Pro-Choice Anti-Abortion

How to talk about abortion in light of fundamental differences in belief

I think abortion is bad and should be avoided and that “safe, legal and rare” is a good slogan actually. I was raised Catholic but lefty, what more can I say. I’m also the accidental child of young parents - my mom was 19 and my dad had just turned 20 when I was born, and my life is great and I’m really glad they didn’t abort me. Regardless, I think making abortion illegal or difficult to obtain is really bad for moral, utilitarian and democratic reasons. 

Regardless of when life begins, abortion should be legal

Morally, I value liberty over duty and think that criminalizing abortion is inconsistent with our existing laws and expectations as they pertain to bodily autonomy. Pregnancy is not at all trivial and we don’t require people to sacrifice their body for the lives of other already living humans let alone for the life of a fetus that could become a human. Now, a fetus is different than some random other person because, other than in the case of pregnancy as a result of rape, the pregnant woman has had a hand in it’s creation. But a parent has also had a hand in the creation of their child, and yet we don’t require them to donate an organ to the child if needed (although we usually would expect them to). We also don’t require a drunk driver who’s harmed someone to donate an organ to his victim, even though he is morally culpable for the damage caused. You could argue that maybe we should require him to… but my point is we don’t and our laws should be consistent.

From the utilitarian perspective I think illegal abortions are a lot more bad than legal abortions. Of course I think there would be a lot fewer abortions if it was illegal, so it’s not like every legal abortion would be replaced by a worse illegal one. But abortions avoided due to lack of access or illegality amount to forced parenthood. And I think forced parenthood is often really bad for the mother, can sometimes be bad for the father and is less than ideal for the child. Still, while not ideal, in the vast majority of cases I’d bet the child would rather have been born than aborted, even with a resentful or poor or uneducated or unstable mother. But I also think these “would’ve been aborted kids” are often born instead of another later kid rather than in addition to (i.e. most aren’t marginal babies). In the case of my family, my parents were too busy completing their university degrees while working full time and caring for me to desire a second baby. After a couple of pregnancy scares my dad got a vasectomy at 22(!!!), which seems unwise (of course it was unwise, they were 22!). But I expect they would’ve had two babies instead of one had they had their first child later.

Finally, even if you believe that life is sacred and that it begins at conception, you have to recognize that belief as, at least in part, a religious or philosophical claim rather than a purely scientific one. And a major feature of secular societies is that we’re not supposed to allow groups to enact their religious convictions on others by enshrining them in law. According to Pew Research 56% of Americans say that the phrase “life begins at conception and so a fetus is a person with rights” describes their view at least somewhat well. But an even bigger majority (72%) say that the statement “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” describes their view at least somewhat well. And most Americans, including many republicans (37% of whom say abortion should be “mostly” or “always” legal) think first trimester abortion should be legal in most cases. We live in a secular democracy, and our laws should reflect that.

AP NORC poll from 2021

But… by a certain stage of pregnancy abortion is on a spectrum with infanticide

While much less common than first-trimester abortions, late in pregnancy abortions do feel pretty close to infanticide. In India, where they’ve historically struggled with the problem of abortion of female fetuses on the basis of their sex (sex determination was made illegal in 1994 in response to this problem), they use the term female feticide to describe the practice. The choice to popularize this term, so close to infanticide, forces you to attend to the similarity between abortion and murder. There is of course, at least at some point in a pregnancy, a feeling that you’re killing something that’s very close to a baby. 

Science has allowed us a lot more insight into fetal development. In Caitlin Flanagan’s piece “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” she talks about how she used to feel comforted by the fact that most abortions happen in the first trimester, until she looked at a 3-D ultrasound image of a 12 week fetus which looks disturbingly like… well, like a baby. And after searching around online for pictures and illustrations I found that even by 9 weeks the fetus looks quite human. These photos certainly have an effect, but many of my less emotionally driven friends are more focused on expectations around the fetus’ ability to feel pain. This is often said to begin around 24 weeks but is subject to debate. I also intuitively feel that viability is an important factor in determining the moral weight associated with abortion, but since viability is inherently tied to technology… this is a moving target.

I’m still thinking through my position on whether late in pregnancy abortion should be legal in most cases. I don’t think we should require someone to sacrifice their body for another person (or fetus). But allowing a dependent being to continue to grow until it reaches a point where it’s very similar to a baby and can likely feel pain and then killing it is at best a sign of utter incompetence and at worst extremely morally objectionable. And I think women who get late in pregnancy abortions for non-medical reasons should feel shame.

Some stats on abortion in the US

While there’s a lot of discourse on late in pregnancy abortions, which I’ve just contributed to, the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester with nearly half completed before the 6th week of pregnancy:

2020 data from the CDC: Kortsmit, Katherine, et al. "Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2020." MMWR Surveillance Summaries 71.10 (2022): 1. Excel file used for plot available here.

