Does the Violinist Argument Prove Abortion Rights?

The violinist argument is one of the most powerful, classic arguments in favor of abortion, famously brought forward in an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Strangely enough, it’s also one of the less known, in popular circles. One reason that it is so persuasive is that it builds its thinking on common ground between pro-life and pro-choice views of human rights, specifically the natural rights flowing out of the enlightenment. Because pro-lifers will generally accept rather than critique Secular Humanism and its view of rights, the violinist argument is able to expose the fault lines and inconsistencies of pro-life rhetoric, and persuade people of the seeming reasonableness of abortion. Abolitionism, on the other hand, dismantles both the pro-choice and pro-life views of human rights, because we stand on the word of God as the foundation of human value and purpose.

Thomson’s violinist argument reads,

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. 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. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. 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.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

The violinist argument most naturally fits with the concept of abortion in the case of rape, which Thomson grants, and which many pro-lifers grant as acceptable (though Christians should not). But she then extends it effectively enough to abortion for other reasons.

My response to the violinist argument will center around a treatment of the subject that I heard from Stephanie Gray, a pro-life Catholic woman, concerning the purpose and design of a woman and her womb.

Despite our broader ideological differences, I do think Gray’s response to the violinist argument is essentially accurate, though unelaborated. My purpose here will be to lay the groundwork necessary for it to be received in its full force.

The violinist argument centers around a view of ethics that balances weightier and lighter rights, perceived or real, that the woman and her child have. The person with the most weighty collection of rights has the right to determine what to do in the situation. As mentioned above, Thomson is operating on the philosophical groundwork of her opponents, attempting to show that even a pro-life view of ethics (i.e. humans possessing a right to life from fertilization onward) should lead to support for abortion.

My purpose here is to bring to bear one of the lesser-known correctives that the abolitionist movement brings to the abortion debate, namely that humans do not actually possess intrinsic rights. We have responsibilities before God, and an important and protected role in creation, having been created in his image and likeness (Gen 1:26-27). But we don’t actually have, for example, a right to life. In at least the fall of man, we forfeited any right to life, and are all now under a collective judgement of death, living only by the continued grace and forbearance of God as he calls us to repent unto eternal life (Rom 6:23). And even in our creation, the value ascribed to human life is external rather than intrinsic to our frames of dust, an expression of the value that God places on the image he stamped into us. God has full authority, as our creator and source of value, to kill mankind or make him alive (Job 1:20-22), and to authorize others to do so (Rom 13:1-5).

The idea that humans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” comes from an enlightenment attempt to secularize certain Christian ideals as Christianity began to subside in its impact on culture. Thus the Declaration, in catering to both the many Christians and the comparatively few but powerful Deists in the country, used language that was essentially amenable to both groups, if a bit imprecise. At the time it was probably a minor and unknown failure on the part of the Christians to more precisely nuance our view. But over time, it has yielded a view of ethics in America and beyond that justifies things like the violinist argument by granting to humans unalienable rights that then must be weighed against each-other, leading ultimately to the entitlement generation in which we are all now swamped. The abolitionist contention is therefore that protection of humans, in its most precise form, comes from duty and accountability rather than intrinsic rights.

Any system of ethics that attempts to separate moral from immoral behavior in the world relies on an assumption of essential meaning to the things in the universe, such as persons and the behavior they produce. Four groups are of note in our day.

1. Very consistent and rare atheists and naturalists will understand the conclusions of their system, and assert that there are no true ethics in the universe in an ultimate sense, only those expressed as compacts among people.
2. Less consistent and common atheists and naturalists will posit or assume ultimate morality without attempting to justify this belief on the grounds of their system.
3. Masses of people professing a variety of religious beliefs will engage with life as practical atheists and naturalists, being inconsistent with both their professed religious/philosophical beliefs, and with the ethical implications of their true system of naturalism.
4. Christians with a consciously theistic epistemology and philosophy will ground their thinking in the idea that a personal, transcendent God created the universe, assigned meaning to its various parts, and thereby established the necessary foundations for an ethical system that describes its proper use. This same God then is understood to have revealed himself to mankind in the history recorded in the Bible, giving in the scriptures an inspired and inerrant revelation of his character and standards, and his solution for our disobedience to those standards in Christ Jesus, among other things.

Other kinds of people may exist in the world; this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list. But it should be noted that Christians of the fourth group argue for a classification of two essential religions in the world, those whereby order and meaning are developed from Chaos through a process of evolutionary change (e.g. the Greek pantheon, religion of evolution, etc.), and those whereby order and meaning are imposed on Chaos from an outside, personal and transcendent source (Judaism, Christianity, etc.). Addressing the major subclassifications of the Chaos religions is beyond the scope of this paper, but the problems with each should be addressed as part of establishing an airtight case for theism as necessary to meaning in the universe, and consequential “rights” (or duties) on the basis of that meaning.

