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
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.
This would all make sense if the life in question wasn't willed into existence in the first place by the mother, knowing it would have no other way to survive then to carry it to term. In 99% of cases pregnancy is the result of a conscious decision to have sex without using protection.
Besides, do you really think abortion will reduce once we have artificial wombs? Do you think that people who don't want to raise a child are going to be OK knowing they have abandoned children out there? They would rather they be dead than abandoned, that's the crux of abortion. "It never happened."
Assume consensual, unprotected sex. Everything that happens after, from sperm migration to ovulation to fertilization to transport to implantation to gestation, is an involuntary biological process that a pregnant person neither causes or controls. At almost every step between pregnancy and sex, failure is more probable than not. Even IVF, under the best circumstances, is nowhere near certain. The line from sex to pregnancy to birth is a branching probability tree, not an inevitable outcome of sex. At best, consensual sex knowingly assumes a risk of pregnancy. No one is “willed into existence.” Biology.
There are no circumstances under which one person, even a person with full moral status, can claim to use another person’s body (blood, organs, involuntary physiological processes). Not as parental duty, not in contract, not civil liability, not penalty for a crime. Not ever. What makes the difference here?
Ectogestation does not change the underlying ethical question with respect to abortion; it just changes the timeline. At every point in pregnancy, an embryo or fetus only survives Inside another person’s body because that person’s body provides them with continuous physiological support that sustains prenatal life and development – oxygenation, waste removal, metabolic regulation etc. There is no magical alternative option by which an embryo or fetus can survive inside another person’s body and exit alive without that person providing continuous ongoing life-sustaining support.
Throughout pregnancy, the ethical question about abortion is always something like: is there an obligation to continue providing that continuous life sustaining support – a duty to stay pregnant and give birth? And the ethical question about abortion bans is always something like: is it ethical to stop someone from ending their pregnancy to ensure they continue to provide that life-sustaining support?
Unless you have an idea for how a fetus is supposed to get into an artificial uterus through teleportation, ectogestation doesn't change much. Getting a fetus into an artificial womb still requires a pregnant person to undergo injurious, high-risk procedures which would not bypass the physical trauma or the extraordinary demand being made of them.
There is a widespread cultural failure to acknowledge the biological facts of pregnancy. The foundational processes that sustain fetal life and growth are involuntary, autonomic. Though people can and often do behave carefully during pregnancy, gestation is non-agentic. As long as a person's body is artificially supported, pregnancy can continue in the body of a person who is brain–dead, legally dead.
Moral and legal duties attach to voluntary conduct – do/do not – so a duty to continue pregnancy is not coherent. It’s a duty to keep “doing” something that you are not “doing” voluntarily. Pregnancy happens to and through a pregnant person's body, but it is not a voluntary action carried out by them. A duty to gestate doesn’t become any more coherent when framed as a duty not to get an abortion - a duty not to voluntarily end an involuntary process in your body is still a “duty” to be used like a life support machine.
If the law requires you to keep doing something that your corpse could keep doing after you are dead, after the part of you that made you capable of doing anything for yourself or anyone else is gone forever, that law is not treating you like a person, a moral agent with rights and obligations to act. It repurposing you into a biological apparatus for producing useful output. An object for another person’s use. No ethical system can survive treating people like things.
TLDR, even if there was an artificial womb that you could sustain life, if there is even the most minute convenience in aborting rather then transferring the fetus the right to abortion remains. Predictable.
The real condition is tragic: The fetus has emerging moral status. The mother has autonomy and life interests. Those two goods collide and there is no painless resolution. The abortion debate reveals a civilisation that has lost the ability to live with tragic tension. Optimising the abortion debate merely postpones the tragedy by relocating the debate at the next arbitrary boundary.
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
.
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.
This would all make sense if the life in question wasn't willed into existence in the first place by the mother, knowing it would have no other way to survive then to carry it to term. In 99% of cases pregnancy is the result of a conscious decision to have sex without using protection.
