A New Response to the Violinist Argument

The “Violinist” argument for keeping abortion legal is an
illustration created by Judith Jarvis Thompson for the purpose of clarifying
our moral intuitions about abortion by considering a parallel situation. The Violinist
story goes like this (see the full, original story here):
A woman wakes up to find she’s been attached without her consent to a famous
violinist who needs the help of her kidneys for the next nine months in order to
live. If the woman detaches herself from him, he will die.

According to Thompson, since it’s clear that the woman ought
not be forced by law to remain attached to this man (though he is a person with rights), in the same way, the law
ought not force a woman to remain attached to an unborn child who is similarly
using her body to live (though he is a person with rights).

In response to this bodily rights argument, Stephen Wagner, Josh Brahm, and Timothy Brahm (along
with others—see acknowledgments) have developed a new illustration that more closely
parallels the situation of a pregnant woman (including those who are pregnant
by rape), which they call “The Cabin in the Blizzard.” From Stephen Wagner’s
paper, “De Facto
Guardian and Abortion”:

Imagine that a woman named Mary
wakes up in a strange cabin. Having gone to sleep in her suburban home the
night before, she starts to scream frantically. She goes to the window and sees
snow piled high. It appears she is snowed in. On the desk by the window, she
finds a note that says,

“You will be here for six weeks.
You are safe, and your child is,
too.
There is plenty of food and water.”

Since she just gave birth a week
ago, she instinctively begins tearing through each room of the cabin looking
for her infant son. She finds an infant in a second room, but it is not her
infant. It is a girl who appears to be about one week old, just like her son.
Mary begins to scream.

Pulling herself together, she goes
to the kitchen area of the cabin and finds a huge store of food and a ready
source of water. The baby begins to cry, and she rightly assesses that the baby
is hungry. Mary sees a three-month supply of formula on the counter in the
kitchen area.

Now imagine that the police show up
at the cabin six weeks later, and Mary emerges from the cabin. After
determining she is in good health, albeit a good bit frazzled, one policeman
says, “We’ve been investigating this situation for some time. The Behavioral
Psychologists from the nearby University of Lake Wobegon are responsible. We’ll
bring them to justice. We’re so glad you’re okay. Is there anyone else in the
cabin?”

Mary said quietly, “There was.”

“There was?” The police hurry past
her to the cabin. They search the cabin and find the infant formula unopened on
the counter. They find the infant dead on a bed. The coroner confirms that the
infant died from starvation.

We can see that Mary was wrong for not feeding the baby in
this situation, regardless of the fact that she did not consent to these
demands being placed on her. As Wagner points out, our moral intuition tells us
her obligation to feed the child exists even if her only option is to use her
own body to breastfeed that child, causing her great discomfort. And even if the note Mary found had a fourth line saying, “If the child in the cabin dies,
you will be rescued immediately,” we still would not think her justified in killing the baby either actively or passively.

Wagner analyzes why this obligation exists:

What’s going on here? My colleague
Timothy Brahm and I, in trying to put our finger on what seems to be happening
in her case, called her a de facto guardian. It just happens
to be the case, for whatever reason, that Mary is now in a situation in which
she is the only person in the vicinity who can help a child in need. It’s as if
Mary is now situated in the same way a parent or guardian is situated most of
the time, but in Mary’s case, it’s by accident. Finding herself situated as a
parent, she now shoulders the same obligations of a parent or guardian,
and in her case, temporarily. It’s as if the obligations slipped over onto her
by the accident of the situation….

A parent’s moral obligations, at
least for feeding and sheltering their children, are so strong that we say
there should also be laws forcing parents to do these things. If the moral
obligations of a de facto guardian like Mary are simply the same obligations of
a parent, yet temporary, then they must also be legal obligations. In other
words, it should not be legal for a person in the de facto guardian
position to neglect the feeding and sheltering of the child.

Wagner’s paper explores different variations of the cabin
story (formula vs. no formula, the existence of severe physical difficulties, the
baby is her own child, she’s trapped for two years instead of six weeks, etc.),
responds to objections, and explains why this illustration is a much more
accurate analogy to pregnancy than is Thompson’s Violinist. The full paper is worth
a read.