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During a recent episode of her Miss Me? podcast, Lily Allen, the popstar singer known for her hit single “Smile,” admitted that she had had so many abortions, she could not remember the exact number, as she just kept getting pregnant all the time.

“Abortions. I’ve had a few, but then again, I can’t remember exactly how many,” Allen sang to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s classic, “My Way.” She later added that she believed she’d had four or five abortions.

There has been a spate of celebrities lately celebrating their abortions in a crudely vulgar and cavalier manner. How did we, as a civilization, arrive at the point where a woman could take a Sinatra song and, in a pathologically narcissistic and homicidal spirit, use it as a vehicle to boast about the killing of her four or five unborn children? How did we as a civilization become so morally numb and psychologically insensitive that we see her behavior as nothing more than a jocular exercise in free speech? How and when did our ethical sensibilities become so calcified that we celebrate abortion as a blood sport, a victory for women to use their bodies in any manner they choose without any overarching moral principle to regulate or guide those choices?

One could attempt to function like an indiscriminate wholesaler in the realm of diagnostics here by pointing to the moral relativism of our culture, the rampant nihilism that is constitutive of our civilization, and the erosion of objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. But these arbitrating referents might be too broad. It might be more helpful to look directly at the explicit premises that undergird the abortion movement, and, more specifically, the foundational premises that guide the thinking of women who defend their right to abortion.

I contend that it is sloppy and nefarious ideas that got us into this state of affairs, where celebrating abortion and, as seems to be the case with Allen (pictured above left), allegedly using it as a form of birth control, came to be regarded as a virtue. It is only moral principles and rigorous reasoning that will pave a way for us to understand why life, regardless of when it begins, is a non-negotiable, sanctified phenomenon. It is, I shall argue, an indubitable moral axiom.

We begin with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson argues that even if we grant that a fetus is a person with a right to life, this does not automatically make abortion morally impermissible. She believes that the right to life does not entail the right to use someone else’s body to sustain that life.

To amplify this point, she employs a particular thought experiment known as the violinist analogy. It goes as follows: imagine that you are involuntarily, surgically connected to a famous unconscious violinist who needs your body to survive because he suffers from a fatal kidney ailment, and you have the correct blood type to save him. Without your consent, the Society of Music Lovers has connected his circulatory system to yours. If you unplug yours, he will die. If you remain connected, he will recover in nine months. Thomas argues that although the violinist has a right to survive, he does not have the right to use your body against your will. Therefore, unplugging yourself, although it will result in his death, is morally permissible because his right to life does not supersede your right to bodily autonomy.

The analogy is used to argue that a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body can justify abortion even if the fetus is considered a person with a right to life. Abortion can be permissible because it is not a violation of the fetus’s right to life but a refusal to allow the fetus the use of the woman’s body, to which the fetus has no intrinsic right.

Before I begin to assail Thomson’s argument logically, a statement on her methodology is necessary. It is grossly improper in moral philosophy or in any form of reasoning involving ethics to hypothesize a scenario so far-fetched that one is never likely to encounter it in reality. To attempt to secure a moral principle from science-fiction scenarios is more than implausible; it is immoral. Moral principles are based not only on what is plausible but, more importantly, on what is factual and rooted in objective reality – i.e., that which corresponds to concrete referents in real life.

Thomson’s attempt to reason from a hypothetical scenario in which one is taken by force and surgically hooked up to an ailing kidney patient, and extrapolates that to the case of abortion fails one important philosophical meaning test. I shall call it Causal Responsibility. In the Violinist Argument, the one who is hooked up to the ailing kidney patient is forced against her will. She is a victim of a cruel hoax and plays no causal responsibility in the status and well-being of the violinist.

In the case of abortion, what is real is that two people are causally and, therefore, morally responsible for that fetus. They have consented to an act of sex which they knew could result in the creation of a child—use of birth control notwithstanding, as no form of birth control is one hundred percent effective. One has voluntarily used one’s body to create a life—intention here is irrelevant; consent to heterosexual sex always comes with the full knowledge that it could result in a pregnancy. To move forward with the act, therefore, is to implicitly consent to the creation of a life.