Without meaning, human activities like rape and murder become relative in their moral quality to particular circumstances, tastes, and preferences.

For example, why is it acceptable to kill and eat plants, whereas it’s unacceptable to kill and eat humans? If the biological world is merely an arbitrary, chance-driven collection of chemical reactions that produce results beneficial to particular organisms, then how can we assign any moral distinction to the killing of a human versus the killing of a tomato plant? Both should be considered “murder” if there is no distinction of meaning between the two. Pain is irrelevant, being only an illusion generated by chemicals in one organism that finds pain useful. Complexity is merely a matter of degress. When there is no meaning to a particular organism or other orgaization of chemicals, there can be no moral distinction between them.

Culture can assign that meaning. If on account of our superior consciousness and abilities of collective organization, a community of humans ascribes to its own kind special protections over and above those granted to tomato plants, then within that human society the killing of a human could be considered immoral, and the killing of a tomato plant acceptable. But a competing society, like an alien race, or a different human colony, may arbitrarily create its own moral code that permits the killing of humans. Thus Nazi Germany and antebellum America should be viewed as operating morally on their own terms, if society is the source of morality. There is no way to look at their treament of humans as immoral, because there is no ultimate meaning given to human life beyond the limits of a particular society and its law codes or other expressions of consensus.

Without ultimate meaning, ethics becomes an expression of the personal tastes of the strongest society, and the strongest creatures in that society, the ethics of the fittest. Protection of the less defensible creatures becomes less likely, and (like all ethics) ultimately arbitrary and irrelevant, because all life is arbitrary and irrelevant. So if e.g. men gain sufficient power in a society to deem the rape of a woman to be acceptable, this can’t be viewed as morally wrong, because there is no meaning to woman, to her will, to man, or to any constraints on acceptable behavior. We are merely chemicals reacting together. There’s no true distinction between chemicals of sexual intercourse operating in the context of a consenting and loving marriage relationship, and chemicals of intercourse operating in a non-consenting assault of power and personal pleasure. It’s just the universe carrying out effects from causes, with the existence of people and their concerns a meaningless accident of brute factuality.

Thus without a consistent philosophy that logically shows meaning to exist in the universe and its various aspects, especially as it concerns persons and the behaviors they willingly produce, there can be no foundation for human rights (if they exist), or human value, or constraints on behavior that protect human life. Ethics requires meaning, meaning requires design, and design requires a transcendent designer, namely God. If a philosophy wishes to dethrone God while maintaining meaning and ethics, it must be able to successfully produce transcendent, unchanging meaning without Him. Meaning that evolves from Chaos is subject to change, and therefore ethics will always be subject to change, permitting things like rape and murder on the basis of a new context.

A few diverse religions posit the existence of a transcendent God, though fewer than most would think. I’m aware of the big three – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Mormonism’s gods are not transcendant, despite using Christian language and scriptures. I don’t know enough about Jehovah’s Witnesses to know if their conception of God is truly theistic.

As a Christian, I of course have no problem with biblical Judaism. Christians believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah of Jewish scriptures, and that there is no true contradiction or religious distinction between the God of Jewish scriptures before Christ, and the God of Jewish scriptures written at the time of Christ, namely the New Testament. The rejection of Jesus at his advent is best characterized as a sectarian split within Judaism, rather than the advent of a new religion. The new sect accepted Gentiles on principle, which is why I’m included. But our faith is (properly understood) a sect of Judaism, rather than a distinct religion, issues of historic elaboration and confusion notwithstanding. Islam, on the other hand, is a distinct religion without that kind of historic bond with Judaism or Christianity, despite its borrowing from those sects.

Judaism then is the true source of theism (i.e. monotheism) in human history. Perhaps more precisely, on their own history, this should be traced back to pre-Abrahamic times, ultimately to Adam. So then the best conception of the matter is that in Judaism, we have the oldest instance of scriptures which document the battle between theism and humanism (or more broadly chaos religion) dating into antiquity. Theism then is owned by all of mankind, but is particularly preserved in and by the special people who God chose for himself (Exo 19:5-6). For the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to this historic religion as “Christianity” to include what I believe is a legitimate extension of Judaism at the advent of Jesus in the first century as her Messiah, while excluding Islam, Mormonism, and other religions that fail to provide evidence for their supposedly continued extensions of Christianity.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed himself to mankind through creation (Rom 1:20), as well as through history in many well-documented and well-evidenced interactions with mankind. To a degree far beyond every other religion, Christianity postures itself as a falsifiable religion. It makes claims about history that may be vetted and verified, such as the life, death, and resurrection of a man named Jesus who fulfilled many prophesies and presented himself as the Messiah of Israel. These are not claims that exist in a vacuum, they are claims about history that is well-documented.

