How to Think About Abortion

The real life trolley problem--not easy to accept, but simple to understand

Abortion is a strange issue, in that whenever I see it discussed, people seem either unwilling or unable to speak about it in an honest and direct fashion. This typically includes both sides of the debate, which is more of an indictment on the pro-life side, as a direct and honest analysis of course makes it undeniable that the pro-life position is correct. The central point at issue is who counts as a human being and why. All one has to do is ask this question honestly and it becomes apparent very quickly that the ”pro-choice” side (which I will deem “anti-life,” as a compromise in between “pro-choice” and “pro-child-murder”) makes little to no sense.

Yet, for whatever reason, I feel that I have rarely seen any actual pro-life people do this clearly or effectively. This could be some sort of personal bias on my part, no doubt. Perhaps my life circumstances have simply not brought me into contact with such people. What I find more likely is that it is a result of the immeasurable anti-life bias baked into society through narrative control. We have been conditioned for generations by cultural elites (media, academia, etc.) to think of this issue only in terms that are favorable to the left (i.e. anti-life viewpoint).

On top of this, the pro-life viewpoint in America seems to have survived primarily through highly religious Christian communities. However, these people appear by and large to hold this position simply out of tradition, without having a thorough understanding of why it is the correct position even from a secular viewpoint. Even if they do have such understanding, they are unlikely to reason through it in detail during sermons to their congregations. Rigorous philosophical analyses of contentious political issues are simply not in the purview of most churches, even if the churches do happen to hold largely correct viewpoints on said issues.

The point is, I believe people are not faced often enough with this central question: Who counts as a person, as a human being, and why? The lack of this perspective shows in how I’ve seen people speak as if it is “pro-life” to ban abortion after “only” 6 weeks. To me, there is little difference between banning abortion after “only” 6 weeks, or after 15 weeks, or 20, or whatever other arbitrary number that you prefer. None of these are “pro-life” in the sense that all still allow the mother, along with willing medical personnel, to destroy her own child.

Of course, we can say that a 6 week ban is “more” pro-life than a 15 week ban. After all, the former will almost certainly result in fewer children killed than the latter. But this is a ridiculous distinction to fixate on. No one gets away with minimizing the Holocaust because Hitler killed “only” 6 million Jews compared to other evil dictators who killed more people, such as Mao or whoever else. The bottom line is that each individual human life begins at conception. Once you grant the premise that it somehow does not, there is no rational reason why it would magically begin at 6 weeks of development instead, or 15, or any other number.

This is why, as I have seen pro-life speakers sometimes point out, the leftist position on abortion has trended noticeably towards infanticide. If life does not begin at conception, why would it magically begin at a specific 20 week cutoff after conception? Why 20 weeks, exactly? There is no good answer to this, and of course the same thing is true in reverse. There is no rational justification for why human life would somehow begin at 20 weeks but not 15, or 15 but not 10, or so on. Thus the tendency of the two “sides” to trend towards a definition of life that begins either at conception or at delivery.

And of course, if you’re an anti-lifer, it’s not hard to justify infanticide from there, at least on a purely logical basis. The somewhat coherent justification for allowing abortion up to point of delivery is the idea of the woman’s “bodily autonomy.” After delivery, the child is no longer “a part of the woman’s body,” so now it is no longer okay to kill it.

But children don’t stop being a burden post-partum. What if the mother decides post-delivery that she does not want to deal with the burdens—emotional, financial, etc.—of raising a child after all? We could even say that the woman’s physical autonomy and home are still violated because the infant will require her to feed it, will keep her up at night by crying, and so forth and so on. Why can she not murder the infant now?

The obvious response here is that the state would care for the child instead, but this presumes a pro-life state which for some reason has accepted a priori that it is not okay to simply dispose of unwanted infants. This takes us back to the question of, why wouldn’t it be, if the child is considered a burden even by their own mother? At this point one would have to admit that it is simply wrong, as a matter of principle, to kill an innocent child for no reason other than the fact that their parents do not want them. Well, either that or go all the way and actually endorse the literal baby murder. Good luck with that, if you want to try it.

