I think it's odd you treat all embryos as equal. Human intuition, and law, typically considers a 2 week embryo to have dramatically less moral weight than a 20 week fetus. Lack of acknowledgement of that felt like an oversight in this post
I took that as implicit. Since birth elevates the status from fetus to human, and at some point embryos are elevated to fetus status, it only stands to reason that the status changes gradually, not in huge discrete steps.
What not an absolute right at the start? The power to destroy implies ownership but then why do women alone own the child without recognition of the male co-pro creator?
And why can't "owners" of embryos enter into contracts to sell them at birth?
Doubtless there is a "market" for breeding female sex slaves - the Turkish sultans seemed to like doing so.
I'm going to call you Sweetie because I know it will angrify you.
Sweetie, I was answering a very narrow question. Your rant had nothing to do with what I said, nothing to do with what I was responding to. Railing and ranting does not change people's minds, and since you are more interested in ranting and railing than changing people's minds, you go right ahead ranting and railing and contributing zero to the conversation.
The women in this study were near the age cutoff, so we should assume they are
Anyway, we found that in practice the time issue hasn't had too much salience. Its more signaling then something people really believe in. I've yet to see a pro-choice person go "man, the fact that you allow this before X weeks means we are cool."
I don't think that's really true. Sure I think the very radical pro-life or pro-choice wouldn't recognise the differences but I think most people would see a vast difference between terminating an embryo in the first weeks where it's just a microscopic ball of cells vs a near-term fetus where it's recognisably a baby.
This is what a baby looks like at three months, which is still considered the first trimester. It's hardly a "clump of cells".
A majority of Americans think it should be legal to kill that baby and basically every referendum since Dobbs has backed that up.
94% of abortions happen in the first trimester and here is their breakdown.
Within the first 6 weeks: 40.2%
Between 7 and 9 weeks: 38.4%
Between 10 and 13 weeks: 14.2%
An awful lot of those are happening to a fetus that clearly looks like a child.
I think your average person thinks "1st trimester is long enough I can get an abortion if I want one no problem." Fetal developments got nothing to do with it.
There are a lot of problems with this sort of analysis, but the most obvious is that we generally aren't permitted to violate someone's autonomy just because there's a good chance they won't ultimately regret it being violated. I mean, just think about immigration - I'm sure a bunch of people who are denied entry into the US ultimately end up feeling good about their lives in Mexico or Thailand or whatever, but that's not a good argument for arbitrarily preventing their freedom of movement, right? Or you could even imagine something much worse, like child marriage, or bride kidnapping, or whatever. Just because people who are denied some right ultimately adjust to the results of that denial can't possibly justify the denial itself!
Also, for the record, I'd just say that plenty of people *don't* think an intermediate fetus has inherent moral value, and actually think there's no coherent or plausible analysis that says they do. I personally can't understand how value could exist on a sliding scale like that at all, or how it could be the case that something with no conscious experiences or psychological properties of any kind could be harmed in any way at all, which is all that should matter here.
Who exactly are you attributing *no* conscious experiences or psychological properties of *any* kind to? Do you imagine these things suddenly snapping into place at the moment of birth, or is it that a fetus becomes inherently valuable at the moment it begins to have conscious experience in the womb, whenever that is, or that a newborn does at the moment its blooming, buzzing confusion begins to resolve into genuinely conscious experiences? By polling if nothing else, it seems that the vast majority of people think third-trimester fetuses have pretty similar moral worth to newborns, and that seems like by far the most obvious intuition.
I definitely agree there's currently ambiguity as to when exactly conscious experience arises in a newborn, but I think there's good reason to believe it takes place significantly after the vast majority of abortions ever take place. Certainly late-term abortions are a more complicated issue - but even there, there are actually perfectly plausible theories of consciousness that do have it arising at the moment of birth or perhaps during the process of labor.
I’m pretty sure you don’t actually want to decide whether to do something that might be murder on the basis of any theory of consciousness, let alone one of many “plausible” ones, though I surely believe you that arguments pinpointing consciousness to birth exist. Anyway, I’m not sure what you meant by “intermediate fetus”, then, but the main response is that most people who consider the unborn to be morally valuable before they’re conscious, or more often before they’re able to feel pain, use a moral system that focuses on the harm to the killer of the unborn, not to the unborn themselves. But you already know this so I assume you’re just going to say you think such a position is inherently incoherent, or something.
I relate to your desire to stay on the side of caution. But you have to base views on some type of theory of consciousness, otherwise, who's to say eating a potato isn't murder.
I mean, we use theories of consciousness to determine whether a killing is immoral all the time - that's why, for example, we allow taking people in persistent vegetative states off life support. But even if you really want to err on the side of caution, you could be something close to absolutely sure that the majority of abortions take place before any mentation at all is even possible. And it seems to me that it just isn't possible to harm something in a morally relevant way if it has no psychological features whatsoever.