Some evidence of course may be reasonably dismissed as something that conspiring man (or angels, etc.) can produce. God’s history of revelation to mankind can be well-summarized in Moses’ relationship with the Egyptian magicians, who tried to mimic and thereby dismiss God’s work to show himself sovereign over all other so-called gods. To some extent, they could reproduce the miracles of God. But in the end, the one who holds all creation in his hand can and will overcome those who try to dismiss him as mere trickery.

So too, man can explain away some of the evidence. Jesus ensuring his crucifixion on Passover can be explained through the intentionality of his self-presentation as Messiah. But how do you explain the empty tomb, and the seemingly genuine belief of hundreds of followers who claimed to see him after his death, then died their own brutal deaths in defense of that claim? As evidence is added together, the cumulative case for significant points in Christian history (like the resurrection) rival the evidence we have for the most well-accepted facts of ancient history.

So you have this God, who presents himself through history as a force that cannot be easily explained away, however much the magicians may try. This God then makes claims about human ethics which he says must be followed upon pain of eternal death. Finally, in light of our own failure to keep his commands, he comes to earth himself as the promised Messiah and lamb of Israel to take the punishment we deserve, and transform those of us who will follow him into a people who, over time, will become increasingly faithful to his ethical code.

In light of this evidential history, other religions of the world offer competing views on the question of ethics. These may be addressed by the Christian in two ways. First, most may be dismissed as Chaos religions, which we have shown fail to provide requisite meaning to the universe as a precondition of ethics. Second, those that remain must provide evidence that their conception of God (or other transcendent source of morality) is actually the God who created and judges this particular world in all of its history.

As far as I’m aware, Islam provides evidence for theism in e.g. their kalam argument (though not Islamic theism), evidence which Christians appreciatively borrow and use. But it fails to show that Allah can rival the Christian God in (especially) his prophetic power, or other lines of evidence. God speaks of the future in his word, with many prophecies that have already been fulfilled in great detail, demonstrably centuries after the prophesies were spoken. As our God said through the prophet Isaiah,

Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Isa 46:8-11)

Set forth your case, says the LORD; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified. Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing; an abomination is he who chooses you. (Isa 41:21-24)

While ethics can and should include protections for the weak, certainly the God who created and assigns meaning to the universe must be the most powerful of all, showing dominance over any other gods perceived therein. The God of the Bible shows humility, allowing competing gods to present their case without his destroying them immediately. But as his rivals threaten the world, the meaning, and the order he created, he shows his power for what it is, in particular acts of judgement, and the arguably greater power of prediction and predestination. What can a person or god do, when his whole history is in the hands of his rival? In all of our attempts to deify ourselves, man in the end must and will bow the knee to the God of Israel. We will never rival his power over history, however advanced we may become in our own powers of fallible prediction.

In short, any man or god which seeks to challenge the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must demonstrate an equal mastery over history and its course, showing his or her power in the real world in which we live. Otherwise, the power of assigning meaning and ethics must fall to our God as the most rational choice within the bounds of theism. Outside of the bounds of theism, there is no foundation for ultimate meaning or ethics.

This brings the discussion onto the foundation of the biblical worldview. If ethics can only be justified on theism, and if biblical theism is the most justified version of theism on the balance of evidence, then the question of human and abortion rights must be resolved on the grounds of the biblical worldview. Concerning the violinist argument, we need to understand the similarities and differences between the violinist and the child in light of God’s purposes for mankind.

Whereas the Greeks saw order and deity emerge naturalistically from Chaos, the biblical God imposed order on chaos from outside creation, through his spoken word. While chaos wasn’t evil in the moral sense, being an aspect of his first created work, God ultimately viewed the disordered world as not yet good, not the result he ultimately intended.

Thus for six days, God spoke order into creation, bringing forth various elemental distinctions in the environment, and ultimately the biological creatures that would come to inhabit the heavens and the earth. Finally, on the sixth day, he created a special creature that would exert sovereign dominion over the earth, namely mankind.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:26-28)

Notably, the central purpose that God gives to mankind is to continue his work of subduing chaos. God gave us the basic building blocks of civilization, creating food, work, animal helpers and environmental stewards, human and animal reproduction, natural resources in the earth, and perhaps some other things. But then he left the work of further ordering this world to those creatures he designed to be his representatives on the earth, man and woman.

Thus we see a distinction between the simple garden of Eden described in Genesis 2, and the sprawling city of New Jerusalem described in Revelation 21-22. Man through his civilization is intended to work and keep the garden in particular (Gen 2:16), and the whole world ultimately (Rev 21:24-26), bringing the whole earth under the cultivated order centered in Eden, living in faithful submission to the one above man, namely God.

