> Let’s say you’re trapped in a burning building and you have a choice between saving one five-year-old and a thousand frozen embryos. If you’re not both pro-life and chronically addicted to biting bullets, you pick the five-year-old, right? Very few people really think that embryos’ lives matter as much as born children’s do.
I think a lot of this is due to presumed replacement effects, though? My instincts about this situation are very different depending on whether the outcome is "these particular embryos burn up, the people involved have a different thousand kids instead" or whether it's "these particular embryos burn up, the people involved have no kids at all instead, the world in five years has a thousand fewer people than it otherwise would have". In the former case, it's pretty unambiguously right to save the five-year-old; in the latter, my common-sense-morality-intuitions point five-year-old-ward but my consequentialism-intuitions point embryos-ward and I'm genuinely unsure which would win in the event. (I'm pretty sure my *endorsed* answer, from a distance, is the embryos, but unsure how much effect that would have on my actual decisions in the moment.)
Yeah, I was going to mention, my intuition leans towards the embryos with just a few small changes. Either cryo-freeze the five year old, or put the embryos into fully functioning artificial wombs, with caring parents, and suddenly things shift towards saving the thousand. The analogy might need some fine tuning here. Or my intuition is weird. Could go either way.
Very interesting. As someone who thinks that it's much worse for a 10 year old to die than a newborn, and possibly even for an 18 year old too, I'm probably out there by today's standards (and no, I'm not a time traveller from the "massive child mortality" era though this historical perspective undoubtedly plays a role).
As someone who had an abortion which didn't feel like a tragic or difficult decision -- in the sense that I didn't have a doubt for a moment what I wanted to do -- but still felt like a much harder thing to go through than taking a morning-after pill (I think it's this scared animal thing kicking in here) I feel that the concept of gradually "increasing" personhood might be a decent compromise here -- and as on your embryos vs child example, the vast majority of anti abortion people don't REALLY seem to believe that abortion is equivalent to infanticide, never mind "proper" murder.
>> I would be pretty unhappy about dying even if I died painlessly and no one would miss me.
Interesting. Even if you didn't know it was to happen or that you were dying?
I think I'd be ok with it. On some level, it would feel like an optimal, even desirable solution: nobody gets harmed apart from the future me, who doesn't exist. Of course, you're young, so you have a realistically worthwhile future of projects and "projects", rather than just waiting for the (clearly visible on the horizon) decrepitude to arrive; so that makes a big difference.
>Vast majority of anti abortion people don't REALLY seem to believe that abortion is equivalent to infanticide
I greatly distrust "don't REALLY seem to believe X" of this form -- frankly, it's easy to get out of this "don't really believe that bombing faraway Palestinians to death is as bad as stabbing someone and watching them struggle and die in front of you".
I would definitely save the 5 year old, for what it’s worth. Not even close, either; you could make it 10 21-week infants and I’d still choose the 5-year old,
I agree, but my decision is influenced by the fact that 22-23 weeks is the bleeding edge of practical viability. I think I would probably have a harder time choosing if survival chance was higher.
> society must not justify neglecting its obligations to poor children by conscripting the man, himself generally quite poor, who is nearest the problem.
This is a key point, I think, and a good reason to take the viability line (to the extent it is a line) as the morally pragmatic demarcation point. As you say, we struggle with the implementation details, but we generally *do* recognize that, while there is a societal obligation to ensure that all children be cared for in a loving home as they grow, confining that obligation to a particular person due to their proximity or relationship to the child is itself an immoral imposition on at least one of those parties.
This is the key difference, to me, between a healthy-but-not-independently-viable fetus and a newborn infant: the party or parties sustaining the infant through the beginning of its life can be swapped out if needed, in a way that the central party (the pregnant person) can't be swapped out in the case of the fetus. In the infant case, society can, if needed, seek a way to accomplish its general obligation without imposing it specifically and involuntarily on a particular person. In the case of the fetus, there's a genuine moral dilemma, and I ultimately don't trust "society as a whole" to actually resolve the dilemma if we allow it to just bulldoze over the specific individual at the heart of it.
My favorite rejoinder to the idea that death is only bad because of the suffering it causes I the people who survives comes in an episode of "X." The main villain, Fuma, asks another character what makes death bad. The other character replies that people are sad when their loved ones die. Fuma replies that he doesn't have to worry about that because he intends to kill everyone one Earth, so there will be no one left to mourn.
In spite of that, I think most people still regard Fuma's plans as villainous.
Great essay. Chiming in to say what a couple other people seem to be saying; I'm mostly with you in your pragmatic descriptions of why we value things like "not dying", and then when you talk about relative values of different ages of humans my brain goes "what?".
I agree with you that it's wrong to kill two-year-olds. But if I had to do a trolley problem thing and save either a two-year-old or a thirty-five-year-old, I'd save the thirty-five-year-old. Same with the five-year-old vs. two newborns. And these are pretty immediate reactions!
I do think w/ "killing kids vs. killing adults" something else plays into it. Somehow who chooses to go out and kill a child we see as "defiling innocence" in some way. Versus w/ an adult, they're at least "picking on someone their own size". See, for example, reactions to school shootings - when an adult goes out and shoots up a kindergarten, we see them as simply a monster, but people have been trying to find ways to make Harris and Klebold into misunderstood loners since Columbine. However, most of us have no intention of killing people anyway. I like the burning building question better for that reason. Does choosing between rescuing from a burning building a two-year-old or an adult change your answer to that question at all?
This is all just differing moral intuitions though. The only place where I truly think your argument doesn't make sense is in assigning life projects to people who don't really have them. I don't see any way that claiming a newborn baby can have a life project is different from claiming that a hypothetical baby can have a life project. Neither life project is substantiated in an actual brain that can visualize and want it. And if a baby's life project exists simply because growing up is what babies are for, then why doesn't a pair of sperm and egg have a life project since becoming a baby is what sperms and eggs are for?
>>Giving a child up for adoption is the right choice for some pregnant people, but it doesn’t substitute for the ability to end a pregnancy.
I'll admit up front that I'm coming from... uhh... *kind of* the other side of this one... but just trying to give friendly pushback, because I genuinely do like this essay.
To wit, just because it's the right choice for some people in the context of having a choice, doesn't mean it can't be the correct moral choice in most circumstances within the context of if a right to a choice doesn't actually exist. IOW, if the substitute is morally superior (again, in most circumstances) to the ability itself, then on some level it constitutes a duty, regardless of how preferentially inferior it is as a substitute for having a choice.
To borrow a theme of yours from (II), from behind the Rawlsian veil, I personally would prefer being conceived into a world where my mother was required to take me to term and give me up for adoption, at the cost of potentially being born a woman and not having that choice myself. Because the former involves significant personal cost (and even potential death) vs. never getting very far past the starting gate to begin with.
