A defense of terminating a forced pregnancy as non-destructively as possible: revisiting Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument in terms of practical bioethics

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s ‘A Defense of Abortion’ (1971) is widely read as establishing that abortion may be permissible even if the fetus is granted a right to life. This paper re-examines that claim by returning to Thomson’s central analogy of the unconscious violinist and reconstructing the argument at the point before it is extended by further examples. On a strict reading, the violinist case supports only the permissibility of detachment from compelled bodily support, not the permissibility of intentionally destructive termination. To bridge this gap, we identify and assess a set of auxiliary principles—most notably proportionality in self-defence, the requirement of least-destructive means and an implicitly gradualist view of moral status—that are needed if Thomson’s broader conclusions are to be sustained. We argue that these principles are not developed in Thomson’s original discussion but can be introduced charitably without abandoning her hypothetical starting point. Once introduced, however, they shift the focus from abstract moral rights to questions of medical feasibility, agency and institutional practice. The paper thus reframes Thomson’s argument not as a settled defence of abortion but as a diagnostic case that reveals how philosophical reasoning about rights transforms when confronted with the empirical realities of pregnancy and contemporary medicine.