Actually if you read JJT's article with some of her other hypos it becomes clear that her defense of abortion is limited to instances of unwanted pregnancy due to involuntary sex. This implicit in the original hypo: you awake and _find yourself_ attached to the violinist by tubes.
As has been pointed out countless times, the reaction is very different if you, for example, bet on the next Cubs game -- no, that's too hopeless -- the next Sox game, win, your friend takes you to a fabulous dinner, lose, you end up hooked up to the violinist. There it looks like you took a stupid chance and lost, so stop kvetching, it's your own damn fault. Her later examples are like this.
I didn't present my turnabout of the argument on the rightwinger as a knockdown refutation. There are no knockdown refutations. I presented it as an amusing rhetorical strategy. I this in the context of showing the limits of JJT's argument.
Incidentally my personal experience is that lots of right-wingers find themselves speechless in the face of it; they didn't anticipate that the argument would expand in that direction, so they haven't got the responses mapped out the way they have the usual argument in the artificial model world that doesn't contain, for example, mass poverty and starvation or unnecessary death and illness due to the private control of medicine. Leaving those things out d part of they way the model obfuscates things.
Also, a lot of anti-abortionists may _feel_ like unwanted pregnancy and childrearing is punishment for what was probably premarital teenage sex by a lazy welfare princess, but it doesn't do to _say_ so. Their rhetorical strategy requires a display of empathy for the woman in her plight. If they say, basically, F*ck you, bitch, drop dead, you are just a vessel for bearing babies, it would limit their appeal.
However, I think the idea that women really are just baby machines, that sex is bad and pregnancy is deserved punishment, are a lot closer to what drives the debate that all this rebop about whether fetuses have moral standing or whether they have a right to life whether or not they have the metaphysical feature of being a person (usually expressed, stupidly, as being "alive," as if grass wasn't alive.).
--- On Sat, 12/13/08, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Catholicism, was Re: blacks about as morally conservative as Republicans
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, December 13, 2008, 12:11 AM
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > On the other hand, it is useful and amusing, as a
> rhetorical strategy, to turn this point on right wing
> anti-abortionists. How can they say that a _fetus_ has the
> right to what it needs to survive, but a _grown woman_
> doesn't, if that "something" happens to be
> money for foof or medical care, etc.
>
> Wouldn't the right-winger be liable to say it's the
> woman's fault for getting knocked up? You didn't
> choose to have the team of doctors attach the violinist to
> you, but the woman chose to have carnal knowledge.
>
> SA
> ___________________________________
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