To get into the actuarial math... (~50% chance of being born a woman) x (~>57% chance of ever becoming pregnant) x (0.0223% chance of death in US) + (some term to consider the pain and suffering of a bad pregnancy relative to death) << (~20% abortion ratio).
So, fun fact about me: I wouldn’t exist if abortion was illegal. When my mom was 16ish, she had an accidental pregnancy and got an abortion. Even if she had given that kid up for adoption, it’s likely that just going through that pregnancy as a teenager would have fundamentally changed her life, causing social isolation and health complications, interfering with college applications, compromising her relationship with her family, etc. Sure, she might still have gone on to become a tenured professor with two wanted children, but I suspect that being forced to carry a teen pregnancy to term substantially lowers the probability of that happening.
The world where I and my sister exist seems pretty good to me. If you asked me whether I would accept a 20% chance of painless death before I became conscious in exchange for living in a world where more women are like my mom and more families are like mine, I think I would take that bet. (To be fair, I don’t actually think non-existence sounds that bad. Imo Ozy is on to something with the life project metric. If I never get the ability to form preferences, goals, or relationships, I don’t think I really have that much to lose.)
On a less personal note, I think you get into tricky positions when you start to apply Rawls to fetuses. For example, this argument also implies that we ought to be doing a lot more for fetal health than we currently are, even if it makes the life of women worse. For example, we can make it illegal for any woman of childbearing age to drink or use drugs, force everyone to get regular std tests, and put folic acid in the drinking water. After all, you would much prefer to exist as a non-miscarried baby without fetal alcohol syndrome. From a rawlsian perspective this world seems likely to be better (yes it requires restricting some personal loner, but you already said you were okay with making it worse to be a woman), but most people have other moral intuitions about freedom or government overreach that control in this case.
>> But the decision to have a child is the most important decision most people will ever make.
Just want to stress-test your logic on this.
By your own preferred mode of reasoning -- focusing on "common-sense morality" -- it would therefore follow that we should invoke the common experience of this "decision".
Accordingly, I would submit that throughout most of human history, and even including many if not most births today, this "decision" has never been such a philosophical or rational "homo economicus" exercise. Like, sure, on the margins there are a LOT of women today who deeply weigh their choice -- the margin is quite wide. And modern historiography amply shows us that the historical margin was wider than many pro-lifers like to imagine it was; women have had access to abortifacients of varying effectiveness throughout history, and therefore have had something of a choice.
But for most people, most pregnancies, they make a choice and then move on. Moreover, if they hadn't made THIS particular choice at THIS particular time in their life, they probably would have made a similar choice at a similar time in their life -- it's not something made on a whim, but it's not something that requires epic amounts of reflection to make.
What I'm saying is, although you're *objectively* correct that it's a hugely important choice, the common experience is that most people don't *treat* it like a hugely important choice at the moment it's made.
TLDR: How do you reconcile the difference between the choice being important and people not treating it as such, with your own rhetorical preference for relying on common-sense morality?
1. A decision can be immensely important and also easy (if, for example, it's overwhelmingly important to you to have a child).
2. Most people throughout most of history had limited ability to determine the course of their own lives, and whether they had children was decided for them. That's bad!
Are you sure on #2? I mean, if you’re saying that largely ineffective abortifacients took away a lot of choice in the matter, then sure. But it’s highly debatable to what extent childbearing was “decided for them” across all the different cultures and times.
I’d hold that an exceedingly small proportion of childbearing decisions were made by political structures; and still a minority by spouses and parents; all still adding up to a minority of childbearing being coerced. Most were just down to biology and acculturation — IE people wanted to have sex and knew babies came from that, and they wanted babies because they were socially programmed to without ever being coerced.
Too many people excessively map off of Victorian tropes about medieval European patriarchy**, which in truth was a lot more cooperative than the tropes would have us imagine. The kernel of truth is that the tropes were based on real legal principles that privileged the patriarchy, but those only came into play when people didn’t already agree, which again, acculturation mostly took care of.
** I can’t tell if this is what you’re doing, and it’s not an accusation, just sharing my prior here.
The violin argument is still absurdly bad and while you correctly point out just how invasive and awful it can feel to be forced to support someone else in your body that doesn't support the Thompson's violin argument -- it supports the obvious idea that utility/consequences should matter. The only reason to make the violin argument is to defend the idea that **controlling for how bad the experience is** the right not to support someone else in your body is more important than other equally unpleasant experiences.
-- And I say all this as someone who personally supports extremely extensive abortion rights based on better utilitarian considerations. --
So let's list all the ways the violin argument is really awful.
1) It proves far too much. If you take it seriously then you should conclude that it's unacceptable to deny a women with a healthy pregnancy one day before delivery an abortion (suppose it's a place where you don't have the equipment to do a C-section but for some reason can abort or wait for delivery tomorrow when the equipment arrives).
2) It doesn't really explain why any burden not to force the violinist on someone extends to an obligation to make available the means to remove (and kill) a violinists who was attached with your full consent.
At a practical level a win for pro-lifers is passing laws that make it illegal to access the drugs or pay others to perform the surgical procedures to abort the child.
3) If you think the argument does -- contra 2 -- explain why one has a right to access the medications and professional medical care necessary to perform the abortion then the argument either rests on the assumption that the fetus has the same moral status as a person or it proves way way more than most people are comfortable with.
If you believe that the fetus isn't yet a person it's no different in kind than any other natural condition that obtains in your body. If you can say "I want to change the condition I find my body in as a result of correctly functioning natural processes" and that creates a right of access to the means then why can't you say "I don't feel jacked up/euphoric/calm" and gain the right to heroin, crack, or whatever weird ass and potentially harmful thing you want to do to yourself -- even weird mutilation. Honestly, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this idea but most people aren't and it's a surprising consequence of this argument.
Now you might object, but those things are incredibly harmful and pose risks to you that aborting a pregnancy doesn't and indeed protects you from. But you've given up the core benefit of the argument -- avoiding having to get into the discussion of trade offs since if you are the arbiter of what you see as a harm maybe you only care about the next 24 hours and if society can override that why can't they judge the harm of a single regretted abortion to be all important?
4) It's fundamentally sneaky and emotionally manipulative. Rather than elucidating some unique aspect of the moral situation it just picks finds an extreme example that feels analagous.
But if we replace the example with something like -- they implant a little DRAM sized stick under the skin on the back which keeps the violinist's engram healthy and he is in suspend the whole time the supposedly relevant aspects haven't changed but the intuitions have.
I'm confused about the "right to choose whether to have a child" argument. Everybody, both men and women, already have that right. People who don't want children can simply not have sex. So pro-choice arguments of "I should have control over my body" and anti-child-support arguments of "I shouldn't be forced to pay for a child I didn't want" both don't make a lot of sense to me, since the person in question *did* have a choice, and chose to risk the child.
