They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.
The child on the other hand won't be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he'll be hurt, but in the end, he'll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man.
To liken this to pregnancy, the mother can be thought to be the person inside the house and the fetus to be the growing child.
[11] To illustrate an example of pregnancy due to voluntary intercourse, Thomson presents the people-seeds situation.
[12]In this example, the people-seeds flying through the window represent conception, despite the precautionary mesh screen, which functions as contraception.
The woman in question does not want a people-seed to root itself in her house, and so she takes the necessary precautions and measures to protect herself with the best mesh screens and then voluntarily opens the windows.
She observes that some may argue the affirmative to this question, stating: "[A]fter all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors.
[13] Thomson does not support abortion in all circumstances, and she gives as an example a hypothetical woman who seeks a late termination of pregnancy "just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad", and declares this to be "positively indecent".
Critics of her view have formulated many objections to her argument, and defenders have responded in kind in a back and forth that continues in philosophy journals.
Thomson's imaginative examples and controversial conclusions have made "A Defense of Abortion" perhaps "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy".
One notable exception to this general agreement is Peter Singer, who argues that, despite human intuitions, a utilitarian calculus implies that one is morally obliged to stay connected to the violinist.
[20] Defenders of Thomson's argument reply that the alleged disanalogies between the violinist scenario and typical cases of abortion do not matter, either because the factors that critics appeal to are not genuinely morally relevant, or because those factors are morally relevant but do not apply to abortion in the way that critics have claimed.
Thomson's defenders also point to her people-seeds argument as a strong analogy to typical cases of abortion.