This exposes the real reason why abortion remains acceptable while other forms of child murder (or even child abandonment) are not: Because it is simply much more a case of “out of sight, out of mind.” It is too emotionally difficult to ignore one’s actions when murdering an infant that is visibly moving its limbs around and capable of audibly screaming in pain. It is, from an emotional standpoint, much easier to kill something that does not physically resemble an autonomous human being, that cannot cry out in pain or look you in the eyes.

Yet, these are emotional reasons, not logical ones. We’re trying to stick to logic here. It is my belief that people are guided principally by these emotional whims and then attempt to logic their way into justifying them.

This returns us to the topic of abortion. If we accept a priori that a child cannot be killed simply because the parent feels inconvenienced by their existence, then abortion can only be justified if the unborn child is defined as not a child (i.e. not a person, not a human being). Hence my focus on the question, who counts as a human being, and why? From a pure biological perspective, it is an objective and irrefutable statement that each individual human life comes into existence from previous non-existence at the point of conception. This is the beginning point of each human being’s life cycle.

This definition of human life is simple and requires no further explanation or justification. It is somewhat ironic, in that advances in medicine and science have given us such a thorough understanding of this truth. One hundred years ago, if you asked me when human life began, I actually couldn’t tell you. Sometime between mommy and daddy falling in love and mommy missing her period, maybe, although even then who knows what is really going on inside of mommy? If we had taken a closer look at reproduction and found out that the fetus actually has the exact same DNA as the mother up until some point before developing its own DNA, maybe this conversation would be different.

But instead, we know that every cell in an individual’s body bears their own unique DNA, different from the mother’s, from the moment of conception. This removes the “bodily autonomy” argument as abortion quite clearly violates the bodily autonomy of the life being cut short. I suppose you could say that child and mother are violating each other’s bodily autonomy, and the mother’s desire to not be pregnant should defeat the child’s very life, but again, good luck with that.

You have probably noticed that I am insisting upon the term “child” and not using words like fetus or anything else. Language is important, and anti-lifers are very keen to control their language so as to dehumanize unborn children, instead referring to them as “clumps of cells” and the like. This is grotesque to say the least, but the point of this post is to avoid emotional arguments in favor of the rational so let’s not dwell on that (although it does bear pointing out, technically speaking, we are all just big “clumps of cells”).

Anyways, we use the word “child” to describe humans across a wide range of pre-mature developmental stages, from infants up through adolescents, especially in a context where the immature individual’s relative innocence is being emphasized. A sixteen year old female may be described as a teenager or a girl in most circumstances, but if she is sexually preyed upon by an adult, we are likely to describe her as a child in this context, and the adult as a child predator or pedophile. People may even acknowledge their unborn children with the word child so long as the offspring are not unwanted—although if they decide to abort them, then of course they somehow become un-children.

This is why I insist upon using this term for the unborn, because this makes clear that abortion is child murder in a very technical and literal sense, as in, the deliberate taking of an immature and innocent human life. This concludes the primary narrative of the post, so let’s proceed to a rather lengthy list of copes and objections that people like to raise. First off, people will try and give some alternative definitions for life/human life/human being. All the other definitions besides the one I gave suck. Here are the common ones of which I am aware:

--Life begins when a person has a heartbeat/a certain level of brain development/etc.: Why would the development of a specific organ define a human being? Are human beings hearts, or brains? Of course not. A cat has a heartbeat, and a brain, yet it is not a human being. We likewise continue to recognize human beings as what they are in important ways even after their organs have ceased functioning and they have died, through rituals such as funerals, norms such as respect for corpses, etc.

--Life begins when a person becomes conscious: We don’t understand consciousness well enough to even try for this one. For all we know, animals are just as conscious as we are. Likewise, there is nothing to indicate that an infant is any more conscious or self-aware than a cat.

--Life begins when the child can survive outside the womb: An extension of the focus on “bodily autonomy.” But a child cannot survive on their own for many years yet, so this goes back to the previous discussion of asking why it wouldn’t justify infanticide. Nothing in nature or biology supports the notion that a human body’s development actually begins only at the point when they are theoretically capable of surviving outside the womb, exposing this as a viewpoint concocted simply for political convenience.