Of course there's a difference between actively wanting a child vs. not wanting one and choosing to engage in an activity that comes with a risk of one. But we generally don't reason the same way with other activities. If someone chooses to ride a motorcycle and gets injured, that's unfortunate, but we don't treat it as some great injustice and violation of their bodily integrity. In both cases the participants were fully aware of the potential outcomes and decided the benefit was worth it, so I don't see why we should treat them differently. Sex is a recreational activity that comes with certain risks; risks that are quite low as long as one prepares in advance.
The best argument against this position I know of is that sex is different from other recreational activities since it's so tightly bound up in the human psyche for evolutionary reasons. People don't *need* thrill rides to be psychologically healthy, but do need sex, as evidenced by e.g. how relationships tend to be healthier if the participants have good sex. This argument seems reasonable to me, but it's not *obvious*, and shouldn't just be assumed. Moreover, a right to sex would lead to some very unpopular conclusions when applied to involuntary celibacy, so I don't think any significant fraction of people actually believe such a right exists.
- I am totally willing to bite bullets about a right to free sexual expression.
- You can't force people to love other people, but "no one should expect to be loved" would still be a cartoonishly evil solution to nearly any problem. Things can still be very valuable if it would be wrong to force people to provide them.
- If someone can't walk because of a motorcycle accident, I would like them to receive medical treatment and disability accommodations so they can participate fully in society, I don't go "well that's the predictable consequence of your actions."
- While it is completely consistent to believe that no one should have PIV unless they actively desire to conceive a child, this would be a very radical norms shift and involve either far less PIV than any culture I'm aware of has actually done or a sharp rollback of women's rights.
- It is genuinely baffling to me why everyone is like "don't have sex" rather than "use an IUD or the implant" in these examples. Do I need to write a post that's like "PSA: IUDs and the implant are very effective"?
I know IUDs exist and are effective, that was one of the methods I was referring to under "risks that are quite low as long as one prepares in advance."
My claim is certainly not that no one should have PIV unless they actively desire to conceive a child, just like I obviously don't think that people should only ride a motorcycle if they *desire* to get injured. I'm saying that the consequences should not be treated as though they're a *surprise*.
I find the violinist argument particularly bad because it totally ignores the consensual aspect of the situation. If I wake up one day tied to someone in a hospital bed, there's a reasonable argument in favor of allowing me to detach myself even if it results in their death. But if I voluntarily choose to sign up to become a long-term blood donor and then I change my mind later and leave them to die, that's a horrible thing to do.
I think you're missing the point of the motorcycle analogy. If people in a third-world country have a 10% chance of dying of malaria, that's a top priority because they can't avoid this outcome. If 10% of skydivers are dying of parachute malfunctions, that's also bad, but there's no need for this to be a priority, since they always have the option of just not going skydiving.
The first person has only one option: 10% chance of death. The second person has two options: don't go skydiving and 0% chance of death, or go skydiving and 10% chance of death. The second person's options are *strictly better* than the first's, so they can only be said to be better off. The importance of one's right to life does not imply that one's right to safe skydiving is equally important.
The same concept applies to abortion. A person in a society where abortion is illegal has multiple options: they can choose to never have sex, or choose to have sex that may conceive a child. This means that, outside of rape, the badness of a ban on abortion is lower-bounded by the badness of being unable to have sex at all.
Being unable to have sex could certainly could be very bad depending on one's psychological needs! But that's clearly not the argument being made, because if it were, people who are completely unable to have sex would be a higher priority to address than those who only have to face a choice between lack of sex vs. potentially having a child.
The existence of effective birth control supports the pro-life side of the argument, because it means there's much lower cost to never conceiving a child. Rather than people having to choose between never having sex and having to face the possibility of a child, the choice is actually between "have careful sex and not have to worry about it" and "have uncareful sex and maybe have a child".
So talking about the impact on the woman's body or the man's pocketbook as an argument in favor of abortion seems invalid to me, since in both cases they had the option to avoid any risk and chose not to exercise it. Whether abortion is right or wrong then depends primarily on what rights the child should have, not the mother.
Great essay, paticularly the why death is bad and life projects.
I think of myself as pro-life at the margin (UK), largely because common experience says people are often astonishingly lazy, inconsiderate, and just plain selfish, I very much doubt people weight the interests/life projects of their foetus or the moral loss of aborting a younger foetus/embryo anywhere near as much as they ought.
My guess would be that where there is a sharp cutoff the vast majority of abortions the main effect is that most abortions that would have happened later happen before the cutoff - my suspicion is that the ordinary amount of human laziness and selfishness means people fall short of their morality.
Do you know of any research around this, what happenss when abortion cut-offs are put in place? What convinced you that the person who has to carry the pregnancy would make the best decision without restrictions?
Well, I'm still stupid. It's bad that you were sick for months; it's worse to kill a violinist. If I had a button that saves a dying violinist but makes you go through that again, I would press it until my fingers fell off. Sure it's an atrocity, but it's a lesser one.
Would I have the strength to do it myself? Absolutely not. If I was pregnant with a clearly conscious, sapient, constantly-playing Niccolò Paganini, I would kill him as fast as I could, if necessary by killing myself. But so what? It just makes me a wimp. I shouldn't have a special permit to commit murder so I don't get sad.
So I don't think your "treating patients like people" obtains. If a pregnant woman comes to your clinic, and if you're pretty sure that her foetus is a person, then you don't have one patient, you have two. You shouldn't be imprisoning the woman to prevent her from getting an abortion elsewhere, because then everyone who gets pregnant would avoid doctors; but you shouldn't be killing one of your patients to spare the other non-lethal suffering, either. (I think I can phrase this in terms of central capabilities, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to care about the foetus's future life or just its current needs — it can't do very much self-determination until it's actually born, so I don't know if it has a right to it that the doctor ought to respect.)
I think most pro-lifers think of personhood as binary and kicking in very early on, and *don't* agree that later abortions are worse? I've seen more opposition to late-term abortion but that seems to be more about political feasibility. Less charitably, we can't even convince pro-lifers to help prevent unwanted pregnancy or support pregnant people who only abort because they can't afford the kid, so I'm very pessimistic about convincing any to make abortion easier.
> Conversely, let’s say you’re trapped in a burning building and you have a choice between saving one five-year-old and two premature infants born at 21 weeks of gestation.
You might want to replace "two" with "ten" -- otherwise, the reason I'd pick the five-year-old is that a 21-week preemie has less than half the chances of surviving to adulthood of a five-year-old, which is not particularly relevant to the point you're making.
I'm a non-feminist man who supports abortion until birth. I'm not kidding. I find the idea of being invaded by something living off you horrifying (like something out of Alien, which of course was where the director got the idea), and I don't think the government should be allowed to stop you from doing that. If it's legal to cut off your arm, it should be legal to kill the thing living inside you you didn't ask to put there (and may be there against your will).
Not particularly rational, but then moral reasoning often isn't.
