Imagine that you wake up tomorrow in a hospital bed. You have no idea how you got there. Scary, right? You look around and see that there is a tube coming out of your side and going into the side of a mysterious person lying in the bed next to you.

Suddenly, the doctor comes running in and says, “You’re finally awake! I’m so sorry, let me explain what’s going on. The man in the bed next to you is a world famous violinist with a rare kidney disease that requires him to be hooked up to someone else’s kidney for nine months. You were kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, who figured out somehow that you’re a kidney match. These superfans kidnapped you and hooked you up, and then left you here so you can be hooked up to him for nine months. This is incredibly unjust and I’m so sorry! But here’s the problem: now you’re kind of stuck. If you disconnect from him, he will immediately die. And he’s a person, with the same equal right to life as you!”

Even though the violinist will literally die if you disconnect, most people would agree that you still have the legal right to do so. Maybe you’re a worse person if you choose to unplug, but almost everyone believes that the government just shouldn’t force people to donate their time and bodily resources to other people. That seems pretty obviously wrong.

Let me connect that to pregnancy for you. This pro-choice argument says that even if human fetuses are people, even if they have the same equal right to life as everybody else, even though they are literally going to die if a pregnant woman refuses…the government just shouldn’t force a woman to donate her body to an unborn person. We don’t force organ donation, so we certainly shouldn’t force pregnancy. Women have a right to refuse the use of their bodies by other people, period.

This Right to Refuse argument originated with Judith Jarvis Thomson in her paper, “A Defense of Abortion.” She wrote that analogy about you being kidnapped and connected to a violinist who needs your kidneys to survive, and now this argument makes the rounds of the abortion conversation all the time. People will simply refer to it as “the violinist” or they’ll bring up the same concepts by talking about blood donation or not forcing people to donate their organs.

Check your reaction…

When I first introduce pro-life people to the Violinist argument, I usually see one of two reactions: panic or eye-rolling.  

Let me address the eye-rolling first. They’ll say something like “Pregnancy is nothing like organ donation! Pregnancy is a gift! It’s beautiful!”

Now, as a woman currently 33 weeks pregnant, I don’t disagree that pregnancy is a wonderful gift. But pregnancy is also a lot like organ donation.

There is quite literally another human using my organs—in this case temporarily—because their organs aren’t at this time capable of functioning as they’d need to to sustain separate living. A zygote, embryo, or fetus requires constant use of her mother’s organs, blood supply, and nutrients. In many ways, pregnancy is weirder than normal organ donation. Normal organ donation is a one-time major medical event with side effects and recovery time. But in pregnancy, I’m literally feeling the human who is using my organs for many, many months, and likely feeling very sick for several of those months—and then I still have to go through a major medical event with side effects and recovery time. 

I was bedridden for 10 weeks at the beginning of my pregnancy. And as I type this, my tiny human has apparently decided to run a marathon. Not gonna lie, it’s more than a little distracting to be repeatedly kicked in your ribcage. 

Pregnancy is a lot like organ donation. And the violinist is a lot like the tiny human inside me. The whole point of the violinist analogy is to argue that even if pro-lifers are right and a fetus is morally equivalent to an adult, you still have the right to an abortion because you have the right to refuse to donate your organs to other people. Judith Jarvis Thomson is assuming, at least for the sake of argument, that fetuses are people. And that’s where the panic comes in.

I panicked the first time I heard the violinist analogy my freshman year of college. I was literally stumped. Up until that conversation, I had assumed everyone was pro-choice because they didn’t understand biology, or because they thought what gave humans value was some trait they acquired later on in development.  I had never heard of a pro-choice argument that granted that fetuses are equal in value to you and me.  And I had no idea how to answer it. 

I seriously questioned whether I had an obligation to become pro-choice now—since I couldn’t explain why a pregnant woman shouldn’t be able to refuse to donate her organs to an unborn person but should be able to refuse to donate her organs to a born person. After all, my right to bodily autonomy is incredibly important! It’s why I have to sign 7,000 consent forms every time I’m at the doctor’s office. It’s one of the reasons that sexual assault is so deeply wrong and harmful. Everyone’s bodily autonomy is extremely important and deserves to be respected. So shouldn’t pregnant women have the same bodily autonomy everyone else has?

Now, panic isn’t the reaction I want my audience to have when I first explain the violinist argument, but I do want you to stand, just for a moment, in healthy awe of how smart it is. Of just how well it appeals to what we already believe about the realities of pregnancy, the personhood of the unborn, and the importance of bodily autonomy. It shouldn’t be shocking why this argument is so persuasive to so many college freshmen reading Thomson’s paper in Philosophy 101, or why my TikTok feed is full of pro-choice people bringing up organ donation. It’s not an argument to roll your eyes at.

But no, we don’t all have an obligation to become pro-choice either. 

You see, the question isn’t “Is pregnancy analogous to donating an organ?” Because I think the answer is, in many ways, yes. The question is “Is abortion analogous to refusing to donate an organ?” 

That’s where the violinist argument breaks down.

After you’ve recovered from that initial reaction…

…you’re probably shifting into the “responding phase.” And the gut response I usually hear from pro-lifers is something about an obligation to help.

“The violinist is a stranger, but the fetus is your own child! You have an obligation to help your own child.”

