Perhaps fifteen years ago, I read a paper at the Tennessee Philosophical Association, a group which meets annually at Vanderbilt University. One of my old professors, whose Wittgenstein seminar I took in the early 1970s, was the assigned respondent. He took issue with my argument, and I took issue with his rebuttal, and then the room, with about twenty philosophers from around the state (including a faculty member and student from Union University in Jackson) pitched in to the discussion. Re-reading it in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision (2022), the one that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), I think it still has merit. Perhaps it can make some small contribution to the conversation that’s now ensued.

I might also mention my recent piece on ectopic pregnancy, an invited column for Christ Over All.

When the Violinist is Your Parent: Against Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Defense of Abortion

In August 2003, a heat wave claimed 60,000 lives in Southern Europe, and France was hit the hardest, where 14,800 “extra deaths” were recorded, a gain of 141% in the mortality rate.^[i] Many who died were elderly parents whose children were on their annual Mediterranean shore vacation. Writing in The New York Times, John Tagliabue observed,

Apparently, nothing gets in the way of the holiday, not even grandma and grandpa. This summer's withering heat wave claimed a staggering number of victims . . . most of whom were elderly. The police, undertakers and social service agencies found them in apartments, homes and hotels. The rooms were often as hot as ovens.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, noted last week that roughly half the victims died in their homes, not in hospitals or nursing homes, implying that French families, in a rush to get to the beach, had simply left their loved ones to perish in the inferno. (And indeed, some families postponed funerals until after the Aug. 15 holiday weekend.)^[ii]

When recently re-reading Judith Jarvis Thomson’s classic essay, “A Defense of Abortion,” it occurred to me that widespread indignation over these callous adult children could suggest a problem for her case.

Thomson leads us to imagine that a gifted violinist has been hooked up to your kidneys since only they can sustain him. You were kidnapped for this purpose by the Society of Music Lovers, and now the musician’s life is “in your hands.” Thomson argues that it is morally permissible for you to pull the plug since you never assented to the operation and you are not obliged to lie there as a life-giver for a long stretch of time. Analogously, you are not obliged to provide life support to an unwanted, developing embryo who has appeared in your womb.

For purposes of argument, she is content to declare the fetus a person, circumventing the debate over when the conceptus becomes a human being. Her violinist is meant to demonstrate that even human beings can be unplugged when their dependency has been imposed upon you, without your say-so. While it is nice to be a Good Samaritan, offering sacrificial and extensive care to some poor soul you come upon, it isn’t your duty to do so if the task has been foisted upon you, and it certainly is no business of government to require it of you.

Unchosen Parents

Of course, many argue that the woman who engages in intercourse voluntarily has a level of responsibility foreign to the kidnap victim. She put herself at risk of pregnancy, and now she must live with the consequences. But Thomson insists that it takes more than that to generate responsibility:

If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may not wish to.^[iii]

But what about the case of one’s parents, whether biological or adoptive? They weren’t chosen. There was no Thomsonian checklist for assuming responsibility for mom and dad. Indeed, it’s quite likely that many a child would have chosen another set of parents had they had the option. But many believe that those vacationing Frenchmen, as grown children, had some duty to make sure their parents were safe from the sweltering August heat – even if they had found their parents a disappointment through the years. Is this impression warranted?

The late philosopher Jane English argued that it may be malformed or misdirected. By her account, we need to know “the extent to which there is an ongoing friendship between [parent and child],” for the “filial obligations of grown children” is not “owed for services rendered.” ^[iv]

Suppose that Vance married Lola despite his parents’ strong wish that he marry within their religion, and that as a result, the parents refuse to speak to him again. As the years pass, the parents are unaware of Vance’s problems, his accomplishments, the birth of his children. The love that once existed between them, let us suppose, has been completely destroyed by this event and thirty years of desuetude. At this point, it seems, Vance is under no obligation to pay his parents’ medical bills in their old age, beyond his general duty to help those in need. An additional, filial obligation would only arise from whatever love he may still feel for them.”^[v]

But isn’t this a bit lean on decency. Isn’t there more to it than this? Perhaps one would argue that the child has a prima facie duty to care for his parents, one which can only be removed or mitigated by extraordinary acts of parental abuse. ^[vi] But to follow English in saying that filial obligation is built only on the achievement and maintenance of friendship seems cold or tone deaf.