I was with you for a while there, but then you totally lost me. I'm all about having compassion for the women in these scenarios, but the trend seems to be too much, rarely do I see too little. Women are adults, with a full functioning brain and a good grasp of responsible, upright behavior. We should treat them as such. Women know what it takes to conceive a child, just like how they know what their financial situation is. If they are willing to have sex while they are in dire straits, that is fine, but they are then responsible for any morally difficult outcomes.
Having to make a tragic choice which is extremely forseeable and could have been avoided is very different from having to make a tragic choice which is thrust upon you by outside forces; and the majority of abortions are performed on the back of extremely foreseeable, avoidable actions. Even if a fetus is of lesser value than a proper human, this isn't behavior we should excuse. Even putting off the legal question, there should be some genuine social pushback to a woman that acts irresponsibly and then finds herself caught by a self-inflicted morally fraught choice. Even if every man has a right to gamble, they have no right to our sympathies, when the bank comes calling for their house.
So, first of all, I think you forgot to say "without highly reliable contraception" in the last sentence of your first paragraph. The failure rate of an IUD or an implant is far less than one per hundred years of use.
Second, I in fact think it is a nice feature of the world that I can have sex even when I would rather not have a child. I take a teratogenic medication and probably will for the rest of my life. I do not think I am being an irresponsible person who deserves to be shamed because I would like sometimes to have marital sex with my husband.
No, I'll stand by the first paragraph as it is. Using highly reliable contraception makes it highly unlikely that they'll need to ever touch on abortion, which is great, and should be encouraged, but the odds aren't zero. A grown adult treats a one in a million chance as a one in a million chance, especially when it involves something as morally important as the creation of human life.
Not sure where the idea of shaming is coming from. Like I said, I'm fine with people choosing to have sex, go for it. Everyone is entitled to decide what risks they take in life.
But I'm not okay with treating people like children, who don't understand the potential results of that action until directly confronted with them. Sex potentially leads to the creation of human life, and everyone knows this. People also know whether they are willing to support that human life prior to having sex, and if they aren't, then they risk entering into a moral quandry of their own design. It is unreasonable to give them our unconditional sympathy when their life choices directly led to their life outcomes. They need to own their actions, and the potential consequences which follow them.
Hope I'm not coming off too harsh here, but this is an important issue to me, as I'm sure it is to you. I'm glad you get to enjoy sex with your husband, that's great, I wouldn't want that taken from you for the world. But if that action ever brings a third party into the world, it would be cruel of both myself, and our society to not offer them genuine consideration and compassion. I've really been struggling to find that compassion lately. Which is a shame. Because when women are blameless, be it through rape or threats to their life, our society is firmly united behind them. When a fetus is blameless, well.
I don't think that, by your logic, rape makes a woman blameless. After all, she chose not to have an IUD put in, knowing that there exist rapists in the world. And a woman who doesn't use contraception being raped and getting pregnant is more likely than a woman who both has an IUD and uses condoms properly getting pregnant. The rape isn't her fault but she still failed to take precautions against a one in a million chance.
Ah yes, we should naturally hold women accountable for decisions made against their will, and in blatant disregard for all the upright values which we humans are expected to live by, in a good society. What a perfectly reasonable standard.
I feel like you're sort of reading other people's arguments into mine, but perhaps I'm just not expressing myself clearly. Women and men make choices about sex in their life. They make these choices in an informed manner, with full knowledge about the potential outcomes. When they aren't the one making the choice, or when the knowledge of potential outcomes is too obtuse/hidden to reasonably expect them to possess, then direct responsibility for the outcome of their actions fades away. In the majority of abortion cases, this direct responsibility hasn't faded away.
>Using highly reliable contraception makes it highly unlikely that they'll need to ever touch on abortion, which is great, and should be encouraged, but the odds aren't zero. A grown adult treats a one in a million chance as a one in a million chance, especially when it involves something as morally important as the creation of human life.
I think there needs to be some acknowledgment of the fact that we’re leaning on women to keep the human race going reproductively. And this is something that really is a significant burden for a lot of them involving all kinds of side effects and sacrifices in some of their prime healthy years. This may not be you at all, but I see a tension in pro-life pronatalists who are obsessed with TFR and yet seem to focus on everything except the difficulty of pregnancy itself, which involves giving up a lot of autonomy for a decent chunk of a year (per kid!) in a society where we all get to enjoy a bunch of autonomy otherwise.
IMO the least we can do as a society (besides making pregnancy less onerous medically when we can), is give women as much autonomy over *when* they go through the process as well as trusting them to be able to press the abort button when things go sideways and it’s a threat to their physical health or there’s a condition incompatible with life. I’d like to see a little more respect thrown women’s direction, or at least an acknowledgment that they pay a high bodily price to keep humanity going.
As to the statistics. This isn’t academic to me. I’ve been married 10+ years and have carefully managed to time my second kid to be born several months before I start a tenure track job. When I’m pregnant I basically can work 33% of my normal rate when I’m not. It sucks and I’m sick all the time. I was very careful in setting up a year for myself of low publishing pressure so it could happen. I double up on birth control and I sure as heck hope I never have to make a hard choice, but I have trouble judging other careful women who ended up on the wrong end of statistics.
Good points here, I think I loosely agree with you. One of the big missing links in the abortion conversation, in my opinion, is male contribution. Both men and women are equally culpable in creating a fetus, which makes it kind of ridiculous to put all the responsibility and inconvenience onto the mother. I think my personal disconnect with most pro-choicers is that, where they solve this through less responsibility on the woman, even in areas where she should clearly bear it, I want it solved through more responsibility from all involved parties, even in areas where they should questionably bear it. Human life seems morally important enough, and sex avoidable enough, that I struggle to let people off the hook.
Which feels like the correct direction to go, given the stakes involved. Hope I haven't been bugging you all too much. Giving some pushback feels basically necessary, after stumbling across the fifth consecutive article arguing a pro-choice stance. Thanks for the comment, hope you enjoy your day!
No worries, I was strongly on the pro-life side for years (conservative evangelical background), and I haven't let go of a sense of the importance of human life and the difficulties of these questions either. I also can't really deny that the issue only really became more complex for me once I knew I had nonzero chance (no matter how small thanks to contraception) of becoming pregnant, so anyone who's able to see the complexity without the personal stake in it is already ahead of me.
I haven't really read blogs on feminist issues in a while--currently on an econ kick--so I haven't seen a bunch of pro-choice blogs lately myself, but this one seemed like a good chance to throw out the argument that'd been rattling around in my head this year, especially since one thing economists are pretty concerned about (and so I've been seeing a lot) is whether a population is aging and the consequences of that. Hope you enjoy your day too!
> If you have procreative sex in the morning rather than the afternoon, you’re not killing the baby you would have conceived if you’d had sex in the morning.
> Let’s say you’re trapped in a burning building and you have a choice between saving one five-year-old and a thousand frozen embryos. If you’re not both pro-life and chronically addicted to biting bullets, you pick the five-year-old, right? Very few people really think that embryos’ lives matter as much as born children’s do.