This purpose of course was marred by the rebellion and fall of man in Genesis 3, but the dominion mandate still presents to us God’s essential purpose in creating man, to be a subordinate and partner in his work to subdue chaos.

This understanding of man’s purpose and meaning brings forward a key weakness in the violinist argument, namely the reason that there is a connection between two people The violinist is connected to his benefactor because of disease, which is a product of the fall. The child, on the other hand, is connected to his mother because of creation, in fulfillment of God’s purpose for humanity to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” So on the one hand, the violinist is connected to his benefactor as a matter of Samaritan-like compassion (to use Thomson’s language) for a stranger who is facing death in a fallen world. On the other hand, the child is connected to his mother as a fulfillment of God’s purposes of reproduction in the dominion mandate, with an added relationship of responsibility inherited from it.

To put it another way, all of the man-to-man ethical responsibilities and nuances demonstrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luk 10:25-37) are present in both scenarios, but the mother and the father receive an additional responsibility toward their child on the basis of the dominion mandate’s provisions for human reproduction. So if a mother is unwilling to carry her child to term for reasons that would justify passing a man dying on the side of the road, she and the father still have a responsibility to their child on account of God’s design for human reproduction. They have a man-to-man relationship with with their child that brings specific obligations from the dominion mandate that are not shared by other man-to-man relationships, such as the scenario with a stranger presented in the violinist argument.

An example of this relational distinction can be seen in a problem that sometimes surfaces in the abolitionist community. An abolitionist parent can be so active in trying to rescue children from abortion that she neglects her own children in their needs of education, general love, and attention, etc. If we’re doing a calculation of proper priorities that equalizes all relationships in terms of man-to-man duty of care, then the mother should obviously prioritize saving the lives of the children being aborted, because a child’s life is more important than a day with your own child at the park. Because we have so many masses of children being killed by abortion, there will always be a more urgent case of care than what can be presented for one’s own children.

Biblical ethics bring balance to this issue by recognizing a distinction between the duties we have for strangers, and those we have toward our closer relations. For example, Paul writes,

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1Ti 5:8)

So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. (Gal 6:10)

In the first quote, Paul establishes a particular duty concerning people who are closely related to us, especially those within our respective households. This is justified on account of the way that God created mankind to operate as a collection of distinct families rather than a large mass of equal relations (Gen 2:24). Like the cellular structure of our bodies, humanity at large is cellular, with immediate responsibilities toward one’s spouse, children, and parents, and with broader and lesser degrees of care owed to the neighbors in one’s general and national vicinity, etc.

Similarly, as described in the second quote, we also have responsibilities to those who are related to us spiritually, through the new birth brought in the second dominion mandate (Mat 28:18-20, Jhn 3:1-21). We are to care for fellow Christians first, then from the overflow of our ability, show compassion to all neighbors according to their needs.

So in the parable of the good Samaritan (often cited by Thomson in relation to her violinist argument), we see that the Samaritan had resources to help the one dying man in his immediate vicinity. It was a sacrifice for him and his family to give into this need, but it wasn’t a sacrifice that essentially undermined his faithfulness to his family, as far as we are told. Thus scripture allows it to be seen as a duty that the Samaritan rightly fulfilled, extending his localized duty of care to a stranger, but only insofar as it didn’t compromise his weightier responsibilities.

This helps us to better understand the distinction of responsibility that we see in the violinist argument. A man who was kidnapped to save a violinist is responsible to that violinist according to normal obligations of man-to-man care, insofar as his weightier duties are not compromised. A mother, on the other hand, is responsible to her child according to those same man-to-man duties of care owed to a stranger, as well as the weightier parent-to-child duties of care that are given through the dominion mandate.

Simply put, we expect and require parents to feed and clothe their own children. We don’t expect them to feed and clothe all of the children in the world equally. This is because parents bear a special responsibility for their own children on account of the purpose and design of God for marriage and family, concerning the localized/cellular way in which humanity is to take dominion over the earth.

The violinist argument provides an excellent analysis of the problematic nature of the right to life, which I agree with in Thomson’s initial formulation of the right. She writes,

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to be precisely the source of the mistake.

For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to have a right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the West coast and brought Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier, the fact that for continued life the violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has a right to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you that you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your kidneys unless you give him this right—if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due. Nor has he any right against anybody else that they should give him continued use of your kidneys. Certainly he had no right against the Society of Music Lovers that they should plug him into you in the first place. And if you now start to unplug yourself, having learned that you will otherwise have to spend nine years in bed with him, there is nobody in the world who must try to prevent you, in order to see to it that he is given some thing he has a right to be given.

Christians should have no difficulty agreeing with Thomson that there is no “right to life” intrinsic in humanity, either in the pre- or post-fall world, according to the normal sense of the term. We are creatures who were given life as a gift by God, and we have no intrinsic claim to it.