The Classic Perspective

In the appendix to his brief for renewed focus on natural law in the British school system, C. S. Lewis, traces the ancient tradition of recognizing duties to parents, an aspect of what he called the Tao: from Hindu scripture -- “Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty”; from the Babylonian List of Sins -- “Has he despised Father and Mother?”; from an ancient Egyptian “Confession of the Righteous Soul” -- “I was a staff by my Father’s side . . . I went in and out at his command”; from Epictetus’s list of duties -- “To care for parents”; from the Bible’s Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 -- “Honour thy Father and thy Mother.” ^[vii]

Lin Yutang picks up the theme, giving a Chinese perspective, one which declares duty far beyond English’s friendship criterion:

The debts to one’s friends may be numbered, but the debts to one’s parents are beyond number. Again and again, Chinese essays on filial piety mention the fact of washing diapers, which takes on significance when one becomes a parent himself. . . . The duties of a son serving his parents are pretty hard, but it is sacrilege to make a comparison between nursing one’s own parents and nursing a stranger in a hospital.^[viii]

Albeit, the virtue must be cultivated:

The feeling is that the home alone can provide anything resembling a satisfactory arrangement for the old and the young. But for the young, it is to be taken for granted that not much need be said, since there is natural parental affection. “Water flows downwards and not upwards,” the Chinese always say, and therefore the affection for parents and grandparents is something that stands more in need of being taught by culture. A natural man loves his children, but a cultured man loves his parents.^[ix]

Legal Implications

Sometimes, the government gets involved. For instance, “France's civil law of 1804 codified the Obligation Alimentaire -- the legally enforceable obligation that people were required to ensure the welfare of their needy kin.” It declares, “Children, on their side, owe aliment to their parents and other ascendants who may be in need.” ^[x] Not surprisingly, “Its influence has considerably weakened since a universal old age pension was established in 1983 . . . which more effectively addressed equity issues for poorer families.” But the basic conviction remains that children should stand on call, should their parents fall into penury or other forms of ruin.

The same sort of phenomenon is found in America, where, in 30 states,

[A]dult children are legally responsible, at least on paper, to pay for necessities like food, clothing, shelter and medical attention for indigent parents. These statutes, known as filial responsibility laws, are modeled on the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601, which made blood relatives the primary source of support for family members, the elderly included. Public assistance was available only as a last resort.

The American colonies had similar laws to England’s — and they were enforced — until the advent of the New Deal, which created the Social Security system, intended to provide 45 percent of a worker’s pre-retirement wages. That would keep mom and dad afloat in the good old days. Civil or criminal cases seeking assistance or reimbursement from adult children all but stopped. But, even more significant to the quiet passing of filial responsibility was the introduction of Medicaid, in 1965, a pillar of the Great Society, which had eligibility requirements that seemed at odds with the existing state laws, even though courts had upheld their constitutionality.^[xi]

Again, these developments did not repudiate filial care, but were meant to cover for its absence. So if government programs fail, it is reasonable to fall back on the family. This seems to be the case in China today, where care of parents has been the social, convictional norm. Now that the one-child policy has left many parents in difficult circumstances, “China considers new legislation to make it compulsory for people to visit elderly family members, who will be able to sue relatives if they feel abandoned.”^[xii]

But Lin Yutang’s diaper illustration notwithstanding, what if the child feels it has no reason to be grateful? Jeffrey Gleitman was a case in point. He was born in Jersey City November 25, 1949, and within weeks, it became clear that he had “substantial defects . . . in sight, hearing, and speech.” Though several operations helped improve his sight and his parents were able to place him in a special school for “blind and deaf children,” they were not content to let matters be.

In 1967, his mother sued her doctor, Robert Cosgrove for emotional damage; his father sued for financial compensation regarding the special expenses needed to care for Jeffrey; and, strangest of all, Jeffrey sued for the harm he’d suffered by being allowed to be born. They all complained that Dr. Cosgrove was negligent in not warning them about the danger of German measles early in the pregnancy.

