Nudge and Abortion
Here’s my ongoing Twitter exchange with Richard Thaler:
Thaler: As @CassSunstein and I say repeatedly in Nudge, the goal is to improve outcomes for people AS JUDGED BY THEMSELVES, not policy maker’s taste
Me: .@R_Thaler @ATabarrok @CassSunstein So what existing *hard* paternalism does your stated goal imply should be abolished?
Thaler: @bryan_caplan I would say most drug laws, all prohibitions of gays, abortion, many immigration laws, …
Me: .@R_Thaler Glad to hear about drug laws. But the other laws you name allegedly prevent harm to *others* not harm to self, no?
Still, Thaler’s reply got me thinking about abortion. The main pro-life argument, of course, is that abortion is murder, and murder is harmful to the victim. But on reflection, there is also a simple libertarian paternalist case against abortion.
Key starting point: Parents very rarely regret having children – even initially “unwanted” children. This is not mere status quo bias: Most childless adults eventually regret not having children. As I’ve said about parenthood before, “Buyer’s remorse is rare; non-buyer’s remorse is common.” Implication: Most women who want to terminate their pregnancies would probably change their minds after their babies are born. Most won’t go through the next eighteen years thinking, “I wish I’d gotten that abortion.”
Armed with these facts, an old-fashioned hard paternalist would simply ban most abortions: “You’ll thank us later.” What about the libertarian paternalist? He’d want to achieve the same result – discouraging abortion – with subtler means. Instead of prohibiting abortion he’d want to nudge pregnant women into carrying their fetuses to term. Some candidate nudges:
1. Waiting periods: Abortions must be scheduled at least a week in advance. This gives women time to reconsider their decision, so they don’t abort rashly.
2. An opt-out rule for counseling. The libertarian paternalist could schedule all women who want an abortion for a pre-procedure session with a psychologist – or maybe just volunteer mothers who previously considered abortion. Women who don’t want counseling would have to explicitly refuse to participate.
3. Inconvenient locations: Abortions have to be performed in remote rural hospitals. Women who definitely want abortions will make the extra effort, but more ambivalent women will decide to keep their babies.
4. Deny government funding for abortion. If the government thinks that a procedure is generally ill-advised, the first step is to refrain from encouraging it. If people want to pay for it out of their own pocket, they’re still free to do so.
As an actual libertarian, rather than a libertarian paternalist, I support only nudge #4. But it’s hard to see why a staunch libertarian paternalist would object to any of them. (Before you appeal to the slippery slope, remember that Thaler has repeatedly minimized this danger). Despite all the nudges, a woman who really wants an abortion would remain free to get one. The upside, though, is that well-crafted nudges would sharply reduce the number of women who abort children they would have eventually come to love. It’s seems like libertarian paternalists should jump right on board.
Of course, I might just be failing the Ideological Turing Test. So tell me: Why would a libertarian paternalist oppose any of the pro-life nudges I suggest?
The post appeared first on Econlib.
Abortion generally does not change the total number of children a woman has over her lifetime. If she is unable to have an abortion she will likely compensate by having fewer children later. So nudges would not cause women to have more children they are glad to have. It would cause them to have more children at less convenient times in their life instead of more convenient times.
It's true that women rarely regret having children, but they do sometimes regret the timing of their children. My own mother has occasionally wondered if it would have been better if she had had children later in life. I pointed out to her that it certainly would not be better from my perspective, and she said that that wasn't the spirit of that kind of hypothetical.
Germany and Matthew Yglesias: a) Germany "bans" abortion, but practically allows it the first 3 months IF the women got a counseling about state-help for mothers (esp. poor, single) - which is not super-low, actually. So, kinda combination of nudge 1+2. Kept no one who was set on abortion from getting one, might help on the margin - but not by a lot. - I like that system. (nudge 3 sounds bad and is hardly practical in densely populated areas aka Europe). 4 is not a nudge; NOT doing 4 is a nudge towards abortion. A nudge I am ok with (unlike most transgender stuff) - but at 300-700$ affordable anyways (German price tag).
b) M.Y. had a nice post today https://www.slowboring.com/p/23-thoughts-on-the-2023-midterms
that included a link to this ad https://x.com/MediumBuying/status/1704479015992447432?s=20 - so saying "most women would have been happy with their kid, thus let us make abortion hard" may come over as controversial. My take: Those women are welcome to happily have a kid in the right circumstances. Hardly any is going to give birth once per year, so going a year without is no biggie.
All in all: Bryan has been very outspoken against nudging paternalism. Arguing now for a "libertarian paternalism" seems: strange. To quote MY: abortion rights is an almost uniquely uninteresting topic to debate — it’s what most people think versus a religious doctrine that you can’t really disprove or debunk. I’m not going to do a 2,000 word column on “here’s why your raspberry-sized fetus doesn’t have a soul.” But it’s an intensely personal topic that impacts tons of people directly, and voters care about a lot it when they perceive rights to be genuinely at risk. - (He kinda recommends Republicans to keep to being against late abortions. That would get even my vote anytime.)