--Life begins whenever you feel like it does: An appeal to subjectivity whereby someone will typically say something along the lines of “well, a person is just like, whatever you feel like a person is, man.” Obviously, there is an objective and correct definition of what a human being is and who counts as one; because in the past, incorrect definitions that excluded entire races were used, and we all know how that ended up.

All of these silly and nonsensical attempts at alternative definitions arise because a person begins their thought process from the starting point that abortion must be okay, then reasons backwards from there, grasping at straws. This is made apparent by how readily we understand what life is when liberal political values are not at stake. It is illegal to destroy the eggs of migratory birds, especially those of endangered species. But why? If fetuses are not humans, aren’t eggs not birds? This notion is so absurd that no one even thinks to ask about it when they are not starting from an initial assumption that abortion must be justified. Moving on.

One common abortion cope is the idea that the child is somehow being saved from a bad life because their parents are poor, or do not want them, or whatever. This viewpoint if taken seriously would suggest that the poor should all sterilize themselves, so there goes that argument. This also covers all arguments about how barriers to abortion disproportionately affect minorities, which is truly an own goal, as this is a tacit admission that one is advocating for a practice that disproportionately murders minority children.

Another frequent cope is to reference public opinion on the issue or election results. I have even seen pro-life advocates use this flawed logic, whereby they will point out that most Americans don’t favor the liberal position of allowing abortion up until point of birth. Which is true, but most of them don’t favor the correct viewpoint either, so what good is that? Most of them probably prefer not to think about the issue very much, and even if they did think about it, most will be intellectually incapable of reaching a conclusion that would be deemed socially unacceptable. Truth and the opinion of the average voter typically have little or nothing to do with each other. Welcome to democracy.

I hesitate to mention this next one because it’s so bad, but I have seen some more libertarian minded types attempt to suggest that the state should not ban abortion because the state banning things is bad. Except that even the most hardcore libertarians typically agree the state should at least enforce laws against murder, and even full-on anarchists will admit that murder is still bad even if the state isn’t around to ban it. This also covers any version of “it’s an individual’s private choice” type of copes. No, killing a child, even your own, is never “your individual private choice.” Sorry.

Another one that’s really bad is when people say “well, if life begins at conception, why aren’t sperm and eggs counted as people?” Because they’re… sperm cells and egg cells, not human beings? Once conception takes place via the combining of these two, you have a genetically unique and observably distinct, individual human being, who can then mature into an adult if given sufficient care and nutrition and etc. Not before. A sperm cell or an egg cell on its own can never grow into an adult human, or grow in any way at all, for that matter.

Also, each male ejaculation contains tens to hundreds of millions of sperm. And if we thought of all those millions as people, then like, men become mass murderers just by existing, I guess? Because every time a man has sex, only one sperm cell can actually reach the finish line, so to speak. The rest inevitably “die,” even in a successful insemination that leads to pregnancy. This notion also suggests that every woman’s period is somehow a murder or at least a death by negligence. So yeah, this one goes to some real weird places.

I am saving the “best” for last, and this is the cope that will typically be reached when all others are exhausted, although sometimes people are lazy and just reach for it straight off the bat. The question is thus: What about rape? This is, after all, the only instance in which we can say that a woman’s bodily autonomy has truly been violated. By definition, in any other situation, she has gotten pregnant as a result of her own willful actions. If we are asking “what about rape?”, we are now making an implicit admission that abortion cannot be justified on any other grounds, i.e., an implicit admission that abortion is wrong in all other cases besides rape.

This is likewise an admission that abortion is the murder of a child, because well, that’s why it’s wrong in the first place. If this were not true, you wouldn’t need to bring up rape to prove your point one way or the other. So now, one is forced to make a choice. Is it worse for a woman to bear a child-by-rape that she does not want, or to murder the child in order to spare her the burden? I suppose you can make the argument for the former. I think we must choose the latter, and the choice is so obvious that I do not think it really needs further defending. After all, we do not allow infanticide simply because the infant was a product of rape.