I think a lot of this is due to presumed replacement effects, though? My instincts about this situation are very different depending on whether the outcome is "these particular embryos burn up, the people involved have a different thousand kids instead" or whether it's "these particular embryos burn up, the people involved have no kids at all instead, the world in five years has a thousand fewer people than it otherwise would have". In the former case, it's pretty unambiguously right to save the five-year-old; in the latter, my common-sense-morality-intuitions point five-year-old-ward but my consequentialism-intuitions point embryos-ward and I'm genuinely unsure which would win in the event. (I'm pretty sure my *endorsed* answer, from a distance, is the embryos, but unsure how much effect that would have on my actual decisions in the moment.)
Yeah, I was going to mention, my intuition leans towards the embryos with just a few small changes. Either cryo-freeze the five year old, or put the embryos into fully functioning artificial wombs, with caring parents, and suddenly things shift towards saving the thousand. The analogy might need some fine tuning here. Or my intuition is weird. Could go either way.
Very interesting. As someone who thinks that it's much worse for a 10 year old to die than a newborn, and possibly even for an 18 year old too, I'm probably out there by today's standards (and no, I'm not a time traveller from the "massive child mortality" era though this historical perspective undoubtedly plays a role).
As someone who had an abortion which didn't feel like a tragic or difficult decision -- in the sense that I didn't have a doubt for a moment what I wanted to do -- but still felt like a much harder thing to go through than taking a morning-after pill (I think it's this scared animal thing kicking in here) I feel that the concept of gradually "increasing" personhood might be a decent compromise here -- and as on your embryos vs child example, the vast majority of anti abortion people don't REALLY seem to believe that abortion is equivalent to infanticide, never mind "proper" murder.
>> I would be pretty unhappy about dying even if I died painlessly and no one would miss me.
Interesting. Even if you didn't know it was to happen or that you were dying?
I think I'd be ok with it. On some level, it would feel like an optimal, even desirable solution: nobody gets harmed apart from the future me, who doesn't exist. Of course, you're young, so you have a realistically worthwhile future of projects and "projects", rather than just waiting for the (clearly visible on the horizon) decrepitude to arrive; so that makes a big difference.
>Vast majority of anti abortion people don't REALLY seem to believe that abortion is equivalent to infanticide
I greatly distrust "don't REALLY seem to believe X" of this form -- frankly, it's easy to get out of this "don't really believe that bombing faraway Palestinians to death is as bad as stabbing someone and watching them struggle and die in front of you".
I would definitely save the 5 year old, for what it’s worth. Not even close, either; you could make it 10 21-week infants and I’d still choose the 5-year old,
I agree, but my decision is influenced by the fact that 22-23 weeks is the bleeding edge of practical viability. I think I would probably have a harder time choosing if survival chance was higher.
> society must not justify neglecting its obligations to poor children by conscripting the man, himself generally quite poor, who is nearest the problem.
This is a key point, I think, and a good reason to take the viability line (to the extent it is a line) as the morally pragmatic demarcation point. As you say, we struggle with the implementation details, but we generally *do* recognize that, while there is a societal obligation to ensure that all children be cared for in a loving home as they grow, confining that obligation to a particular person due to their proximity or relationship to the child is itself an immoral imposition on at least one of those parties.
This is the key difference, to me, between a healthy-but-not-independently-viable fetus and a newborn infant: the party or parties sustaining the infant through the beginning of its life can be swapped out if needed, in a way that the central party (the pregnant person) can't be swapped out in the case of the fetus. In the infant case, society can, if needed, seek a way to accomplish its general obligation without imposing it specifically and involuntarily on a particular person. In the case of the fetus, there's a genuine moral dilemma, and I ultimately don't trust "society as a whole" to actually resolve the dilemma if we allow it to just bulldoze over the specific individual at the heart of it.
My favorite rejoinder to the idea that death is only bad because of the suffering it causes I the people who survives comes in an episode of "X." The main villain, Fuma, asks another character what makes death bad. The other character replies that people are sad when their loved ones die. Fuma replies that he doesn't have to worry about that because he intends to kill everyone one Earth, so there will be no one left to mourn.
In spite of that, I think most people still regard Fuma's plans as villainous.
https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?si=w6a5q7pJvRiyPi_d
Great essay. Chiming in to say what a couple other people seem to be saying; I'm mostly with you in your pragmatic descriptions of why we value things like "not dying", and then when you talk about relative values of different ages of humans my brain goes "what?".
I agree with you that it's wrong to kill two-year-olds. But if I had to do a trolley problem thing and save either a two-year-old or a thirty-five-year-old, I'd save the thirty-five-year-old. Same with the five-year-old vs. two newborns. And these are pretty immediate reactions!
I do think w/ "killing kids vs. killing adults" something else plays into it. Somehow who chooses to go out and kill a child we see as "defiling innocence" in some way. Versus w/ an adult, they're at least "picking on someone their own size". See, for example, reactions to school shootings - when an adult goes out and shoots up a kindergarten, we see them as simply a monster, but people have been trying to find ways to make Harris and Klebold into misunderstood loners since Columbine. However, most of us have no intention of killing people anyway. I like the burning building question better for that reason. Does choosing between rescuing from a burning building a two-year-old or an adult change your answer to that question at all?
This is all just differing moral intuitions though. The only place where I truly think your argument doesn't make sense is in assigning life projects to people who don't really have them. I don't see any way that claiming a newborn baby can have a life project is different from claiming that a hypothetical baby can have a life project. Neither life project is substantiated in an actual brain that can visualize and want it. And if a baby's life project exists simply because growing up is what babies are for, then why doesn't a pair of sperm and egg have a life project since becoming a baby is what sperms and eggs are for?
>>Giving a child up for adoption is the right choice for some pregnant people, but it doesn’t substitute for the ability to end a pregnancy.
I'll admit up front that I'm coming from... uhh... *kind of* the other side of this one... but just trying to give friendly pushback, because I genuinely do like this essay.
To wit, just because it's the right choice for some people in the context of having a choice, doesn't mean it can't be the correct moral choice in most circumstances within the context of if a right to a choice doesn't actually exist. IOW, if the substitute is morally superior (again, in most circumstances) to the ability itself, then on some level it constitutes a duty, regardless of how preferentially inferior it is as a substitute for having a choice.
To borrow a theme of yours from (II), from behind the Rawlsian veil, I personally would prefer being conceived into a world where my mother was required to take me to term and give me up for adoption, at the cost of potentially being born a woman and not having that choice myself. Because the former involves significant personal cost (and even potential death) vs. never getting very far past the starting gate to begin with.
To get into the actuarial math... (~50% chance of being born a woman) x (~>57% chance of ever becoming pregnant) x (0.0223% chance of death in US) + (some term to consider the pain and suffering of a bad pregnancy relative to death) << (~20% abortion ratio).