The court called Jeffrey’s complaint a claim of “wrongful life”:

The infant plaintiff is therefore required to say not that he should have been born without defects but that he should not have been born at all. In the language of tort law he says: but for the negligence of defendants, he would not have been born to suffer with an impaired body. In other words, he claims that the conduct of defendants prevented his mother from obtaining an abortion which would have terminated his existence, and this his very life is “wrongful.”

But the justices demurred:

The infant plaintiff would have us measure the difference between his life with defects against the utter void of nonexistence, but it is impossible to make such a determination. This Court cannot weight the value of life with impairments against the nonexistence of life itself.^[xiii]

Of course, few people are inclined to wax litigious in this direction. They are fundamentally grateful that they have had the chance to have a go at life. But whatever their perspective, the law has proven to be unsympathetic to those who want to collect compensatory and punitive damages for the personal suffering entailed by their very existence. And it is reasonable to suppose that, should Jeffrey’s parents find themselves in dire straits in their dotage, he would do his best to extend care to them, though he knows that they are responsible for his being on earth, a situation he claimed to resent.

The Art of the Possible and Optimal

Natural law (whether outlined by Epictetus, Thomas Aquinas, or C.S. Lewis) does not set up a target that people cannot hit. Its precepts may be challenging, but they are manageable, indeed, salubrious. And if there is a duty to not kill one’s unborn child, then carrying even an unwanted one to term is not a ruinous task.

Perhaps it would not be so if the human gestation period were that of elephants (22 months), black alpine salamanders (two to three years), or the frilled shark (3.5 years),^[xiv] not to mention the nine years Thomson suggests. Maybe that would break the typical human psyche, especially if the pregnant woman were bed-ridden (as in the thought experiment) instead of mobile up to the day of delivery.

But how can we say that the span of gestation is pertinent when the principle of bodily sovereignty is at stake? Can we be a-little-bit-violated any more than we can be a-little-bit-pregnant? Isn’t violation violation, hence unacceptable, and grounds for immediate severance?

Thomson doesn’t think so. She even says that a rape victim would be “indecent” to refuse to carry a child to term if pregnancy lasted only an hour. ^[xv] So, it comes down to a judgment call of how much is too much. Later, in discussing the Kitty Genovese case, where 38 people watched from their apartments as she was murdered, with none so much as bothering to make a phone call to the police, Thomson says that “these things are a matter of degree, of course.” While we may not be called to serve as Splendid or Good Samaritans, offering direct and risky aid at street level, we should be at least Minimally Decent Samaritans, alerting the authorities to the terrible thing happening before our eyes. At any rate, we are not “morally required” to “give long stretches” of our lives to help, and none of the 38 were prosecuted for their inaction. (Neither, then, according to Thomson, should expectant mothers, be required by law to be Good Samaritans to their unborn children.)

So again, what is “too much”? How long is a “long stretch”? Thomson gives her perceptions, but are they too convenient?

Hans Christian Anderson provides what can serve here as a cautionary tale in “The Princess and the Pea”: Having opened the castle door on a stormy night to a drenched young woman claiming to be a princess, the queen decided to perform an overnight test:

She went into the bedroom, took all the bed clothes off and laid a pea on the bedstead: then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea, and then twenty feather beds on top of the mattresses. This was where the princess was to sleep that night. In the morning they asked her how she slept.

 

‘Oh, terribly bad!’ said the princess. ‘I have hardly closed my eyes the whole night! Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!’

 

They saw at once that she must be a real princess when she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. Nobody but a real princess could have such a delicate skin.^[xvi]

Could it be that we have become too sensitive to slights and impositions, insisting that we not be put upon, even to preserve another human life? Could it be that we have become so fixed upon our “right” not to be inconvenienced, that we’ve lost track of what it means to be called upon, legitimately, to respond sacrificially to reversals?^[xvii] And could it be that those who opt for metaphysical naturalism have misconstrued what constitutes “a long stretch of time,” dismissing the notion of eternity, against which current affairs are measured?

