The moral incoherence of pro-abortion arguments
Even as a materialist and atheist, I've always found arguments in favor of abortion to be incoherent and nonsensical
A recent agony aunt column in The Guardian featured a concerned individual seeking advice on how to handle her pregnant sister's excessive drinking. While on a trip together, the sister was frequently sneaking off to guzzle spirits. The letter writer was worried about the potential harm to the unborn child but unsure of how to approach the situation without being “judgmental” (God forbid!). Experts consulted for the article emphasized that no amount of alcohol is considered safe during pregnancy and urged the importance of addressing the situation immediately. Comments at the end of the article revealed overwhelming concern for the well-being of the unborn child.
Seeing such touching concern for fetuses in The Guardian seemed to me rather ironic given the paper’s typically strident enthusiasm for terminating pregnancies, to the point where even minor travel inconveniences to procure an abortion are editorialized as tragic melodrama on the level of Sophie’s Choice (“Tearful Texas doctor recalls being forced to travel out of state for abortion”).
Even after years of thinking deeply about abortion, I still don’t really know where I stand on it; it feels like maybe the most complex issue in moral philosophy, and I genuinely have no idea how so many intelligent people seem to have such confidence that their side is the correct one. On one hand I’m an atheist who respects religion and would like to believe, but find myself with no faith at all. I don’t think there’s a hell and I don’t think a fetus is necessarily aware of anything when it’s terminated. Of course, that doesn’t make abortion fine and dandy, and pulling the plug on someone in a coma would be little different in my mind.
The overwhelming majority of people believe it’s wrong to end an innocent life. This is uncontroversial. But many of us do it several times a day—I killed a mosquito today after it buzzed in my ear, and over the last 48 hours I’ve eaten pork, beef, and chicken. Clearly our aversion to ending innocent life applies to humans and charismatic lifeforms most people have no interest in eating (e.g., dogs, cats, pandas, dolphins). Within the subset of humans, we tend to view the murder of children—say, somewhere like Dunblane—as the acme of wrongdoing, partly because it’s easy to imagine the anguish of the parents, but also because we regard children as more innocent and less deserving of such a fate. Consistent with this outlook is the almost universal sense of sorrow people feel when they discover a woman who died was also carrying a child.
The reductio ad absurdum of this belief is that unborn children should actually be viewed as the most precious living things; they are not only the youngest humans, but also the most innocent and helpless. Yet even on an ostensibly unambiguous moral matter such as whether or not it’s acceptable to end a human life, the point is hotly debated when it comes to the unborn. This reveals a profound incoherence at the heart of the pro-abortion worldview; we value youth, innocence, and helplessness, but only when the victim is visually appealing (it’s not a coincidence that domesticated animals have evolved ‘cute’ features to endear themselves to humans). A ‘clump of cells’ is an alien sight, desensitizing people to and detaching them from their treatment of the unborn. It’s unlikely that if fetuses appeared like perfectly formed babies at ten weeks people would so readily support their termination, even—and perhaps especially—if they were the size of a fingernail. Does it seem right to base one’s conduct toward a lifeform based on what it looks like? Killing a human is either wrong or it’s not, and the arbitrary and hazy criteria that attempt to morally legitimize termination have never really convinced me. In particular, the idea that it’s acceptable to terminate a fetus if the child wouldn’t survive independently outside the womb is both spine-chillingly callous and brutally unscientific.
This all brings me back to the original article in which everyone demonstrated concern for the unborn child. Where were the celebrations of female independence on display? Where were the comments cheering the absence of a domineering husband forbidding the pregnant woman from living her best life? Perhaps most significantly, where were the cries of ‘her body, her choice’? “My body, my choice” is probably the most quoted maxim on the pro-abortion side of the debate, but it has been curiously wielded over the last few years. Anti-vaxxers cleverly appropriated it when protesting government encouragement to be vaccinated during the pandemic, and although I am vaccinated because I believe they are generally good things that prevent serious illness and death, anti-vaxxers’ use of the slogan exposed the empty and insubstantial essence at its core—nothing is that simple, especially abortion.
The fact is that such comments were nowhere to be found. Just as the average person would react with horror when seeing a pregnant woman smoking cigarettes or snorting cocaine, when moral dilemmas are uncoupled from the identity politics battleground we’ve all sleepwalked into over the last few years people’s basic humanity and common sense emerge from the chrysalis.
I think a combination hereditarianism and concern for suffering might resolve this dilemma handily. Assume:
1) Killing murderers is good.
2) Abortion is murder.
3) People's moral values are normally determined by genetics
4) A person's moral worth is defined by who they would be in a plausible world (ie. someone who would slice your throat for a nickel isn't redeemed by the fact that no one offered them one)
5) The only reason why we bother with examining the actual actions of a person before judging them as unworthy of life is that it serves as a functional shelling point to protect us personally. We don't actually care about a would be murder getting murdered except in as much as that precedent might be extended to us.
And you get:
6) Aborters are killing would-be murderers and doing the rest of us a favor.
Now I would be disgusted with this train of thought if I thought there was a conscious being suffering when it was being aborted. But at least for early term abortions this doesn't seem to be the case, so abortion is normally a positive good.
Obviously, most people are not thinking in these terms but I figured I'd suggest a coherent justification anyway.