The flaws of an old hypothetical also illuminate the weakness of contemporary arguments for abortion grounded on claims of bodily autonomy.

Judith Jarvis Thompson’s hypothetical: If you were kidnapped and used as a life-support system for an ailing virtuoso, would you have the right to disconnect him? Nonetheless, its argument from autonomy is, if anything, now more central to the case for abortion.

This emphasis is largely a byproduct of the ultrasound pictures on our fridges and social media feeds. It is difficult to dismiss human lives in utero as worthless clumps of cells when you can count their fingers and look at their faces. So abortion supporters increasingly echo Thompson’s claim that no one should be compelled to sustain another person, whether violinist or fetus. Thus, a woman has an absolute right to violently end the human life developing in her womb. //

The violinist scenario is a hypothetical freak of medicine, whereas pregnancy is the normal reality of human reproduction. This normalcy, in turn, reminds us that we were all once utterly dependent in utero, and that most of us will be dependent again, whether from illness, injury, or old age. In short, we are all the violinist.

Human solidarity recognizes this shared dependence. Ignoring it, or trying to avoid it, has been a great failure of the liberal political tradition. Liberal discourse privileges independent, rational adults (or at least adults who imagine themselves such). But independent, rational adults don’t need solidarity, they need a non-aggression pact and mechanisms for conflict resolution—which is what classical liberal theorists such as John Locke sought to provide. //

Abortion’s dissolution of family solidarity poisons everything. Abortion culture encourages men and women to use each other rather than to love each other. Abortion culture teaches us to treat children as expensive commodities, rather than welcoming them as blessings. //

Family requires solidarity, which abortion destroys, both directly by violently ending unborn lives and indirectly through the culture this enables and encourages. And when solidarity decays within family life, it will not endure socially or politically.

This is why the promises of abortion advocates have proven false. Thompson’s weird hypothetical invites us to disconnect the violinist, but abortion disconnects all of us from the love and solidarity that enable genuine human flourishing.