So, fun fact about me: I wouldn’t exist if abortion was illegal. When my mom was 16ish, she had an accidental pregnancy and got an abortion. Even if she had given that kid up for adoption, it’s likely that just going through that pregnancy as a teenager would have fundamentally changed her life, causing social isolation and health complications, interfering with college applications, compromising her relationship with her family, etc. Sure, she might still have gone on to become a tenured professor with two wanted children, but I suspect that being forced to carry a teen pregnancy to term substantially lowers the probability of that happening.
The world where I and my sister exist seems pretty good to me. If you asked me whether I would accept a 20% chance of painless death before I became conscious in exchange for living in a world where more women are like my mom and more families are like mine, I think I would take that bet. (To be fair, I don’t actually think non-existence sounds that bad. Imo Ozy is on to something with the life project metric. If I never get the ability to form preferences, goals, or relationships, I don’t think I really have that much to lose.)
On a less personal note, I think you get into tricky positions when you start to apply Rawls to fetuses. For example, this argument also implies that we ought to be doing a lot more for fetal health than we currently are, even if it makes the life of women worse. For example, we can make it illegal for any woman of childbearing age to drink or use drugs, force everyone to get regular std tests, and put folic acid in the drinking water. After all, you would much prefer to exist as a non-miscarried baby without fetal alcohol syndrome. From a rawlsian perspective this world seems likely to be better (yes it requires restricting some personal loner, but you already said you were okay with making it worse to be a woman), but most people have other moral intuitions about freedom or government overreach that control in this case.
>> But the decision to have a child is the most important decision most people will ever make.
Just want to stress-test your logic on this.
By your own preferred mode of reasoning -- focusing on "common-sense morality" -- it would therefore follow that we should invoke the common experience of this "decision".
Accordingly, I would submit that throughout most of human history, and even including many if not most births today, this "decision" has never been such a philosophical or rational "homo economicus" exercise. Like, sure, on the margins there are a LOT of women today who deeply weigh their choice -- the margin is quite wide. And modern historiography amply shows us that the historical margin was wider than many pro-lifers like to imagine it was; women have had access to abortifacients of varying effectiveness throughout history, and therefore have had something of a choice.
But for most people, most pregnancies, they make a choice and then move on. Moreover, if they hadn't made THIS particular choice at THIS particular time in their life, they probably would have made a similar choice at a similar time in their life -- it's not something made on a whim, but it's not something that requires epic amounts of reflection to make.
What I'm saying is, although you're *objectively* correct that it's a hugely important choice, the common experience is that most people don't *treat* it like a hugely important choice at the moment it's made.
TLDR: How do you reconcile the difference between the choice being important and people not treating it as such, with your own rhetorical preference for relying on common-sense morality?
1. A decision can be immensely important and also easy (if, for example, it's overwhelmingly important to you to have a child).
2. Most people throughout most of history had limited ability to determine the course of their own lives, and whether they had children was decided for them. That's bad!
Are you sure on #2? I mean, if you’re saying that largely ineffective abortifacients took away a lot of choice in the matter, then sure. But it’s highly debatable to what extent childbearing was “decided for them” across all the different cultures and times.
I’d hold that an exceedingly small proportion of childbearing decisions were made by political structures; and still a minority by spouses and parents; all still adding up to a minority of childbearing being coerced. Most were just down to biology and acculturation — IE people wanted to have sex and knew babies came from that, and they wanted babies because they were socially programmed to without ever being coerced.
Too many people excessively map off of Victorian tropes about medieval European patriarchy**, which in truth was a lot more cooperative than the tropes would have us imagine. The kernel of truth is that the tropes were based on real legal principles that privileged the patriarchy, but those only came into play when people didn’t already agree, which again, acculturation mostly took care of.
** I can’t tell if this is what you’re doing, and it’s not an accusation, just sharing my prior here.
The violin argument is still absurdly bad and while you correctly point out just how invasive and awful it can feel to be forced to support someone else in your body that doesn't support the Thompson's violin argument -- it supports the obvious idea that utility/consequences should matter. The only reason to make the violin argument is to defend the idea that **controlling for how bad the experience is** the right not to support someone else in your body is more important than other equally unpleasant experiences.
-- And I say all this as someone who personally supports extremely extensive abortion rights based on better utilitarian considerations. --
So let's list all the ways the violin argument is really awful.
1) It proves far too much. If you take it seriously then you should conclude that it's unacceptable to deny a women with a healthy pregnancy one day before delivery an abortion (suppose it's a place where you don't have the equipment to do a C-section but for some reason can abort or wait for delivery tomorrow when the equipment arrives).
2) It doesn't really explain why any burden not to force the violinist on someone extends to an obligation to make available the means to remove (and kill) a violinists who was attached with your full consent.
At a practical level a win for pro-lifers is passing laws that make it illegal to access the drugs or pay others to perform the surgical procedures to abort the child.
3) If you think the argument does -- contra 2 -- explain why one has a right to access the medications and professional medical care necessary to perform the abortion then the argument either rests on the assumption that the fetus has the same moral status as a person or it proves way way more than most people are comfortable with.
If you believe that the fetus isn't yet a person it's no different in kind than any other natural condition that obtains in your body. If you can say "I want to change the condition I find my body in as a result of correctly functioning natural processes" and that creates a right of access to the means then why can't you say "I don't feel jacked up/euphoric/calm" and gain the right to heroin, crack, or whatever weird ass and potentially harmful thing you want to do to yourself -- even weird mutilation. Honestly, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this idea but most people aren't and it's a surprising consequence of this argument.
Now you might object, but those things are incredibly harmful and pose risks to you that aborting a pregnancy doesn't and indeed protects you from. But you've given up the core benefit of the argument -- avoiding having to get into the discussion of trade offs since if you are the arbiter of what you see as a harm maybe you only care about the next 24 hours and if society can override that why can't they judge the harm of a single regretted abortion to be all important?
4) It's fundamentally sneaky and emotionally manipulative. Rather than elucidating some unique aspect of the moral situation it just picks finds an extreme example that feels analagous.
But if we replace the example with something like -- they implant a little DRAM sized stick under the skin on the back which keeps the violinist's engram healthy and he is in suspend the whole time the supposedly relevant aspects haven't changed but the intuitions have.
I'm confused about the "right to choose whether to have a child" argument. Everybody, both men and women, already have that right. People who don't want children can simply not have sex. So pro-choice arguments of "I should have control over my body" and anti-child-support arguments of "I shouldn't be forced to pay for a child I didn't want" both don't make a lot of sense to me, since the person in question *did* have a choice, and chose to risk the child.
Of course there's a difference between actively wanting a child vs. not wanting one and choosing to engage in an activity that comes with a risk of one. But we generally don't reason the same way with other activities. If someone chooses to ride a motorcycle and gets injured, that's unfortunate, but we don't treat it as some great injustice and violation of their bodily integrity. In both cases the participants were fully aware of the potential outcomes and decided the benefit was worth it, so I don't see why we should treat them differently. Sex is a recreational activity that comes with certain risks; risks that are quite low as long as one prepares in advance.
