I’m pro-choice in at least the following sense: I do not think that early stage abortions are murder. I think a person is essentially an experiencer, and so if my parents had gotten an abortion at four weeks, they wouldn’t have killed me. I didn’t exist yet. There are weird and thorny empirical questions about whether banning abortions increases overall welfare, but I at least doubt that early-stage abortions kill anyone. Thus, I don’t think they’re wrong for the standard reasons.
Nonetheless, I think reducing the number of abortions is valuable. Government action that reduced the number of abortions would be a good thing, all else equal. Even if abortion isn’t murder, we should prefer there be fewer abortions.
Why is this?
The first big reason is that there’s some chance you’re wrong. You’ve been wrong before! There are lots of brilliant pro-life philosophers. When you find yourself in disagreement with smart people, you shouldn’t be astronomically certain that you are right and they’re wrong. Thus, you should think the odds aren’t terrible that early abortions kill someone.
Let’s say you think that there’s a 5% chance abortions are murder. There are about a million abortions per year in the U.S.. So this would mean that abortions kill, in expectation, about 50,000 people in the U.S. per year. That’s more than gun violence! And 5% seems pretty conservative! This also gives you a pretty strong reason to refrain from having sex unless you are extremely confident that no pregnancy will result or are willing to raise the baby (for otherwise you are risking killing someone for the sake of sex, which is immoral, unless the risk is very low—you’re morally permitted to drive to have sex with someone, even though there’s some chance you’ll run someone over).
And lest you say that this is a Pascal’s wager or Pascal’s mugging, taking seriously a 5% risk that millions of people are being killed each year is obviously not a Pascal’s wager. If there were a 5% chance of a global pandemic that would kill a million Americans annually, that would be a pretty big deal. You don’t need to be a fanatic about risk to think that.
A second reason: people coming into existence is a good thing. I’ve made this case in more detail here. People tend to live many decades of mostly happy life and have positive impacts on the world. Those who get aborted never come into existence. This is bad.
Even if abortion isn’t murder—even if it’s just like failing to bring someone into existence—it’s good to bring people into existence. It leads to many years of happy life. So all else equal, we should regard abortions as in some way lamentable.
Third, even given standard pro-choice assumptions, plausibly a lot of abortions still kill someone. If a conscious being’s life is ended, then someone has been killed. A mind has been permanently wiped from existence. You can’t be a subject of experience without being someone.
So at what point does the fetus have a mind?
One answer goes: around 20 weeks, when the fetus has a cortex. Another answer is around 12 weeks. Probably about 10% of abortions happen after 12 weeks. So if we assume that there’s a 20% chance that a fetus is conscious at 12 weeks, then about 2% of abortions kill someone. The real number is even higher because of the percent of fetuses terminated after twenty weeks.
Now, maybe you think that the fetus’s diminished mental capacities at the time it’s killed diminish the wrongness of killing it. Thus, early stage abortions, even if the fetus is conscious, aren’t that bad. I have two objections to this:
This position is on somewhat dubious ground. If you kill someone while they’re sleeping, this isn’t less bad due to their diminished present mental capacities. If you kill a toddler, this isn’t less bad because of toddlers’ diminished mental simplicity.
At the very least, you shouldn’t be overwhelmingly certain of this very controversial position. So still, in expectation, abortions are collectively as bad as killing lots of people.
And bodily autonomy arguments have no force here. A bodily autonomy argument, if successful, establishes that people should have the right to an abortion. It doesn’t say anything about whether abortions are bad.
There’s also one slight more meta point in favor of this: lots of very smart people think that abortion is the central moral issue—that babies are routinely murdered in a way no less culpable than if you shot a two-year-old. These people are reasonable and their arguments aren’t, on their face, completely insane. It’s not as if these people are arguing that the sky is red or that absolute deontology is true.
In general, if reasonable people think that some particular thing is the biggest deal in the world, we should try to take it seriously. I would like if even those who don’t agree with me about factory farming or wild animal suffering took steps to minimize it, if possible. We should all recognize that we’re morally fallible and take steps to minimize the potential catastrophic consequences if it turns out that we’re in serious moral error. If you may be committing a crime like few others in human history, you should tread extremely carefully, even if you’re pretty sure you’re not.
What policies practically would this support? One is research into reducing rates of spontaneous abortion. The majority of fertilized eggs don’t reach full pregnancy. If the pro-life position is true, then this is the worst human scourge in the world. It means that most people will die before birth. It would be about as bad as if some disease caused most babies to die shortly after they were born. Thus, research into lowering rates of spontaneous abortion is hugely important given any amount of uncertainty on the question.
Another policy along these lines is cash transfers to parents. By subsidizing having children, people are likelier to have children and less likely to abort. This also will lead to more total people being born (you get more of what you subsidize), which is a good thing.
Expanding contraception access may have similar upsides but is riskier. On a lot of pro-life views, contraception is immoral. It also likely lowers the population, so two of the main considerations I cited in favor of lowering abortion rates are at least somewhat dubious, and one backfires. Of course, there may be other reasons to ensure ample access to contraception.
