Over the last several decades
Over the last several decades, the topic of abortion has become an increasingly controversial and heated argument in popular culture, press, and medical fields. The process of the abortion as defined by Meriam-Webster is “the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, resulting in death of the embryo or fetus”. This process has been thoroughly discussed in a number of fields ranging from medical ethics to Christian journalism, in which it has both been defended and attacked. The main focus of the controversy seems to be determining at what point a fetus is considered a human being and therefore at what point abortion becomes murder. Some argue this occurs at the moment of conception while others believe this does not argue until the fetus develops fingers and vital organs around the tenth week of pregnancy. Some, such as medical ethics author Judith Jarvis Thompson, take a different stance all together and argue that drawing a line between being considered a person and not a person is an illogical argument without purpose. Thompson claims that calling a fetus at the moment of conception a human is like calling a freshly fallen acorn an oak tree, however, she does agree that the transition from fetus to human being occurs a long time before birth. Judith Jarvis Thompson is an author within the medical ethics field who wrote an article defending abortion for several medical journals in the 1970s. Her article attempts to avoid the abortion v. murder argument, and defends medical abortion by accepting for the sake of the argument that a fetus has a right to life. Through the acceptance of this assumption, she discusses the flaws within the claims of those who argue that abortion is impermissible; she claims that just because a fetus has a right to life this does not rule out the practice of abortion entirely. Thompson uses the metaphorical situation of a forced kidney donation to a famous violinist to make this point: “You wake up in the morning and find yourself