Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-5870-2744

Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy

Reader 1

Thomas Lambert

Reader 2

Ahmed Alwishah

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

2026 Ava von Pechmann

Abstract

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion” is a foundational work in contemporary abortion ethics. It offers a critical analysis of and detailed rebuttal against the argument from a right to life, a prominent anti-abortion argument premised on fetal personhood. Thomson crucially asserts that we may offer a concession to the abortion critic by accepting the premise that a fetus is a person, and still reject the conclusion that abortion is morally impermissible. This is because the right to life does not necessarily entail the right to use another’s body for survival. As such, carrying an unwanted fetus to term is considered an act of good samaritanship, as opposed to one that is morally obligatory. The responsibility objection to the Good Samaritan Argument posits that in cases of pregnancy not resulting from rape, the woman is responsible for the fetus’ existence in a state of need. Therefore, she is morally obligated to provide the fetus with the aid that it requires to survive, that being the use of her body. David Boonin, in response to this objection, argues that in non-rape cases of pregnancy, the woman is responsible for the fetus’ existence but not its neediness given that it exists. Responsibility for a person’s existence, moreover, is not sufficient to generate a moral obligation to provide the individual with the aid that they require for survival and thus the woman is not obligated to provide the fetus with bodily aid. I reject this argument, alongside Gerald Lang, on the basis that responsibility for a fetus’s existence cannot be distinguished from responsibility for the fetus’s neediness, as neediness is inherent to any fetus’s existence. I argue instead that even if a woman is responsible for a fetus’s existence and its neediness, she does not hold a moral obligation to provide the fetus with bodily aid because moral obligations of aid are generated only when the voluntary action that makes an individual responsible for another person’s neediness leaves the affected person worse off than they otherwise would have been had the action not occurred in the first place. It is not possible, however, for a fetus to be made worse off by being brought into existence and then aborted than if it had never been conceived in the first place. As such, the woman cannot hold a moral obligation to provide the fetus with bodily aid. I therefore hold that even in cases of pregnancy resulting from a woman’s voluntary participation in the sexual intercourse that brought about the existence of the fetus, abortion is morally permissible.

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