I have uploaded a paper to Academia taking apart the 1971 pro-abortion Violinist Thought Experiment:
An exploration of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Violinist thought-experi- ment presented in her 1971 “A Defense of Abortion”. This thought- experiment has been brought up repeatedly in pro-abortion debate over the intervening 50 years, despite the fact that it has a poor fit to questions she attempts to answer and that, in the places where it really does fit the questions related to aborting a baby, it actually tends to support the pro-life position in significant ways. Nevertheless, like many thought experiments, it remains interesting and useful despite, or perhaps because of its flaws.
In the post-Roe v Wade environment where public policy is shifting rapidly, it can be important to go back to some of the foundational arguments which are still thrown around but which few people in the modern pro-abortion debate seem to have read-- which may not have been very good in the first place. Engaged in some of these debates in the last few years, I noticed that an older essay I wrote has long disappeared, but that I still had notes. I therefore rewrote it, partly so that I can now find and refer to it again and partly because the rewriting has allowed me to get some of my own thoughts in better order.