I would appeal to impersonal forces like hurricanes and old age to demonstrate this fact. When a hurricane hits a city and kills 20 people, a tragedy has occurred, not an injustice. When a grandmother dies in her bed, a sad event has occurred, not an injustice. Neither the grandmother nor the twenty hurricane victims held an intrinsic, unalienable right to life that must be respected and actively defended by all other humans and the omnipotent God, for such people and God to be considered just. Rather, temporal and eternal life is a free gift from God, a blessing, not our due.

The biblical protection for life (specifically human life) is defined in Genesis as repercussions for the slaying of a human being who is innocent of any capital crime (Gen 9:6). Rather that grant human beings a right to life, God restrains human and animal behavior such that you cannot kill an innocent human with impunity. This is the essential point of attack for the violinist argument’s second formulation of the problem.

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In their view, it does not include the right to be given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But here a related difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that violinist, then everybody must refrain from doing a great many different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from slitting his throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him—and everybody must refrain from unplugging you from him.

Thomson’s second version of the right to life errs in that it equates withholding care with active killing, which is the very distinction her opponents are making. Slitting the violinist’s throat and shooting him represent active attempts to end his life. Unplugging from him on the other hand reflects the first understanding of a right to life, withholding provision of something he needs in order to live. It is the kidney disease that is killing him, not the removal of your own kidneys from applying their services to his needs. As Thomson later notes, if the violinist miraculously recovered from his kidney ailment, he wouldn’t then be killed by failing to be plugged in. However he would presumably be killed by a bullet or a knife wound.

To rightly apply this distinction to the subject at hand, we should recognize for clarity’s sake that abortion manifests both of these ethical problems in most of the techniques used to end a pregnancy, though not all. Typically, abortion involves both the destruction of the child (killing), and the subsequent removal of the child from her mother’s womb (withholding care). Yet certain forms of abortion at earlier stages of pregnancy are able to rely on normal ovulation to perform the second aspect of removal without active killing, so that the death of the child occurs naturally.

Concerning biblical categories, these two aspects of the process correlate to two aspects of a biblical ethic of life distinctly. First, no one is to intentionally end the life of an innocent human being (Gen 9:6). This correlates to the stabbing and shooting of the violinist above, as well as surgical and chemical abortions that actively kill a child. Second, parents possess a duty of care toward their children prior to emancipation (1Ti 5:8. 2Co 12:14, Gen 2:24). This relates (aside from the relational aspect) to the unplugging of the violinist from one’s kidneys, as well as abortifacients that prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, such as the birth control pill, plan B, and even IUDs.

Importantly, when abortion is accomplished through starvation rather than the active killing of a child, the exclusive ethical context is parental duty of care. This still relates to the killing of innocents, but in a different way. Because this is the concern of the violinist argument, I’ll focus exclusively on this second aspect, as it applies to both the violinist and the child. But it should be recognized that abortion frequently involves not only withholding care, but also the active killing of a child, so biblical prohibitions against murder apply directly.

An example of the killing versus withholding care distinction can be seen in the parable of the good Samaritan. Biblical ethics views a distinction between the sin of the men who attacked the dying man (killing), and the men who ignored him (withholding care). The first group was guilty of attempted murder (Gen 9:5-6, Deu 19:21), whereas the second was guilty of a general failure to love, specifically to offer compassionate, life-giving help in the face of oppression (Isa 1:11-17). If both groups of men were held in Jewish trial, only one group would be charged with criminal activity and intent. The others sinned, but they didn’t commit murder or any other crime punishable by man.

So in the case of the violinist, the worst charge that could be laid against his benefactor upon unplugging himself from the man is that he failed to offer compassionate, life-giving help. Notably, the violinist is sick, not oppressed, so that removes some amount of duty laid upon the shoulders of the benefactor in terms of biblical mandates that speak to this issue. But a charge to compassion is still present, on the basis of man-to-man compassion alone, and should be felt and respected by the benefactor. However, this can and should be balanced by the other duties he has to his family, his church, other institutions with which he has a covenantal relationship (school, business, etc.), and perhaps even to himself in terms of wise conservation of money, mental health, and preparation for future service to the Lord.

For a Christian, a viable possibility would be to remain connected for a time, to show compassion and care, to build out a rapport and relationship, leading ultimately to the sharing of the gospel with the violinist. Earthly life is temporary for everyone, regardless of duration. So the greater gift that can be given is the knowledge of God, his law, and his forgiveness, as well as a demonstration of godly kindness that will help to lead the man toward repentance, while communicating that his death will happen regardless of the connection at some point in the future. Having shown his requisite duty to the man, and hopefully more than the minimum required by man-to-man ethics, the Christian can then disconnect himself with a clean conscience so that he can minister to others.