The best argument against this position I know of is that sex is different from other recreational activities since it's so tightly bound up in the human psyche for evolutionary reasons. People don't *need* thrill rides to be psychologically healthy, but do need sex, as evidenced by e.g. how relationships tend to be healthier if the participants have good sex. This argument seems reasonable to me, but it's not *obvious*, and shouldn't just be assumed. Moreover, a right to sex would lead to some very unpopular conclusions when applied to involuntary celibacy, so I don't think any significant fraction of people actually believe such a right exists.
My list of objections includes:
- I am totally willing to bite bullets about a right to free sexual expression.
- You can't force people to love other people, but "no one should expect to be loved" would still be a cartoonishly evil solution to nearly any problem. Things can still be very valuable if it would be wrong to force people to provide them.
- If someone can't walk because of a motorcycle accident, I would like them to receive medical treatment and disability accommodations so they can participate fully in society, I don't go "well that's the predictable consequence of your actions."
- While it is completely consistent to believe that no one should have PIV unless they actively desire to conceive a child, this would be a very radical norms shift and involve either far less PIV than any culture I'm aware of has actually done or a sharp rollback of women's rights.
- It is genuinely baffling to me why everyone is like "don't have sex" rather than "use an IUD or the implant" in these examples. Do I need to write a post that's like "PSA: IUDs and the implant are very effective"?
I know IUDs exist and are effective, that was one of the methods I was referring to under "risks that are quite low as long as one prepares in advance."
My claim is certainly not that no one should have PIV unless they actively desire to conceive a child, just like I obviously don't think that people should only ride a motorcycle if they *desire* to get injured. I'm saying that the consequences should not be treated as though they're a *surprise*.
I find the violinist argument particularly bad because it totally ignores the consensual aspect of the situation. If I wake up one day tied to someone in a hospital bed, there's a reasonable argument in favor of allowing me to detach myself even if it results in their death. But if I voluntarily choose to sign up to become a long-term blood donor and then I change my mind later and leave them to die, that's a horrible thing to do.
I think you're missing the point of the motorcycle analogy. If people in a third-world country have a 10% chance of dying of malaria, that's a top priority because they can't avoid this outcome. If 10% of skydivers are dying of parachute malfunctions, that's also bad, but there's no need for this to be a priority, since they always have the option of just not going skydiving.
The first person has only one option: 10% chance of death. The second person has two options: don't go skydiving and 0% chance of death, or go skydiving and 10% chance of death. The second person's options are *strictly better* than the first's, so they can only be said to be better off. The importance of one's right to life does not imply that one's right to safe skydiving is equally important.
The same concept applies to abortion. A person in a society where abortion is illegal has multiple options: they can choose to never have sex, or choose to have sex that may conceive a child. This means that, outside of rape, the badness of a ban on abortion is lower-bounded by the badness of being unable to have sex at all.
Being unable to have sex could certainly could be very bad depending on one's psychological needs! But that's clearly not the argument being made, because if it were, people who are completely unable to have sex would be a higher priority to address than those who only have to face a choice between lack of sex vs. potentially having a child.
The existence of effective birth control supports the pro-life side of the argument, because it means there's much lower cost to never conceiving a child. Rather than people having to choose between never having sex and having to face the possibility of a child, the choice is actually between "have careful sex and not have to worry about it" and "have uncareful sex and maybe have a child".
So talking about the impact on the woman's body or the man's pocketbook as an argument in favor of abortion seems invalid to me, since in both cases they had the option to avoid any risk and chose not to exercise it. Whether abortion is right or wrong then depends primarily on what rights the child should have, not the mother.
How does your model deal with rape?
The same way my skydiving model deals with someone being kidnapped and pushed out of a plane.
Great essay, paticularly the why death is bad and life projects.
I think of myself as pro-life at the margin (UK), largely because common experience says people are often astonishingly lazy, inconsiderate, and just plain selfish, I very much doubt people weight the interests/life projects of their foetus or the moral loss of aborting a younger foetus/embryo anywhere near as much as they ought.
My guess would be that where there is a sharp cutoff the vast majority of abortions the main effect is that most abortions that would have happened later happen before the cutoff - my suspicion is that the ordinary amount of human laziness and selfishness means people fall short of their morality.
Do you know of any research around this, what happenss when abortion cut-offs are put in place? What convinced you that the person who has to carry the pregnancy would make the best decision without restrictions?
Well, I'm still stupid. It's bad that you were sick for months; it's worse to kill a violinist. If I had a button that saves a dying violinist but makes you go through that again, I would press it until my fingers fell off. Sure it's an atrocity, but it's a lesser one.
Would I have the strength to do it myself? Absolutely not. If I was pregnant with a clearly conscious, sapient, constantly-playing Niccolò Paganini, I would kill him as fast as I could, if necessary by killing myself. But so what? It just makes me a wimp. I shouldn't have a special permit to commit murder so I don't get sad.
So I don't think your "treating patients like people" obtains. If a pregnant woman comes to your clinic, and if you're pretty sure that her foetus is a person, then you don't have one patient, you have two. You shouldn't be imprisoning the woman to prevent her from getting an abortion elsewhere, because then everyone who gets pregnant would avoid doctors; but you shouldn't be killing one of your patients to spare the other non-lethal suffering, either. (I think I can phrase this in terms of central capabilities, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to care about the foetus's future life or just its current needs — it can't do very much self-determination until it's actually born, so I don't know if it has a right to it that the doctor ought to respect.)
I think most pro-lifers think of personhood as binary and kicking in very early on, and *don't* agree that later abortions are worse? I've seen more opposition to late-term abortion but that seems to be more about political feasibility. Less charitably, we can't even convince pro-lifers to help prevent unwanted pregnancy or support pregnant people who only abort because they can't afford the kid, so I'm very pessimistic about convincing any to make abortion easier.
> Conversely, let’s say you’re trapped in a burning building and you have a choice between saving one five-year-old and two premature infants born at 21 weeks of gestation.
You might want to replace "two" with "ten" -- otherwise, the reason I'd pick the five-year-old is that a 21-week preemie has less than half the chances of surviving to adulthood of a five-year-old, which is not particularly relevant to the point you're making.
I'm a non-feminist man who supports abortion until birth. I'm not kidding. I find the idea of being invaded by something living off you horrifying (like something out of Alien, which of course was where the director got the idea), and I don't think the government should be allowed to stop you from doing that. If it's legal to cut off your arm, it should be legal to kill the thing living inside you you didn't ask to put there (and may be there against your will).
Not particularly rational, but then moral reasoning often isn't.