I will certainly agree that the case of a child by rape is an unfortunate and traumatic reality, and I believe this particular cope is the most powerful anti-life argument, as it is a primary culprit (likely the primary culprit, in my opinion) for why pro-life people may be hesitant to discuss the subject openly and defend their position shamelessly. No one wants to be the one telling an emotional woman that it is wrong for her to have an abortion if she is raped. This is a socially devastating situation that normal people will avoid at all costs for perfectly understandable reasons.

But the fact that it creates a lot of strong emotions and social pressures is completely disconnected from the actual biological and moral truths that we must live with. Nature, unfortunately, does not make exceptions for rape. It would be nice if nature worked according to that one Republican senator who said a woman that is raped won’t get pregnant if she doesn’t want to. But reality doesn’t work like that and nature doesn’t recognize consent (or lack thereof). It is a biological reality that a rape-child remains a child like any other, and to allow their murder due to the circumstances of their conception would itself be incredibly perverse.

There is a cope similar to the rape question in asking “what if the mother’s life is in danger?”, though this one is less powerful because an exception could actually legitimately be made in this case, and always is by any pro-life person so far as I am aware. Obviously, you can allow for the taking of life when there is a literal trolley-problem forced choice by which one life must be taken no matter what. To be fair, it is the closest thing to an actual real life trolley problem that I can think of in politics. Although the ultimate answer remains pretty obvious, people will shy away from it because there is no perfect option that allows them to resolve the situation without any harm to anyone.

I think this is a big reason why abortion occupies the strange space that I attempted to describe at the beginning of this article, a space in which it is a very relevant political issue that we are all aware of, yet people seem universally hesitant or unable to discuss it in much detail. Perhaps more than any other issue, tackling abortion honestly requires one to confront some very ugly realities. My experience is that outside of the screeching blue-haired types, even most supporters of abortion are not particularly happy about their position, and seem to regard it as a lesser choice between two evils.

This ends up benefiting the anti-life position greatly, as when confronted with difficult or uncomfortable realities that upset their prior emotional attachments, the vast majority of people will throw up their hands and walk away from the issue entirely, rather than having the intellectual courage to think it all the way through regardless of how much they may wish that the ultimate outcome were not what it is. And I don’t blame people for not wanting to think about hard moral quandaries with socially unpopular answers.

The problem is, that’s how “our democracy” is supposed to work. Literally every single citizen is, ideally, supposed to be really smart and well informed and able to go out and cast a vote accordingly. Thus, in some sense, it is your “civic duty” to understand the correct position on abortion and vote accordingly. In case you couldn’t tell, I find this notion pretty laughable. The average person’s intellectual capabilities on this issue are at best cowardly, and at worst lazy, stupid, or downright malicious. Thus, cultural elites are able to imprint incorrect beliefs onto them with relative ease.

But I don’t get to make the rules, I just get to sit here complaining about them. In a sane world this topic would not be up for any sort of a vote at all, in much the same way that it would be unthinkable to hold a vote on once again allowing a particular race of people to be enslaved. I do think we will eventually reach such a conclusion on abortion as well, as truth can eventually overcome all of the emotional hang-ups and other human biases if we are allowed to speak it for long enough (which maybe we won’t be, but that’s a subject for another post). Who knows just how long it will take us to get there, though.

Alright, I think that’s everything I wanted to say. See? No mention of God, or religion, or anything like that at all. I think that nearly every abortion argument I have seen, certainly all the ones that I can remember, involve anti-lifers attempting to relate the subject back to religion, even if the pro-life speaker(s) are not bringing up religion in any way shape or form. Again, the irony is that religion would have been a lot more necessary in a time before modern medicine and science made the minute details of the biological processes behind reproduction so readily available for everyone to observe and learn.

Instead of obsessing over religion, the perspective presented above—one based on simple and undeniable biological and moral facts, easily understood by secular people—is the one people should be engaging with. I am not aware of any rebuttals to what I have presented above, and while I am reasonably confident that they don’t exist, I’m never going to say never, so if there is some kind of mind-blowing pro-abortion argument that I’m somehow currently unaware of, I reserve the right to make a future post about that.