In such ways, the duty of compassion can be expressed to a man with no other claim to the benefactor’s time and kidneys than general, balanced, man-to-man compassion would induce.

Parents of children, as we’ve observed, have a specific and heightened duty of care. In an attempt to isolate this issue, the most exemplary situation I can think of is the exposure of children in Rome. This was a situation faced by the early Church where mothers would birth their children and abandon them in the forest, and Christians would go in to rescue them. Like the Good Samaritan, this is a situation where one party harmed the victim criminally, and the other party operated out of a lesser duty of offering compassionate help. Unlike the Good Samaritan, the crime was not unjust homicide, but rather a refusal to feed and clothe the child and protect her from the elements.

We’ve already demonstrated that this kind of abandonment is morally wrong, in that the parent has a special duty to the unemancipated child, on account of the dominion mandate and God’s structure for family. An interesting but unessential question to this debate then is whether or not this abandonment should be classed as murder. It’s wrong for a different reason than traditional homicide, but the result is the same.

Concerning abortion proper, would it be murder to simply induce labor, cut the umbilical cord, then leave the child exposed and dying outside the womb? The question of a fetus’ viability is less important to this issue, since no child is viable (able to survive) outside the womb without a parent’s help and resources for many years. In any case, the child dies naturally, because the parent refused to provide the necessary conditions of life.

Placing this with homicide under the umbrella term of “murder” would involve showing that both homicide and exposure are wrong for the same reason. I’m not sure that my thinking is clear enough to be taken seriously on this count, so I’ll emphasize again that this is a side issue about classifying criminal behavior, rather than determining the morality of the behavior; abandonment of unemancipated children is already demonstrated to be wrong.

But I will attempt to say that it’s murder in the biblical concept if and only if it involves malice against the child (Mat 5:21-22). It may still be a capital offense, and probably is on account of the value God places on those who bear his image, and the duty of care that he gives to parents as they propagate that image in their children. But perhaps it may be more properly understood under the term exposure rather than murder, for clarity.

No, the violinist argument makes a false comparison between the child and the violinist. We can acknowledge that Thomson is right to criticize a right to life given to all human beings, and the pro-life movement’s frequent appeal to this fictitious right. None of us has an intrinsic right to life that must be elevated above all other considerations. We come under special protections and provisions on account of the value that God places on human life, but we do not receive such protections and provisions unalienably on account of our own nature or merit.

With that said, the parental duty of care undermines the violinist argument. Parents have a limited but real responsibility to create, work, and tend an environment wherein their children can grow into emancipated families that collaborate in the extension of God’s dominion over the earth. This includes a mother’s provision of her womb as the only environment wherein her preborn child can grow into sufficient maturity for birth. It also includes a father’s duty of care to support his child and her mother. While general compassion for humanity should lead us to extend limited kindness to people in difficult circumstances, the weightier duty of care owed by parents to their children does not extend to dying violinists, so this breaks the ethical parallel between the violinist argument and abortion.

To this point I’ve defended the special ethical relationship between parent and child against the violinist argument, on the basis of God’s design for family and human dominion, and I believe I’ve done so with reasonable efficacy, at least in terms of paving a basic argument. But I’ve learned that in this culture war, it isn’t enough to merely defend Christianity. You need to show the problems in the religion that’s trying to replace it in the west.

Autonomy is a good word to describe the essential nature of atheistic (i.e. non-theistic, naturalistic) morality. Over the last century or so, Christian apologetics has developed an increasing awareness of the central issue plaguing mankind from Genesis 3 onward, that the severance of our respective wills from God’s authority leads us to pursue autonomous human decision-making with unlimited freedom. Because we reject God’s authority, we seek to establish ourselves as the ultimate, autonomous authority to replace him, with such humanism expressed either individually (anarchy) or corporately (totalitarianism).

Bodily autonomy posits a form of the humanistic faith that centers around individual freedom rather than the will of corporate man, aligning it more closely with anarchy. For example, Thomson writes,

I suppose that in some views of human life the mother’s body is only on loan to her, the loan not being one which gives her any prior claim to it… But I shall simply ignore this possibility. My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body. And perhaps this needn’t be argued for here anyway, since, as I mentioned, the arguments against abortion we are looking at do grant that the woman has a right to decide what happens in and to her body.

Every writer on ethics faces the inevitable choice of which issues to pursue, and which to leave unargued; certainly I’ve done as much in my survey of religious categories, and probably elsewhere in this article. So I won’t criticize Thomson for leaving out a defense of her central presupposition. The omission merely situates the violinist argument as an in-house discussion within Secular Humanism between those who support or oppose abortion, rather than something to compete with the Christian worldview.