I was with you for a while there, but then you totally lost me. I'm all about having compassion for the women in these scenarios, but the trend seems to be too much, rarely do I see too little. Women are adults, with a full functioning brain and a good grasp of responsible, upright behavior. We should treat them as such. Women know what it takes to conceive a child, just like how they know what their financial situation is. If they are willing to have sex while they are in dire straits, that is fine, but they are then responsible for any morally difficult outcomes.
Having to make a tragic choice which is extremely forseeable and could have been avoided is very different from having to make a tragic choice which is thrust upon you by outside forces; and the majority of abortions are performed on the back of extremely foreseeable, avoidable actions. Even if a fetus is of lesser value than a proper human, this isn't behavior we should excuse. Even putting off the legal question, there should be some genuine social pushback to a woman that acts irresponsibly and then finds herself caught by a self-inflicted morally fraught choice. Even if every man has a right to gamble, they have no right to our sympathies, when the bank comes calling for their house.
So, first of all, I think you forgot to say "without highly reliable contraception" in the last sentence of your first paragraph. The failure rate of an IUD or an implant is far less than one per hundred years of use.
Second, I in fact think it is a nice feature of the world that I can have sex even when I would rather not have a child. I take a teratogenic medication and probably will for the rest of my life. I do not think I am being an irresponsible person who deserves to be shamed because I would like sometimes to have marital sex with my husband.
No, I'll stand by the first paragraph as it is. Using highly reliable contraception makes it highly unlikely that they'll need to ever touch on abortion, which is great, and should be encouraged, but the odds aren't zero. A grown adult treats a one in a million chance as a one in a million chance, especially when it involves something as morally important as the creation of human life.
Not sure where the idea of shaming is coming from. Like I said, I'm fine with people choosing to have sex, go for it. Everyone is entitled to decide what risks they take in life.
But I'm not okay with treating people like children, who don't understand the potential results of that action until directly confronted with them. Sex potentially leads to the creation of human life, and everyone knows this. People also know whether they are willing to support that human life prior to having sex, and if they aren't, then they risk entering into a moral quandry of their own design. It is unreasonable to give them our unconditional sympathy when their life choices directly led to their life outcomes. They need to own their actions, and the potential consequences which follow them.
Hope I'm not coming off too harsh here, but this is an important issue to me, as I'm sure it is to you. I'm glad you get to enjoy sex with your husband, that's great, I wouldn't want that taken from you for the world. But if that action ever brings a third party into the world, it would be cruel of both myself, and our society to not offer them genuine consideration and compassion. I've really been struggling to find that compassion lately. Which is a shame. Because when women are blameless, be it through rape or threats to their life, our society is firmly united behind them. When a fetus is blameless, well.
It's a mixed bag.
I don't think that, by your logic, rape makes a woman blameless. After all, she chose not to have an IUD put in, knowing that there exist rapists in the world. And a woman who doesn't use contraception being raped and getting pregnant is more likely than a woman who both has an IUD and uses condoms properly getting pregnant. The rape isn't her fault but she still failed to take precautions against a one in a million chance.
Ah yes, we should naturally hold women accountable for decisions made against their will, and in blatant disregard for all the upright values which we humans are expected to live by, in a good society. What a perfectly reasonable standard.
I feel like you're sort of reading other people's arguments into mine, but perhaps I'm just not expressing myself clearly. Women and men make choices about sex in their life. They make these choices in an informed manner, with full knowledge about the potential outcomes. When they aren't the one making the choice, or when the knowledge of potential outcomes is too obtuse/hidden to reasonably expect them to possess, then direct responsibility for the outcome of their actions fades away. In the majority of abortion cases, this direct responsibility hasn't faded away.
>Using highly reliable contraception makes it highly unlikely that they'll need to ever touch on abortion, which is great, and should be encouraged, but the odds aren't zero. A grown adult treats a one in a million chance as a one in a million chance, especially when it involves something as morally important as the creation of human life.
I think there needs to be some acknowledgment of the fact that we’re leaning on women to keep the human race going reproductively. And this is something that really is a significant burden for a lot of them involving all kinds of side effects and sacrifices in some of their prime healthy years. This may not be you at all, but I see a tension in pro-life pronatalists who are obsessed with TFR and yet seem to focus on everything except the difficulty of pregnancy itself, which involves giving up a lot of autonomy for a decent chunk of a year (per kid!) in a society where we all get to enjoy a bunch of autonomy otherwise.
IMO the least we can do as a society (besides making pregnancy less onerous medically when we can), is give women as much autonomy over *when* they go through the process as well as trusting them to be able to press the abort button when things go sideways and it’s a threat to their physical health or there’s a condition incompatible with life. I’d like to see a little more respect thrown women’s direction, or at least an acknowledgment that they pay a high bodily price to keep humanity going.
As to the statistics. This isn’t academic to me. I’ve been married 10+ years and have carefully managed to time my second kid to be born several months before I start a tenure track job. When I’m pregnant I basically can work 33% of my normal rate when I’m not. It sucks and I’m sick all the time. I was very careful in setting up a year for myself of low publishing pressure so it could happen. I double up on birth control and I sure as heck hope I never have to make a hard choice, but I have trouble judging other careful women who ended up on the wrong end of statistics.
Good points here, I think I loosely agree with you. One of the big missing links in the abortion conversation, in my opinion, is male contribution. Both men and women are equally culpable in creating a fetus, which makes it kind of ridiculous to put all the responsibility and inconvenience onto the mother. I think my personal disconnect with most pro-choicers is that, where they solve this through less responsibility on the woman, even in areas where she should clearly bear it, I want it solved through more responsibility from all involved parties, even in areas where they should questionably bear it. Human life seems morally important enough, and sex avoidable enough, that I struggle to let people off the hook.
Which feels like the correct direction to go, given the stakes involved. Hope I haven't been bugging you all too much. Giving some pushback feels basically necessary, after stumbling across the fifth consecutive article arguing a pro-choice stance. Thanks for the comment, hope you enjoy your day!
No worries, I was strongly on the pro-life side for years (conservative evangelical background), and I haven't let go of a sense of the importance of human life and the difficulties of these questions either. I also can't really deny that the issue only really became more complex for me once I knew I had nonzero chance (no matter how small thanks to contraception) of becoming pregnant, so anyone who's able to see the complexity without the personal stake in it is already ahead of me.
I haven't really read blogs on feminist issues in a while--currently on an econ kick--so I haven't seen a bunch of pro-choice blogs lately myself, but this one seemed like a good chance to throw out the argument that'd been rattling around in my head this year, especially since one thing economists are pretty concerned about (and so I've been seeing a lot) is whether a population is aging and the consequences of that. Hope you enjoy your day too!
Possible typos:
> If you have procreative sex in the morning rather than the afternoon, you’re not killing the baby you would have conceived if you’d had sex in the morning.
I think you meant "... in the afternoon."
> "eggs and sperm are potential people"
I think you meant "... are not potential people"
Potential as opposed to actual