By Matti Häyry

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971) and James Rachels’s “Active and Passive Euthanasia” (1975) are still the gold standard for philosophical argument in medical ethics, five decades after they were published. This is horrible.

Academic folklore has it that they both advocate reasonably moderate, even permissive views on abortion and euthanasia. While this may have been the authors’ intention, neither article does anything of the kind. Let me tell you what they actually say.

Thomson tells a story and asks a question. You have been kidnapped during the night. You are now in a hospital, physically connected to a seriously ill person, who dies unless your circulatory systems stay connected for nine months. Are you allowed to disconnect?

Rachels tells two stories and asks a question. Smith drowns a young relative in a bathtub to gain an inheritance. Jones lets a young relative drown in a bathtub, intentionally failing to help, to gain an inheritance. Is there a moral difference between Smith and Jones?

Received wisdom has it that the implications are far-reaching. Since you are allowed to disconnect, women are usually allowed to terminate their pregnancies. And since there is no moral difference between the drownings, if we may let a patient die, we may also kill a patient.

Reading Thomson’s analogy carefully, its message is more constrained. If you may disconnect, then women are allowed to terminate forced pregnancies as non-destructively as possible. This is as far as the hospital scenario carries, if fetuses are granted a right to life.

Rachel’s stories fare even worse. If medical personnel are permitted, intentionally and for self-interest, to let a healthy patient die, then they are also permitted, intentionally and for self-interest, to kill a healthy patient. There is no discernible link to voluntary euthanasia here.

Convinced? Ditch these relics. Not convinced? Read all about it in “A Defense of Terminating a Forced Pregnancy as Non-Destructively as Possible” and “Fifty Years of Killing and Letting Die” – and weep.

Article: A Defense of Terminating a Forced Pregnancy as Non-Destructively as Possible
Authors: Matti Häyry [1] and Amanda Sukenick [2]
Affiliation: [1] Aalto University, Aalto, Finland; [2] The University of Chicago, USA
Conflicts of Interest: None declared