But there are still over 4,000 abortions per year that happen later than 21 weeks into pregnancy. And for people that agree that late in pregnancy abortions are on a spectrum with infanticide, noting that there are “only” 4,000 per year isn’t a convincing reason to ignore the issue. After all there are less than 100 unarmed civilians killed by law enforcement per year and people seem to be pretty concerned about that. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be good information on how many of these late in pregnancy abortions are done for medical reasons (either in response to fetal abnormalities that hadn’t been previously detected or in cases where the mother’s life is at risk), but it seems like it’s not the majority based on this FAQ from which I quote:

Based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field, Dr. Foster believes that abortions for fetal anomaly “make up a small minority of later abortion” and that those for life endangerment are even harder to characterize. Many of the women whose lives are at risk would be treated under emergency circumstances at a hospital rather than at a dedicated abortion clinic, making numbers more difficult to obtain, according to Dr. Foster.

But I did find some poll results on non-medical reasons for delaying abortion. The most common reason was lack of funds. I know that a lot of Americans don’t just have $500 lying around, but if there’s any situation where it makes sense to do whatever you must to get it, it’s this. For one thing, abortions get a lot more expensive, a lot harder to get and require more recovery time when you get them late in pregnancy. And a baby will obviously cost a lot more than $500. Depending on your pre-existing biases you’ll either take this statistic as a sign that people need to take more personal responsibility for their lives (and fetuses) or as a point in favor of universal healthcare and easier abortion access. Regardless, I think most people can agree that reducing the frequency of late in pregnancy abortions would be a good thing.

Kaiser Family Foundation. “Abortions Later in Pregnancy.” KFF, 5 Dec. 2019

When you look at the polling data the abortion debate isn’t as hot as it seems. Most people agree that early in pregnancy abortions should be legal but also that abortion is a moral issue and that late in pregnancy abortions should be exceedingly rare if not illegal. But both pro-life and pro-choice people are (from my standpoint of maximal nuance and openness) shockingly bad at taking the perspective of the other side, even though both sides really do have a lot of strong arguments.

Pro-life people fail to recognize that their beliefs rely on religious convictions that not everyone holds

To be honest I don’t know many (any) pro-lifers so I’m mainly drawing on my own experience. I used to say that while I’m pro-choice I think “every abortion is tragic” and that I wouldn’t have even been able to take Plan B without a lot of complicated feelings. I got an IUD when I was 20 largely because they’re much more effective than the pill and so would lower my chance of getting into the position where I would have to make a “decision”. Right before the procedure the nurse asked me if it was at all possible that I could be pregnant because the insertion would abort a fetus if I was. I said no, and was confident in that answer, but I still felt an intense sense of dread and fear that … what if I was and what if I aborted that fetus?? Even though this “fetus” was not only extremely unlikely to exist but would’ve been about 3 weeks old max. 

When my friends, who can be oppressively demanding of consistency, have pestered me to explain why exactly a few week old fetus deserves moral weight let alone rights… I’ve come up short. The more I’ve been forced to reflect on this the more I’ve had to admit that a very new fetus doesn’t bear nearly enough in common with a living human to warrant the importance I once gave to it. Saying it has the “potential” to be a human gets you nowhere because so does every gamete. This line of argument forces you to say that contraception and “family planning” are also morally wrong if you want to maintain consistency. People on the pro-life side need to reckon with the reality that their beliefs around abortion are at least partly a result of their religious beliefs, beliefs that other Americans are not required to share or act on the basis of.

Until relatively recently I also assumed that abortion was at least somewhat traumatic for basically all women. I had to hear from a bunch of people for whom it wasn’t traumatic to finally understand that some combination of my religious indoctrination and my personality characteristics made it seem this way to me, and that this wasn’t a given. Similarly, I had to consume at least 10 hours of Aella audio to even start to internalize the fact that at least some women don’t experience sex work as degrading. 

Over time I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea that not all abortions are so tragic, and that they exist on a spectrum from basically having no moral weight to having a lot. I think this view is intuitive to most people anyways in the absence of religious training to the contrary. I haven’t sufficiently looked into this but a quick search shows that there’s been a variety of opinions and legal statuses on abortion over time, and that first-trimester (or pre-quickening) abortions have often been considered in a different class than late in pregnancy abortions. And as Louise Perry and others have discussed, even infanticide was relatively acceptable pre-Christianity.

Liberals fail to accept that pro-life people believe what they claim to believe 

A line I’ve heard more times than I can count is that “conservatives don’t care about the babies!! This is just another excuse for them to control women’s bodies!” I think this sort of response comes from a pathologically secular perspective and inability to believe that other people have faith. Plus it’s unreasonably conspiratorial. While I haven’t spoken to many people who are anti-legal abortion it’s safe to assume that they really do believe that fetuses deserve a right to life and that abortion is murder. Again, I think abortion should be legal even if this is true, but if it’s true abortion is really sad.

The next line is that conservatives aren’t really “pro-life” because they’re not supportive of social policies that support poor families financially. A take that you can only come up with if you fail to accept that these activists literally think abortion is MURDER. Being anti-murder is not inconsistent with being anti-welfare programs. Obviously. Finally, the line that abortion is just healthcare, while possibly true for some Americans obscures the moral dimension that most Americans feel is a part of this debate. And as I think this failure to engage with the moral questions involved only weakens the ability of pro-choice activists to change minds.

Let’s all just hold hands and compromise

This issue has become very politically important and very emotionally salient to activists on both sides of the debate. So we really need to find a reasonable compromise. A really crazy idea I’ve had might be to have the laws reflect the opinions of the average American, making early in pregnancy abortion legal in most cases and late in pregnancy abortion illegal in most cases.