Thomson rightly identifies that pro-lifers will usually join with pro-choicers in debating the issue from Secular Humanistic presuppositions, such as the grant of bodily autonomy to men and women. This is why abolitionists insist that Christians must sever themselves from the pro-life movement ideologically and institutionally, because the humanism of the pro-life movement is idolatrous in its presuppositions, and the conclusions and strategies it produces are therefore often destructively anti-Christian in nature, despite the superficial resemblance to Christianity and its ethical system.

In any case, despite the in-house nature of the violinist argument, I would like to interact with Thomson’s religious presuppositions to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of her ethical system, and the anarchic result that it produces.

The violinist argument, which seems to be representative of the broader bodily autonomy faith, situates a series of presupposed “natural rights” (right to life, right to liberty, right to the pursuit of happiness, etc.) around a core right to bodily autonomy, which controls and limits the others. Thomson writes,

The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right of life. It reappears in connection with all the other natural rights, and it is something which an adequate account of rights must deal with. For present purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would stress that I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life… I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body—even if one needs it for life itself.

There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive someone of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother are jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the box and refuses to give his brother any of the chocolates, he is unjust to him, for the brother has been given a right to half of them. But suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed with that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being unjust to him, for you gave him no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have given him any such right. But we have to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violinists, like everybody else, have a right to life, and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to be killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not act unjustly to him in doing it.

The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violinist has a right to life with the fact that you do not act unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you do not kill him unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you do him no injustice…

I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life of that violinist, but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him.

In the cases described (the violinist and the mother with child), the natural rights view has two rights in conflict with each-other, the right to bodily autonomy, and the right to life. For Thomson, the essential resolution of this conflict is to claim that the assertion of one’s own right to autonomy at the expense of another’s right to life is not a violation of the other’s rights, because the right to life is limited so that only unjust killing becomes a violation (similar to the Christian view). Injustice then takes two forms, the intentional ending of a life when there is no conflict of rights (slitting the throat of the violinist), and the revocation of bodily use once the benefactor has authorized use of her body to the dependent.

On the latter point, Thomson gives further insight into her understanding of rights in response to the essential argument I’ve made in this paper, about the special relationship between parent and child. She writes,

It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant—for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist… And our attention might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to provide support for their children.

I have in effect dealt (briefly) with this argument in section 4 above; but a (still briefer) recapitulation now may be in order. Surely we do not have any such “special responsibility” for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse—or anyway, a Splendid Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist.

For Thomson, the human’s right to bodily autonomy may be amended by a willing commitment (implied or explicit) to extend one’s body to the service of another. Once this commitment is made, it may not be revoked (until I suppose the child’s emancipation into adulthood), presumably on account of an assumed ethic of promise-keeping. This is why parents of born children are held accountable for neglect, whereas parents of preborn children are free to abort (i.e. evacuate) the child and thereby neglect its continued nourishment and development.

Rights are therefore either intrinsic and natural (right to life, right to bodily autonomy, etc.), or conferred by other parties within the bounds of a covenant (right to use one’s body, etc.). The natural rights are limited by the concept of justice, which in turn gives priority to the highest natural right of bodily autonomy.

This means that people who would otherwise have a right to life, or a right to liberty, etc., might be justly brought to death or slavery if the prevention of that condition would require another person to forfeit his/her bodily autonomy. However, forfeiture of bodily autonomy may be enforced upon an unwilling host under a prior commitment made by that host that created a legitimate, dependent relationship which establishes life, liberty, and other natural rights for the dependent. Failure to honor that commitment then turns what would otherwise be a just revocation of life or liberty into unjust death or slavery, etc., on account of the broken commitment.

This discussion raises the question, of course, as to what confers natural rights. Why do they exist? And why is the provision of irrevocable rights performed in the way Thomson describes?

No reason is given in the violinist argument, and no reason can be given on a naturalistic worldview, as I’ve argued previously. Without universal meaning spoken from an outside source, nature cannot produce its own universal meaning and moral code, because nature, its meaning, and by extension its moral code (natural rights) are all subject to unending change. For all we know, “nature” may find human life to be disadvantageous to its nonexistent goal of self-ordering, due to our chaos-inducing weapons of mass destruction, or some other thing. If rights are conferred to humanity by nature today, they may just as well be revoked tomorrow, for any number of reasons, and completely within the bounds of nature’s ever-shifting moral code.

But we can set aside the arbitrary nature of this ethic, especially as I’ve granted it to be an internal discussion among humanists. The same argument is laid against just about any aspect of the humanist faith, so there is little value in echoing what is elaborated earlier and by other apologists, beyond the acknowledgement of the issue, and a brief description of it.

More interesting is an analysis of the impact of bodily autonomy as a basic and controlling right.