“Your kidney was designed for you, but your uterus was designed for a baby. You have an obligation to let them use the thing that was designed for them.”

“In the Violinist story, you were kidnapped! This whole situation isn’t your fault! But in 99% of pregnancies…you are the reason the fetus is in this situation. This isn’t some big surprise. You willingly engaged in an action which you knew might result in the creation of an inherently needy child, so you have an obligation to help them.”

The third response above—often called the Responsibility Objection—is a solid argument, and we’ve taught it here at ERI before. The problem is, our team just doesn’t find it that persuasive to the vast majority of pro-choice people. And the first two responses? I actually think they’re bad arguments; they don’t work when you follow them through to their natural conclusions. 

Convincing you of that isn’t my purpose today though. Even if I thought that all three of them were solid responses to the violinist, I still wouldn’t use them. 

I don’t want to spend my time arguing about when we have an obligation to help other people; in today’s society, that’s honestly just a hard sell. I’m dramatically more persuasive when I spend my time arguing for the modest claim that we have an obligation to not literally kill people.

The Obligation to Not Kill

When you find yourself plugged into that violinist, you hypothetically have three options. You could help the violinist by staying hooked up for nine months, which would be super nice and arguably the right thing to do, but I don’t think that should be legally required of you. You could choose to not help the violinist, which would be you refusing to stay plugged in to the violinist for nine months.

Or, hypothetically, you could kill the violinist. After all, if they are dead, they definitely don’t need your help anymore! You could just shoot the violinist, right now, and they’d be dead. Problem solved. It would save you the embarrassment of saying no to them!

So three options: help, not help, or kill the violinist. But we all know that you shouldn’t do the killing one. In situations where you have all three options, helping and not helping should both be legal, and killing should be illegal.

Here’s the problem though: you don’t always have all three of those options. 

Let’s imagine another story: what if I get super rich and buy a yacht. Huge boat, all the fun stuff on it you can imagine, GIANT yacht. So, obviously, I’m going to take my amazing yacht out into the ocean. I’m hours from shore in shark-infested waters when I discover that there is a preschooler on my boat. 

This little girl was playing hide-and-seek on the docks with her siblings, she found a fantastic hiding spot in the closet on my yacht, and she fell asleep waiting for her siblings to find her. Now that I’ve found her hours later in shark-infested waters, I am kind of stuck. I really only have two options! One, I can help the preschooler by sheltering her peacefully on my boat until I take the boat back to shore and hand the girl over to the police or her parents, and after that I don’t think I should have to do anything else to help her. 

Or…hypothetically, I could kill her. I could say, “This is my boat, and I have the right to refuse the use of my boat to this tiny person who is trying to use it” and then toss the preschooler overboard.

Those are my only two options: help or kill. The only way to stop helping her with my boat would be to throw her overboard, which wouldn’t just be not helping—it would be killing her. So there is no way to just not help—it doesn’t exist! If there was a way to Star Trek beam the preschooler off the boat and onto shore next to her parents so I wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore, that might be a “not help option,” but we all know that doesn’t exist. So if help and kill are my only options, and I think killing is always wrong except in cases like self-defense, then I think I’m obligated to help. 

I’m not interested in forcing people to help other people in general, but I am going to put my foot down and say that you don’t get to kill other people. So I can’t throw the preschooler overboard. When the only way to avoid helping is to kill, I legally have to help—not because I generally have an obligation to help people, but because I have an obligation to not kill people.

(Note: While our team uses The Obligation to Not Kill and the killing versus letting die distinction in the majority of our conversations with everyday pro-choice people, it can be helpful for some more philosophically-minded people to pivot to the distinction between making someone better off, worse off, or keeping them in their original state. You can find our more advanced article on that here.)

Of course, giving a preschooler a boat ride is not comparable to the demands of pregnancy. I’m pregnant; I very much understand that. In no way do I want to diminish what a pregnant woman goes through. But there’s one important similarity between the two cases: in both, there is no way to just “not help.” There’s no way to “unplug” from the fetus to stop being pregnant. 

In pregnancy, the woman only has two options. She can help the fetus by allowing him or her to exist in her womb for nine months and giving birth, at which point she doesn’t have to have any further legal obligation to the child. Or she can kill the child by having an abortion. 

There is no “just don’t help” option. If we could Star Trek beam the fetus out of the mother’s womb into an artificial womb where she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore and the fetus would live, that would be a way to just not help. But we don’t have that technology, so there is no “I just refuse to help you” option. Since help and kill are a pregnant woman’s only options, killing via abortion should still be illegal. 

I wouldn’t normally ask someone to tolerate a strange preschooler on their boat. I’ll ask for it only for as long as it takes to get them to shore safely, because there’s no other non-violent option. I wouldn’t normally ask someone to tolerate a prenatal human in their body (and the physical symptoms that come with it!). I’ll ask for it only for as long as it takes to get them to a place where they can live without your help, because there’s no other non-violent option. 

You absolutely have a right to your bodily autonomy, and to refuse the use of your body to someone trying to use it. But those rights have a limit. None of us have the right to kill innocent people, period. And elective abortion always involves lethal violence targeted at the unborn human. 

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For examples of how we use this analogy in conversation with pro-choice people and responses to common objections, check out our comprehensive course.