Francisco Ramon Mata Marcano

This degree work focuses on the analysis of the essay Defense of Abortion by the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, which was published in 1971. This analysis allows us to elucidate, from an argumentative perspective, what is the scope and what are the limits in the use of analogical arguments by the author, which essentially make up the argumentative apparatus of the essay. The previous exploration of the context of the contemporary philosophical debate around abortion is not left aside, seeking to locate the essay within the domain of the objection of bodily autonomy, for which A Defense of Abortion is considered paradigmatic within Applied Ethics. In the argumentative analysis we explore the use of the most modern tools for analyzing analogical arguments: analogical argumentative schemes and structure mapping theory, which emphasizes the relationships between all the components of the domains object of analogies, rather than on the similarities between the compared elements. Then we consider the argumentative force of each argument. In the end we were unable to verify that there was a true analogy in any of those proposed in the essay. We thus conclude that the exclusive use of analogical argumentation usually leads to a conflict that is difficult to resolve: analogical argumentation fails to grasp all the original characteristics of the pregnancy process such as the beginning of human life, the originality of the mother-conceived relationship, the very fact of how the product of conception is called (embryo, fetus, baby, unborn entity, etc.), facts that are influenced by a certain idea regarding the origin of life itself.