Jane english and the Analogy of the Hypnotized Attackers :: essays research papers

For our next paper I plan on discussing abortion as a social issue. I want to do this in the form of a critical paper This seems to be a very sticky subject and is one of the topics we had in our class that was very interesting to me with a lot of room for interpretation as to when it is or is not o.k. to abort the fetus if it should ever be done at all. The argument I plan to discuss is Jane English's analogy of the hypnotized attackers which was not one of our readings, but one I came across in some research I did for this upcoming paper. This analogy has to do with a mad scientist who abducts people, hypnotizes them and has them attack innocent passerbys. A major part of the analogy is realizing that these people who are attacking innocents are themselves innocent and would not be committing the acts of violence that they are guilty of if they were not hypnotized and were able to act on their own volition. They are acting on the will of the mad scientist. He is the only bad person in this whole scenario. The innocent hypnotized attackers are representative of the fetus and the helpless attackee is representative of the woman or women who are victims of the unwanted pregnancy. The analogy is to determine the measure of force that can that can be used by the attacker to protect one'sself from the undesired attack of an undesirable pregnancy depending on what kind of damage the pregnancy may cause. I think that this analogy does a good job in deciding how to deal with the burden of pregnancy during more than just the moment of attack. Her narrative can grasp or deal with a lot of possible situations. Jane English argues that if a fetus is a person, abortion is still justifiable in many cases and if a fetus is not a person, killing it is still wrong in many cases (pg. 4). When I first read this , or heard, this passage I felt that it was fairly wishy- washy. I felt that her argument really did not have a stand, but how can you when you are not truly pro- choice or pro-life. She seems to be saying that there must be a good reason to end a life and not just for the sheer convenience of it. I completely agree. Also, with this argument came the concept of personhood. This concept seems to be what liberals and conservatives are trying to define because it can be stated at that exact moment when a fetus becomes a person and therefore when abortion