First, like evolutionary thought, bodily autonomy centers its ethical priority around the individual rather than some kind of higher authority, like the collectivist state or God. This could be interpreted as a call to selfishness, but the version of bodily autonomy in the violinist argument makes a useful distinction between what a person should do, versus what another person might have a right to ask of him. For Thomson, rights establish the baseline of what’s required of a person to be considered within the bounds of justice, whereas samaritanism establishes the ideals toward which people should aspire.

Still, the focus that she places on the will of the individual rather than the will of God has implications for society, if taken to its logical conclusions. Because all use of a person’s body and its output requires consent of the individual, social structures that override the individual’s will begin to collapse.

Civil government, for example, relies to some extent on taxation to carry out its responsibilities. Issues of government corruption notwithstanding, the protection of natural rights (or their Christian equivalents) requires the intervention of government in interpersonal affairs. If a member of society does not consent to pay taxes, the government might intervene to compel the member to pay.

True enough, some light-weight forms of government (like Moses) seem to function without cumpulsory taxation. But the Bible does still affirm taxation as a legitimate expectation of government toward its citizens as applicable, to support the ministry of justice (Rom 13:6, 1Co 9:14-18).

On Thomson’s view, it would be an injustice for the government to require taxes of a member of society who was unwilling to forfeit the produce of his body’s work, unless there was a prior commitment of that individual by which he was bound. It may be argued that those who were alive at the founding of our country’s constitution agreed to the social compact, and were thereby bound to it. But what of those who were born into it? Surely they didn’t agree.

We see this problem on a smaller scale in family government. A child will receive her own right of bodily autonomy, but parents may nevertheless require, at one point in time or another, that she clean her room. If she will not, she might be spanked, or confined in her room, or otherwise limited in the exercise of her bodily autonomy. She did not agree to be born into this particular family, with its egregious standards and rules. But she is subject to them anyway.

In the same way, governments have a right and responsibility to overrule the desires of its members at points, not only in the collection of support, but also in the establishing of justice and the prevention of crime. If a man is attempting to rob a convenience store, the police has (and should have) the right to violate the thief’s bodily autonomy to prevent the act. Natural rights advocates would likely argue some kind of scheme of balanced rights on this point, so I don’t aim to rely heavily on it. But the right to collect taxes may only factor into such a scheme from a very distant and abstract standpoint, since the bodily autonomy of many people is being violated to subdue the criminal element of others.

The point is that an individualized ethic and system of rights will always fail on close examination, because God is doing more in human civilization than concerns the individual. Because God gives meaning to the whole cosmos, and because we are living in God’s world regardless of our personal religious convictions, our attempts to center that world around the individual will fail to logically give expression to everything an ethic needs to address.

In the case of the violinist argument, its ethic of bodily autonomy works in society only insofar as the individual willingly submits to higher authorities. One who hasn’t made such commitments may justly (on Thomson’s view) rebel and behave anarchically toward government, family, and other institutions of the collective man.

On the whole, the violinist argument makes a compelling case for abortion (or more precisely, evacuation and exposure of a child), on the basis of Humanistic presuppositions. Thomson masterfully draws out the inconsistency of Enlightenment thinking about natural rights, in its attempt to replace Christian meaning and duties as established by God in creation. By accepting Humanist categories into their thinking, pro-lifers have granted the battle ground to the pro-choice position, and are fighting in retreat on foreign soil.

But at base, the Humanist position is unable to grant protections of any kind to any human being or other creature, because it undermines objective and transcendent meaning. Theism alone offers the rational foundation for a consistent ethic grounded in the meaning that God speaks into his creative work, and Judeo-Christianity alone offers an evidentially satisfactory version of theism. God wages war on Chaos through his Word, and brings humanity into that battle through the two great dominion mandates. With God’s meaning and design pervading the universe, we find great freedom within the boundaries of what is objectively morally and good.

By centering ethics around man rather than God — around bodily autonomy rather than man’s relationship with God and the universe around him — the violinist argument fails on its own terms to adequately dismiss the special responsibilities given by God to parents for the care of their own children. Because Thomson wants to maintain some kind of responsibility for parents with older children, she leans on consent as the foundation of her ethic of bodily autonomy. Yet consistently applied, this brings a host of other relationships to also die at the abortion mill, such as government and parental authority.

In God’s world, parents have a responsibility of care for their children independent of consent, by virtue of the objective meaning that God speaks into the parent-child relationship. This is intrinsic to God’s design for family, regardless of consent, in the same way that a child’s responsibility toward parents is intrinsic to his role, regardless of consent. To borrow Paul’s language, we are members of each-other. We have both duties and benefits that we receive from our various relationships. Some of these relationships we enter into upon consent. Others we inherit from God’s design. Still others we inherit from those who have gone before us. In all cases, these relationships with their responsibilities and privileges are mediated by the meaning that God speaks into our civilization, in its elemental aspects, and in the derivative constructs we build upon his foundation.