If two people are causally implicated in the creation of a life, what is called clinically as pregnancy, that life cannot, on moral grounds, be annihilated by an appeal to expediency any more than a four-year-old child could be abandoned or killed because both parents have found themselves unemployed or mired in debt and poverty. The right to life is an absolute. If, as Thomson claims, the fetus is a person, then it is an end itself with no higher or lesser degree of humanity, moral human status, than those possessed by the mother. It cannot, therefore, be subject to variables in reality that can modify the value of its life and render it as something whose life could be terminated. I do not believe that Thomson can properly refer to the fetus – even for arguments’ sake – as a person, for the simple fact that she has not identified the traditional criteria for personhood. I shall, instead, use the term “fetus-human.”

If a person causes a car accident, whether through impaired judgment or not, that has injured several people, and that person is not financially equipped or psychologically mature enough to deal with the ramifications of what he or she has caused, their psychological or financial inadequacies are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for them to evade accountability for their actions. There is no “exit clause” predicated on personal inconvenience to which one can appeal. A court of law will find that person culpable. The same goes for someone who embezzles money he cannot repay.

In the case of the creation of a life, one played a constitutive causal role in using one’s body in a manner that leaves one duty-bound to honor the right of that life to exist. One cannot by some moral legerdemain make an analytic or moral distinction between one’s body and the body of the fetus-human. As a causal creator of human life, one is co-imbricated in a nexus of relational commitments to the fetus-human one carries in the womb.

Let us return here to two of the compelling beliefs that underlie a woman’s idea that she has a right to abortion: choice and autonomy. Choice as such, without any need to qualify or frame it within a moral context, is taken as sacrosanct, as in the popular slogan that is a predicate of the abortion defense position: My body, my choice. On the surface this issue is nonsensical and guilty of the fallacy of context dropping. We don’t indiscriminately use an autonomous right to our bodies to defend any choice we make, such as murder, cutting off the tails of cats, or torturing homeless people.

The slogan only makes sense because of the assumption that the fetus is an entity that has no right to life on its own. But if, as Thomson has already granted, that the fetus may be regarded as a person, then its moral status is indistinguishable from that of the mother and the slogan is reprehensible. It is not scaffolded by any higher regulative principle save the subjective whims, desires, and capricious moods of a woman. The choice is sufficient unto itself, and it supersedes any inherent value a fetus-human possesses—even by the lowest standards of a cynical skeptic.

One is here reminded of women in the Roman Republic and Empire who were known to have several abortions for the sole reason of preserving their slender figures. This aesthetic choice, made because it was a non-moral value, took precedence over another competing value, this one moral: the value of the life of the fetus-human whose life exists as an end in itself. The issue of autonomy has already been challenged throughout this article. Thomson’s reliance on autonomy as an unassailable feature of moral life fails to take into account the fact that autonomy ends where moral jurisdiction over an independent life will end if one attempts to annihilate it.

You read that correctly. If by Thomson’s admission for argument’s sake the fetus is a person (or as I have termed it, “fetus-human”), then it is not a mere appendage of the mother. It is an independent agent in its own right. The mother can no longer exercise her right to choose her autonomy in a way that contravenes the bodily integrity of the fetus-human. Since the fetus-human has no choice in whether it lives or dies, we have to assert its inherent autonomous status as an end in itself. If it exists as an end in itself, it has a right to life and bodily integrity. This is the intrinsic moral language that inheres in its nature; and it is its only defense to its own life.

The most charitable interpretation of abortion is that it is an exercise in moral delinquency, and moral laziness. It is to use one’s body to generate a human life, and then to opt out of any moral responsibility for that life by asserting that one’s choice, body, and autonomy have a higher and superior moral and metaphysical status than the fetus-human one has brought into existence.