Interesting questions, all of good philosophical provenance, all logically capable of resolution whether in this world, or a world to come. But Thomson does not count them germane to the discussion. Rather she invites us to resonate with her intuitions, which, I argue, short-change the natural demands and promise of filial charity. If it is not obvious with regards to one’s children in the womb, perhaps it becomes so when we consider obligations to our parents.

What would we (and the authorities) say if one of the 38 New Yorkers looking on passively were Kitty Genovese’s son or daughter? What would we think of a Samaritan who passed by his own wounded parents, ignoring them as they lay on the roadside? Wouldn’t we expect him to be not only a Minimally Decent Samaritan, notifying medics at the next town, but also a Good Samaritan, crossing the road to offer assistance, even if he had had strong differences with his folks? And shouldn’t the physical, emotional, and financial costs he incurs in terms of solicitude toward them run beyond one hour, even into years?

If the answers are yes, why is this so, given that their parentage was foisted upon him? I don’t see that Mrs. Thomson has a good answer for this question.

[i] Tory McBride, “French Family Life, Adieu,” The Global Dispatches. Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://www.theglobaldispatches.com/articles/french-family-life-adieu--2.

[ii] John Tagliabue, “Ideas & Trends; In France, Nothing Gets in the Way of Vacation,” The New York Times (August 24, 2003). Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/weekinreview/ideas-trends-in-france-nothing-gets-in-the-way-of-vacation.html.

[iii] Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” reprinted in The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, Fourth Edition, edited by Louis P. Pojman and Lewis Vaughan (Oxford: Oxford, 2011), 797.

[iv] Jane English, “What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?” reprinted in Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics, edited by Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 686-687.

[v] English, 687.

[vi] The Puritan Divine Richard Baxter has pushed back against the conviction that parents earn their children’s respect by good performance. He writes,

Yea, though your parents be never so poor in the world, or weak of understanding, yea, though they were ungodly, you must honour them notwithstanding all this; though you cannot honour them as rich, or wise, or godly, you must honour them as your parents. . . .

If your parents be in want, it is your duty to relieve them according to your ability; yea, and wholly to maintain them, if there be need. For it is not possible by all that you can do, that ever you can be on even terms with them; or ever requite them for what you have received of them. It is base inhumanity, when parents come to poverty, for children to put them off with some short allowance, and to make them live almost like their servants, when you have riches and plenty for yourselves. Your parents should still be maintained by you as your superiors, and not as inferiors. See that they fare as well as yourselves; yea, though you got not your riches by their means, yet even for your being you are their debtors for more than that. (Baxter's Practical Works, Vol. 1, A Christian Directory ,
on Christian Economics, Chap. XI., pp. 454-457.)

[vii] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947; 10th printing 1973), 104.

[viii] Lin Yutang, “On Growing Old Gracefully,” from The Importance of Living (William Heinemann, Ltd. 1931). Reprinted in Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics, edited by Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 680.

[ix][ix] Lin Yutang, 677.

[x] William Burge, Burge’s Commentary on Colonial and Foreign Laws Generally, and with Their Conflict with Each Other and the Law of England, edited by Alexander Wood Renton and George Grenville Fillimore (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1908), 559-560. Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://books.google.com/books?id=GE00AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA555&lpg=PA555&dq=alimentary+obligation&source=bl&ots=PfQwMoXwBK&sig=5KtOOxvfV7dg-U5kHbFSBk5IIxU&hl=en&ei=i7TjTY22Mon30gGpp4SVBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=alimentary%20obligation&f=false

[xi] “Adult Children, Aging Parents and the Law,” The New York Times (November 20, 2008). Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/unenforced-filial-responsibility-laws/.

[xii] “Law to Force Chinese to Care for Parents” PressTV (February 19, 2011. )Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166058.html

[xiii] Gleitman v. Cosgrove, Supreme Court of New Jersey (1967) 227 A. 2d 689.

[xiv] “12 Animals with the Longest Gestation Period,” Mother Nature Network. Accessed May 31, 2011, at http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/photos/12-animals-with-the-longest-gestation-period/heres-to-mothers

[xv] Thomson, 792.

[xvi] Hans Christian Andersen, “The Princess and the Pea.” Accessed May 30, 2011, at http://childhoodreading.com/?p=5.

[xvii] Does this, for example, connect to suspension of the military draft?