Last week, students from Oxford asked us about the ‘violinist’ analogy. It’s something we get asked about and comes up in pro-life conversations a lot so we thought we would give two ways of answering it! Check out the second part below!
An actual analogy
24th May 2020
In our last blog post (LINK), we showed that Thomson’s analogy does not hold up because the parallels are not sufficiently close enough to each other. The violinist is artificially attached, a stranger, and the act of unplugging would be ‘letting die’ not killing. Today, we’re going to look at going a step further with a counter analogy.
To do this, we need to ask what is the actual point of the violinist and what is it trying to say? Well, to break it down, it is essentially arguing 2 points:
- That we have bodily autonomy
- That we don’t have to keep someone else alive, even if it’s a nice thing to do.
The bodily rights argument is one of the strongest pro-choice arguments, so it’s worth delving into. However, as we’ve seen, the Violinist analogy isn’t quite analogous to pregnancy in cases of rape, so here’s another analogy that we think is better:
You’ve just had a baby, and are successfully breastfeeding. You wake up in a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere, in a huge snowstorm. You’re safe. Your own baby is missing. You notice there’s a different baby in the cabin with you, the same age as your own. You have no way of leaving the cabin for the next few weeks. The only way the baby will not starve is if you breastfeed that baby.
If at the end of those few weeks, rescuers came and found the baby dead via starvation, and when asked why, you replied “because it’s my body and I didn’t want to use it to keep the baby alive”, is that ok?
If the person you’re in dialogue with says it’s not ok, then they DO think that we have responsibilities towards those who depend upon us for their survival, ones that supersede bodily autonomy.
If they think it IS ok, then they’ve just admitted that they would let a vulnerable human being die because of selfishness. That’s pretty extreme – as mentioned in our Answering Pro-Choice Questions talk, it’s always good to show just how extreme the pro-choice position is. No one should be ‘comfortably’ pro-choice, and this scenario can reveal that.
If they say “but that’s a born baby, not a foetus”, then the issue isn’t bodily autonomy: it’s their understanding of what a human foetus is. Their actual issue is dehumanising the unborn child.
Keep an eye open for our blog post on the humanity of the unborn coming soon!
