This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).
Here is jeffguinn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy,” which appeared here on April 10:
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Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests.
Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.
Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.
Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.
Abortion intentionally deprives that existence, whether it has yet achieved personhood, of the potential for doing so. Abortion is homicide because it, by definition, it ends ends existence sooner than natural causes would have done. The concept of personhood, even if it exists, is irrelevant.
There still remain two ways to die: natural cause, or homicide. This conclusion doesn’t rely upon religion, or presumed states of existence. It is true, regardless of either.
So far as I know, my argument, which comes at the problem from completely the opposite direction from when morally meaningful life begins, but rather the manner in which every life must end, is my own. (Translated into reality: no doubt others have made it, thereby exposing my ignorance. But I haven’t seen it widely enough presented for me to be aware of it.)
There may well be gaping holes in my argument of which I am wholly unaware. But if there aren’t, then the consequences are unsparing: IVF wastage is homicide; exceptions for rape and incest are homicide; all elective abortions are homicides.
But some homicides are justifiable. Those undertaken to prevent the likelihood of death or significant injury to the mother constitute self-defense just as much as shooting a home invader.
So, near as I can conclude, there is no logically consistent defense for any abortion undertaken for any reason other than in defense of the mother from death or physical injury.
Almost all abortions are murders of convenience. QED.
Ethics Alarms 
I would agree that most abortions are undertaken as a matter of convenience. In many cases, however, genetics plays a significant role. In the case of incest, for example, there is a high probability of birth defects. Rape, by a stranger, leaves a similar problem. You (the rape victim) have no idea what the perpetrators background is nor do you know his family history. It’s a crap-shoot. In both cases, I would support a justifiable abortion.
Which is the slippery slope that leads to automatically aborting Down Syndrome kids. No?
{NOT “slippery slop” which is what I initially wrote. Though that works too…)
In the case of incest, for example, there is a high probability of birth defects. Rape, by a stranger, leaves a similar problem.
Those are indeed difficult cases. However they run into the fundamental problem: that a subsequent abortion is justifiable homicide. There is no theory of law I’m aware of that considers any homicide outside of legitimate self-defense justifiable. Of course, one could be added — but on what basis?
More difficult to reconcile, however, is that even if such a basis could be posited, it would put paid to the indispensable concept that all human lives have equal moral value, particularly in light of the related concept that the sins of the fathers shall not be visited upon the children.
Both of these justifications seem more like emotional talking points than well-reasoned objections.
(1) Incest: The chance of a birth defect from 1 single instance of incest is quite low. In a parent/child or sibling/sibling pairing, the chance of a birth defect rises from 1.7% to 2.2%. Now, you do need to realize the birth defect rate among Muslims is often over 4% due to cultural incest. It has taken 1000 years of encouraged 1st cousin marriage to raise the rate to that level. So, the chance of a birth defect from a single case of incest is insignificantly lower than the rate among Muslims. So, if your argument is that a 2.2% chance of birth defects is dangerous enough that such pregnancies should be terminated, then all 2.2 billion Muslims in the world should be eligible for preventative abortions because of their systematic inbreeding. From a utilitarian perspective in a socialized medicine environment, all Muslim children should be aborted because of the massively enhanced chance of birth defects, which are expensive and saddle the taxpayers unnecessarily. Other factors that seem to affect birth defects at least as much as this include the mother being over 34 and IVF. So, by this reasoning, perhaps IVF should be illegal and women should be sterilized at 33. Or maybe this risk of birth defects is a smokescreen for something else.
(2)Rape: There is no good reason to expect that sex with a stranger will lead to enhanced birth defects over sex in a long-term relationship. This one just doesn’t make sense unless you believe that rapists are somehow genetically inferior. I would love to hear what the the racism crowd has to say about this reasoning. Again, I suspect this is a smokescreen for something else.
Now, I understand the psychological arguments here, that such pregnancies are almost certainly troubling to the mother psychologically. If you want to make that argument, go ahead. Do not try to mask an emotional trauma argument with one based on medical health, however. But, if you want to make that argument, you need to weigh the fact that you are trying prevent short-term emotional suffering by ending an innocent human life and saddling that mother with the trauma that she killed an innocent child to help her deal with a traumatic event. For me, this seems like short-term gain for a long-term loss with a horrible cost.
FWIW: It was recommended that my wife and I do genetic testing on our son. We refused because we weren’t going to kill him because he wasn’t perfect. We also were counselled that he couldn’t survive and were encouraged to abort him. They told me that it didn’t even qualify as an abortion, it was a D&C because the pregnancy was ‘not viable’ based on the lab hormone tests. We had to push back HARD against the doctors on this. They INSISTED that this pregnancy was not viable, that our son would die within a few more months of the pregnancy. Now, you should have seen the faces and heard the blubbering of the doctors as month after month, he didn’t die, he grew, and developed normally. He drives a car pretty well for a non-viable pregnancy. The tests were wrong (nationwide). Untold numbers of healthy children were aborted in 2007 because the hormone tests were defective and people took this utilitarian approach to pregnancy and a casual approach to the value of life. I think about how I would feel now if I or my wife had given in to the intense pressure to abort our son. I am so glad that I am a stubborn SOB.
we had an almost identical story from 2012 with our daughter (my wife, at 36, was considered “advanced maternal age”). We refused to entertain the idea of an abortion regardless of the test results. Thankfully, a great nurse at the OBGYN told us that the results are sometimes wrong and did a retest, which came back normal. She’s now the smartest kid in her school (in 6th grade she’s reading at a college level, last year she was the first 5th grader in her school to get a perfect score in math in state testing).
