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Against Anti-Abortion Violence

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Abstract

Jeremy Williams argues that both anti-abortion and pro-choice theories seem to justify two forms of anti-abortion violence – (1) violence against those that perform abortions, and (2) the subjugation of women seeking abortion. He illustrates this by way of his Death Camps analogy. However, Williams does not advocate such violence; rather he seems despondent over his conclusion. Here I argue Williams’ conclusion turns on confusion regarding the restrictivist position and a failure to adequately meet the challenge of Thomson’s Violinist case. The Death Camps analogy is incomparable to the practice of abortion because it fails to capture the risks, burdens, and rights relationships present in pregnancy.

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Notes

  1. See Davis, 2003, pp. 353–354.

  2. See Williams, 2021, p. 4.

  3. Ibid p. 3, p. 15–22.

  4. See Thomson, 1971, pp. 48–49.

  5. See Thomson’s Violinist Case, Tiny House, Burglar Case, and People Seeds Case. Ibid p. 48–49, 52, 58–60.

  6. See Leridon, 1977 and Boklage, 1990.

  7. See Marquis, 2007.

  8. See McMahan, 2002, 2007 and Parfit, 2012.

  9. See Mulder, 2013.

  10. See Lee & George, 2005; Beckwith, 2007, George & Tollefsen, 2008.

  11. See Marquis, 1989 and Blackshaw & Hendricks, 2020.

  12. See Warren, 1973 and English, 1975.

  13. See Thomson, 1971, pp. 56–57.

  14. See Boonin, 2002, pp. 164–167.

  15. See Williams, 2021, p.17.

  16. See Simkulet, 2020, p. 95.

  17. See Murphy, 1985 Ord, 2008; Lovering, 2013, 2014, 2017; Simkulet, 2016, 2017, 2020; Berg, 2017.

  18. See Marquis, 2002, 2010.

  19. See Simkulet, 2018, p. 14 and Marquis, 1989, p.186.

  20. See Davis, 1984, pp.175–176. For Davis, the restrictivist may believe abortion is defensible in some cases to preserve the mother’s life, but argues the restrictivist should either adopt a more moderate view, or a more extreme view. She also claims the permissivist may believe abortion is indefensible in some extreme circumstances, though she doesn’t go into detail about what these may be.

  21. See Thomson, 1971, p. 50.

  22. Some moderates might also be willing to exceptions for cases of (c) incest, or (d) when the fetus’s life is not worth living in some sense. Laura Purdy’s discussion on what constitutes a minimally satisfying life may help explain why one might make exception (d). See Purdy, 1995a, b. These latter exceptions are problematic; (c) seems to stem from confusion about incest, perhaps equivocating it with (a) or (d); however many children born of incest can live normal, healthy lives, and are not the result of rape.

  23. The view is named to evoke the idea that a woman’s right to abortion is derived from her right to liberty. See Simkulet, 2016, p. 374.

  24. I am hesitant to describe the permissivist view as extreme; rather I take it most permissivists likely do not believe the fetus is a person with rights, so their killing at any stage for any reason is largely unproblematic.

  25. See Manninen, 2019.

  26. For permissivists who believe fetuses lack moral status, the wrongness of abortion would need to be grounded elsewhere. George Harris argues that some abortions may be prima facie wrong because they violate a father’s morally legitimate interest in procreation. One might ground the extraordinary wrongness of abortion for such theorists in rights other than those possessed by the fetus. See Harris, 1986.

  27. For a discussion of similar arguments, see Colgrove et al. (forthcoming).

  28. Many anti-abortion theorists talk as though the telos of abortion is killing the fetus, rather than ending the pregnancy, but this is either hyperbole or uncharitable. To illustrate this, suppose physicians were able to teleport a fetus directly from the womb to an ectogenesis device that would allow the fetus to develop outside the mother’s womb. If we assume women seeking abortion believe that fetuses are persons, it strikes me as uncharitable to assume they’d choose abortion over teleportation ectogenesis.

    Remember, too, that most contemporary abortions are medication abortions that “merely” let the fetus die, rather than killing it, and that most surgical abortions can remove the fetus to let it die outside the womb, rather than kill it, albeit with much greater risk to the mother. It would be uncharitable to interpret most anti-abortion theorists as unaware of this, and it would be uncharitable to interpret them as primarily concerned with how abortion is performed, rather than if it should be performed at all. In light of this, anti-abortion claims that the telos of abortion is killing are likely hyperbolic.

  29. See Thomson, 1971, pp. 65–66.

  30. See Harris, 1986, pp. 595–596.

  31. See Thomson, 1973, p. 156.

  32. See Williams, 2021, pp. 16–19.

  33. See Colgrove, Blackshaw, and Rodger (forthcoming) for a discussion of practical, peaceful alternatives to AAV that abortion critics might first resort to.

  34. See Williams, 2021, p. 1.

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    William Simkulet

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Simkulet, W. Against Anti-Abortion Violence. HEC Forum (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-024-09531-8

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