Society might support you taking a comatose person off life support. But it wouldn’t support you if the comatose person is guaranteed to wake in a few months.
But that's because a comatose person who will one day wake up still has a wide range of psychological features and dispositional desires, whereas a fetus has literally no psychological features or desires of any kind whatsoever. A comatose person is still "in there" in a meaningful way, while the fetus' mind has never existed at any point.
As I said, most people who consider the unborn to be morally valuable before they’re conscious use a moral system that focuses on the harm to the killer of the unborn, not to the unborn themselves. And the same group certainly doesn't use a theory of consciousness in deciding whether to take someone off life support.
If there's no law banning abortion, then there's no violation of autonomy here. He doesn't advocate for such bans in the post. He says he's unsure what to conclude about them.
I think you’re right that many people assign no moral value to a fetus. Many of those same people assign no moral value to human life in general, and if they do, they are very quick to revoke that moral value of the human in question is say, “too old” or “too fascist”.
This is why abortion was originally a pet issue of eugenicists and its modern advocates remain anti-human at root.
I mean, I'm actually on the other side of the shrimp debate - I think it's likely they aren't conscious at all. But still, this isn't a meaningful response either way. Can you explain why I should care about my race or my nation above and beyond the wellbeing of the people inside it?
The same reason you should care about your family more than Somalians. Before the last 100 years, your neighbors would be your extended family, your town would be a collection of the same families for hundreds of years, and so on and so forth.
Everyone in the world who isn’t white understands this intuitively and would find your question bizarre. The Somalians in Minnesota who steal from the local government and send it overseas without remorse understand this. They know where their loyalties lie. Likewise their clan loyalties supersede national loyalties, so they failed to elect the mayoral candidate from the wrong clan. Concentric circles of concern are normal. This seems to have been bred out of white liberals. We’ll see how that plays out evolutionarily.
I guess I don't get it then - it sounds like you have contempt for these Somali immigrants, but aren't they just doing what you're suggesting by privileging their own national and racial compatriots over a basic commitment to equality and fairness for all? It's hard for me to understand why you would suggest we should have these kinds of loyalties if it also makes you angry when other people act on them. Do you think we should all adopt third-world values or not?
You are either completely misreading the post, or your analogy is terrible. Someone immigrating from Mexico to the US will, in fact, almost certainly get many multiples the lifetime income than if they stay in Mexico. The main point of this post is that people misjudge, ex ante, the harms that will befall them if they don’t get an abortion.
Let’s stipulate that borders and abortion bans are unjust restrictions on personal autonomy. (100% endorse.) if it turned out that moving to the US made immigrants’ lifetime earnings go up by a few hundred dollars, but they were leaving their families behind over dreams of earning 100x what they could make at home, it’s valid to point out that leaving makes less sense than the people think it does. A better analogy would be a ban on moving to Alaska to join the gold rush. Such a ban would be much less harmful than a ban on moving from Mexico to the US because the *actual* benefits of the former are much less aligned with expectations than the latter.
Well sure, my point isn't that denying women abortions has a roughly similar material impact as denying a Mexican citizen the right to immigrate. I'm just saying that, in general, it's not enough to justify a restriction on an essential right just because people self-report being okay with the life-altering consequences afterwards. Human beings are notoriously good at adapting to circumstances, but that doesn't mean anything you can properly adapt to ceases to be a harm.
Right… but I think the point I’m (still) not quite sure you’re addressing is that the ill effects people expect from having children *don’t happen*, not that they happen but people end up being okay with them, as you just said. My point isn’t that your analogy is bad because moving to the US has benefits of a certain size, but getting an abortion has benefits of a different size. It’s that people move to the US because they want to make more money than they can in their home countries, and that does in fact happen. This makes it fundamentally different from someone who gets an abortion under the mistaken belief that it is the only way to fend off financial ruin, when in fact empirical reality suggests that isn’t likely to happen.
Take another example. People who try but fail to commit suicide overwhelmingly end up being glad that they’re alive. Knowing that, if someone feels like they should commit suicide because they don’t think their life is worth living, they should revise their belief to recognize they are probably wrong and that their future self will be very much glad to be alive. I think that suicide is not only a tragedy, but also almost always a *mistake*.
In the end, I tend to agree that we shouldn’t ban either abortion or suicide on grounds of personal autonomy. But Bryan’s post is about something else entirely.
I see what you're saying, and to be clear, I agree it's perfectly reasonable to correct misapprehensions about objective material impacts, and to encourage women to avoid catastrophizing. But when it comes to more generalized claims about overall well-being and how that impacts the moral question, that's where I think the logic breaks down.