I’m glad it worked out well for you and you weren’t scared of 1 test. In our case, ALL the tests came back bad for 3 months, then we stopped testing. My wife knew a person who worked in the lab and it turned out that the batch of tests they had were bad. All the pregnancies came back bad. They got a recall notice on them about the time we stopped testing. They weren’t supposed to tell anyone because a lot of people aborted perfectly healthy children. I just wondered what the results were nationwide from that bad batch.
Bill Maher tends to agree with your position:
“I scold the Left when they say, ‘Oh, you know what? They just hate women, people who are pro-life,'” he continued. “They don’t hate women. They just made that up. They think it’s murder, and it kind of is. I’m just OK with that. I am. I mean, there’s 8 billion people in the world. I’m sorry, we won’t miss you. That’s my position on that.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/13/maher_abortion_is_kind_of_murder_im_okay_with_that_is_that_not_your_position_if_youre_pro-choice.html
jvb
Isn’t he an unbelievable asshole, though? Murder is Ok because there are lots of people. Brilliant.
Yeah, he is insufferable.
jvb
Well, at least he is honest about it. At least he doesn’t try to weasel around it and justify his position with some fabricated reason. At least he says that he thinks that it is better that some people kill their children. At least we know he is a sociopath who couldn’t care less if certain people were all murdered. We know where he stands, we know not to bother trying to convince him he is mistaken about his garbage rationalizations, and we know not to turn our backs on him.
He also said that an economic crash would be “worth it” to get rid of Trump. He’s rich: what does he care if normal people lose their jobs, and businesses, as long as a President he doesn’t like goes down? I need a new word for Maher and people like him.
I usually refer to them as the ‘elites’. They are people who think their views and political ideology make them so much better than others that the fate of those others is of no account. They are sociopaths, but they are a special group of sociopaths that is elevated in status by our media and ruling class.
You know, when I was in Virginia Beach in 2022 I visited one of the many quaint little museums between the hotels along the waterfront. It was just the proprietor and myself for a while and we had an interesting discussion about photographing aircraft, since that’s a big part of what I was there to do (Oceana), and he had been a photographer for the military.
Somehow the discussion got political and he said that it was good that most of the victims of black criminals were black themselves because then there would be fewer black people to become criminals later. Outwardly, I didn’t say a word. Inwardly, I was like “wait, what?” I don’t see how that’s different than saying we’ve already got plenty of people and we don’t need more so killing babies is okay.
Almost all abortions are murders of convenience.
You and I agree on all the logic leading up to this comment and I agree that this comment is morally true.
The step from homicide to murder does require a legal definition around which particular human is to be protected from homicide or not. But, the key point is that your expositions compels the pro-abortion crowd to minimally admit that a human life is being taken – it’s then on them to rationalize why in certain instances it should not be legally seen as murder.
And there’s where the twisty rationalizes come flying in.
But, the key point is that your expositions compels the pro-abortion crowd to minimally admit that a human life is being taken – it’s then on them to rationalize why in certain instances it should not be legally seen as murder.
Rationalizations and euphemisms are all that’s left to them.
There are several motivation for abortion advocates. Women are uniquely burdened by pregnancy; that burden is often unchosen; because that burden isn’t shareable, women must have the choice whether to carry it; women cannot participate in society on an equal basis to men without access to abortion; anti-abortion arguments are religious impositions on non-believers.
All of these considerations are absolutely true. But the first thing to notice is that none of them are ethically relevant, they are orthogonal to the fundamental act: intentionally depriving a life of its future.
On top of that, there is no limiting principle.
It gets worse. As this horrible example in the Czech Republic amply demonstrates, the life accidentally, yet intentionally, terminated had more value than the one that was supposed to be, but wasn’t. Abortion advocates must assert, and defend, the argument that some lives are circumstantially more valuable than others. So far as I know, that necessary step has never been taken.
And finally, the justifications for abortion create a carve-out (yes, I’m aware, I typed it anyway) for pregnancy. But there is nothing within those justifications that find a limit with pregnancy. Women are oppressed by pregnancy individually, not as a class.
There are all manner of significant, long-term, intrusive and unchosen burdens in life. The accident victim in a coma? In what ethically relevant regard does that differ from pregnancy? Yet abortion is legal, but killing that accident victim isn’t.
If choice advocates came at abortion from the proper direction, instead of the convenient one, their argument would be without legs. (NB: this argument doesn’t even tangentially involve religion.)
Unless, of course, I’m missing something, or many things.
If I was a political candidate, I would make this argument, while acknowledging that, regardless of its correctness, most voters do not accept its full implications. And that while that is the case, the law will not accord with morality.
Because the bodies are very small, easily vanish.