teresa once said “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may
live as you wish”. When considering the topic of abortion, up to this day, people have argued
their thoughts on whether this displays a moral or immoral act. Two philosophers whose
opinions and analogies have been used to argue for and against abortion are Don Marquis and
Judith Jarvis Thomson. Marquis’ argument against abortion and Thompson’s semi-pro abortion
argument can be used to discuss the morality of people like Mrs.Smith, a wife and mother of two
children. Even on contraception, she finds herself pregnant and because she does not feel ready
for a third child, she decides to have an abortion. Mrs. Smith’s decision to have an abortion is not
morally justified due to the following three reasons: she was fully aware of the risk she was
taking with the contraception, she is obligated to attend to the child beyond the initial nine
months of pregnancy, and she would also be depriving a potential human life from its valuable
future.
Although Mrs.Smith was using contraception, she was fully aware that contraception
does not prevent a pregnancy 100% of the time. In cases of failed contraception, Thomson offers
the people-seeds and the burglar analogies in which she describes that having consensual
intercourse does not mean that the potential child has a right to use a woman’s body for nine
months, specially when it is clear that precautions and different measures (like contraception)
have been used in order to prevent this from happening. The people-seeds analogy describes a
scenario in which people-seeds fly around us in the same way that pollen would. Since the
person does not want children, they try to protect their home from things coming inside by
putting the best mesh screens that they could find. Even though the person took the precautionary
measure, somehow,“one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root”
(Thomson, pg 444). This seed then begins to grow and the person is left to ask themselves if they
are responsible for this people-seed growing and if it is their job to take care of it due to the fact
that in a way, the person caused this to happen. Similarly, in the burglar analogy, Thomson
describes how one day, you might leave a window or a door accidentally opened , and a burglar
gets in. In her opinion, it wouldn’t make sense for a person to just accept the fact that a burglar
has entered their house.
