Reason and Abortion
A conversation with Monica Snyder, Executive Director of Secular Pro-Life
Last December, I published a new essay on the ethics of abortion, building heavily on the Turnaway Study. Around the same time, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person who has noticed the disconnect between popularizations of the Turnaway Study and the study itself. Monica Snyder, Executive Director Secular Pro-Life, had a whole series of thoughtful criticisms. So I reached out to her, and she generously agreed to join me to discuss my essay, abortion in general, and what it’s like to oppose abortion on non-religious grounds.
Whatever your views on this topic, Monica Snyder is likely to challenge your preconceptions about “crazy right-to-lifers.” Though she’s not a statistician, she has an excellent grasp on the statistical methodology behind the Turnaway Study. She’s good-humored throughout. And she blends a fascinating personal odyssey with sincere philosophical curiosity.
A very fun conversation. And it made me realize: While my greatest practical success as an intellectual is convincing readers to have hundreds of additional kids, Monica’s words have plausibly led to the birth of ten times as many. After all, it’s much easier to convince someone to go through with a pregnancy in progress than to initiate a new one.
Seems like the strongest conclusion is also the most boring: People are really good at justifying their decisions after the fact, in order to live with themselves.
There may be a selection effect on the results: The finding that 96% of participants denied an abortion did not still wish they had had an abortion 5 years later is from an analysis that excludes 30% of those denied an abortion but were able to get an abortion or miscarried after being turned away. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953620307863?via%3Dihub
The results seem more like adaptation/adjustment (instead of momentary panic). 58% of all Turnaway study participants who sought abortions later in pregnancy visited more than one facility, and 12% visited three or more facilities. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1363/4521013. That persistence seems like a good indication that at the time many participants did really want abortions
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You mentioned waiting periods. Other research that suggests patients seeking abortion have a high level of certainty and brief waiting periods don't really affect people's certainty in their abortion decision. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7984762/ ; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386716302699
I suspect the Turnaway study results speak to resilience and hedonic adaptation (the same might also be true for participants that got an abortion). Whatever side of the issue we fall on, we should all be grateful that people do not live with regret for outcomes that cannot be changed.
You've framed the moral issue as a conflict of rights between an embryo and a pregnant person. But that seems like the wrong question: pregnancy is not a conflict of rights. Balancing relative harms and benefits makes sense where multiple parties have valid claim to a resource.
But a person's body is their own instrument for acting in the world; if anyone has a claim to your body, it's you. Your body is yours, even if someone else, with full and equal moral status, needs something from your body (blood organs involuntary physiology etc.) to survive.
The ethical question cannot be about trading off severity of harm to the pregnant person or benefit to the embryo. It must be about what one person is morally obligated to do for another person or potential person.
"Not ruining your life" is not usually the standard applied for evaluating what one person MUST do for another person. It might not ruin your life to give me $10,000 or to give me a kidney if I need it, but that does not mean you are morally obligated to do so, even if I need your money or your kidney much more than you do. It would not justify a third party taking either $10,000 or your kidney from you to give it to me.
And, with respect, even in the abstract, the state compelling someone to engage in an activity that ends with a choice between 90% chance of perineal trauma or major abdominal surgery is really not a small intrusion, even to keep another person alive.