Besides, do you really think abortion will reduce once we have artificial wombs? Do you think that people who don't want to raise a child are going to be OK knowing they have abandoned children out there? They would rather they be dead than abandoned, that's the crux of abortion. "It never happened."
Assume consensual, unprotected sex. Everything that happens after, from sperm migration to ovulation to fertilization to transport to implantation to gestation, is an involuntary biological process that a pregnant person neither causes or controls. At almost every step between pregnancy and sex, failure is more probable than not. Even IVF, under the best circumstances, is nowhere near certain. The line from sex to pregnancy to birth is a branching probability tree, not an inevitable outcome of sex. At best, consensual sex knowingly assumes a risk of pregnancy. No one is “willed into existence.” Biology.
There are no circumstances under which one person, even a person with full moral status, can claim to use another person’s body (blood, organs, involuntary physiological processes). Not as parental duty, not in contract, not civil liability, not penalty for a crime. Not ever. What makes the difference here?
Ectogestation does not change the underlying ethical question with respect to abortion; it just changes the timeline. At every point in pregnancy, an embryo or fetus only survives Inside another person’s body because that person’s body provides them with continuous physiological support that sustains prenatal life and development – oxygenation, waste removal, metabolic regulation etc. There is no magical alternative option by which an embryo or fetus can survive inside another person’s body and exit alive without that person providing continuous ongoing life-sustaining support.
Throughout pregnancy, the ethical question about abortion is always something like: is there an obligation to continue providing that continuous life sustaining support – a duty to stay pregnant and give birth? And the ethical question about abortion bans is always something like: is it ethical to stop someone from ending their pregnancy to ensure they continue to provide that life-sustaining support?
Unless you have an idea for how a fetus is supposed to get into an artificial uterus through teleportation, ectogestation doesn't change much. Getting a fetus into an artificial womb still requires a pregnant person to undergo injurious, high-risk procedures which would not bypass the physical trauma or the extraordinary demand being made of them.
There is a widespread cultural failure to acknowledge the biological facts of pregnancy. The foundational processes that sustain fetal life and growth are involuntary, autonomic. Though people can and often do behave carefully during pregnancy, gestation is non-agentic. As long as a person's body is artificially supported, pregnancy can continue in the body of a person who is brain–dead, legally dead.
Moral and legal duties attach to voluntary conduct – do/do not – so a duty to continue pregnancy is not coherent. It’s a duty to keep “doing” something that you are not “doing” voluntarily. Pregnancy happens to and through a pregnant person's body, but it is not a voluntary action carried out by them. A duty to gestate doesn’t become any more coherent when framed as a duty not to get an abortion - a duty not to voluntarily end an involuntary process in your body is still a “duty” to be used like a life support machine.
If the law requires you to keep doing something that your corpse could keep doing after you are dead, after the part of you that made you capable of doing anything for yourself or anyone else is gone forever, that law is not treating you like a person, a moral agent with rights and obligations to act. It repurposing you into a biological apparatus for producing useful output. An object for another person’s use. No ethical system can survive treating people like things.
TLDR, even if there was an artificial womb that you could sustain life, if there is even the most minute convenience in aborting rather then transferring the fetus the right to abortion remains. Predictable.
Wow! A collab between 2 of my favourite SubStacks that I never thot I'd see!
Wonderful discussion! Really enjoyed it all around. Thanks.
The real condition is tragic: The fetus has emerging moral status. The mother has autonomy and life interests. Those two goods collide and there is no painless resolution. The abortion debate reveals a civilisation that has lost the ability to live with tragic tension. Optimising the abortion debate merely postpones the tragedy by relocating the debate at the next arbitrary boundary.
Whatever your views on this topic, Monica Snyder is likely to challenge your preconceptions about “crazy right-to-lifers.”
You just gave away that you think religious people are crazy.