For example, Caplan cites this figure: "One week after abortion denial, 65% of participants reported still wishing they could have had the abortion; after the birth, only 12% of women reported that they still wished they could have the abortion. At the time of the child’s first birthday, 7% still wished they could have had an abortion. By five years, this went down to 4%." This is the sort of thing I'm talking about - although this might be valuable information for a woman who's conflicted about having an abortion, it's not really valuable when it comes to determining whether abortion restrictions are justified or even just determining the permissibility of abortion more broadly. To use the classic analogy, if you wake up attached to a comatose violinist, then whether or not you're allowed to unplug yourself shouldn't depend on a study that says people who stay plugged in are basically just as happy as the ones who unplug.
To your fire hypothetical: If you could save one 6 month old baby or 12 octogenarians which would you choose? I think most would choose the baby, does that mean the elderly only have intermediate worth?
I would expect most people to say that when choosing between babies and the elderly you should pick the baby. Even, possibly especially, the elderly would say that. Are you unfamiliar with the phrase "Women and children first?"
I am and I generally respond post feminism I fully agree, they can eat their cake and die first like they wanted on the pyre of equality.
I agree with your generally gist though I'm utterly confident that most middle age intersectionality feminist would say kill the infant, especially if male.
when you exit the christian framework of “we’re all created in the image of God and our souls are equally valuable to Him” framework one is forced to reckon with the fact that not all humans are equally valuable. The law might still treat all of us the same, but society doesn’t. 6 month old babies have more moral worth than octogenarians. I can’t tell you how many octogenarians would have to be on the line for me to not choose the baby, but at least 12. Once babies are no longer in the womb, and survive to an age where they are almost guaranteed to live to adulthood, which is not a very high age these days (a healthy 6 momth old has an amazing chance these days. Coupled with the low birth rate, each baby is precious), they gain almost infinite value relative to everyone else. I mean ask new mothers. Many are treated like goddesses during pregnancy, because a healthy, wanted fetus has infinite value. An unwanted fwtus has no value. When the baby is dependent on the mother and no one else can take over care, she decides what social value it has. After it’s out, its value becomes infinite, because she is no longer an irreducibly important to the baby.
Many moms report this. Once the baby is out, they feel like chopped liver next to the tiny messiah. Even their own relatives basically fall to their knees before the baby and forget about the mom, because she’s gone back to the same moral status as everyone else.
While it is true that embryos have intermediate moral value between nothing (as in your thought experiment) and a baby, this does not really imply they have more moral value than a womans choice and freedom not to have a baby, which is a load-bearing assumption on your part.
Or put it another way you might prefer, if you asked someone wether they would spend 10$ to save an embryo, would you expect different answers? What about if you ask them to spend the average amount of time and money involved in child care to save the embryo? then your thought experiment will likely reveal most people, especially the pro choice demographic, would assign their time and money to have a higher value than an embryo.
Most people wouldn't regularly spend $10 to save a child dying from malaria in Africa. Unfortunately, people are selfish pieces of crap. That's a given for any moral debate, though. How many pro-choice people would regularly spend $10 to ensure other people could access abortion services in Africa? Basically none.
We all value those closer to us - genetically and geographically - more than those far away.
We have little choice. Suppose the planet Mars had 10,000 trillion people dying from malaria, who could be saved at $1 each. We're fine with that as long as we don't know about it.
Once we know, what's it worth to *us* to help them? Not 10,000 trillion dollars. That much money doesn't exist.
It's fine to value people closer to you, but if you value a $100 Christmas gift to a family member more than, say, 10 lives of strangers, that would typically suggest a defect of moral character.
Suppose you had to walk by and ignore these 10 strangers while they died, on your way to buy the Christmas gift, when you could have stopped and saved all 10 of their lives instead. Surely it would be monstrous to prioritize the gift, no? I imagine that someone being raped is much less bad than 10 people dying, but it would similarly be monstrous to walk by and ignore an ongoing rape just so that you could make it to the gift shop on time or whatever.
Now, I understand that what makes something monstrous is somewhat relative to what humans can reasonably be expected to do. We couldn't expect someone to give up everything to devote their life to saving 10 strangers (i.e. they wouldn't be monstrous to refuse), but people can surely be reasonably expected to do a lot more than they actually do, so it remains a major moral defect that they don't.
Well, malaria nets take thousands of dollars on average to save a single life, but yes, that is correct. If you often have spare money and you buy yourself an extra special TV for thousands that you don't need and never donate money to help save lives, you are a selfish piece of crap. Again, if you were walking down to buy the TV and saw somebody dying who you could save, and you chose the TV over their life, that is a moral defect.
However, I don't think this applies to every purchase of thousands, since I don't think we can reasonably expect people to sacrifice every expensive thing that makes them happy to save other's lives. Imagine if, every time you went out to buy something nice for yourself, people were on the ground dying. You would not be monstrous for ignoring them some of the time to prioritize yourself and your family, but you would be if you ignored them almost all of the time, which is what we actually do.
Yes, it would say something worse about you if you allowed a person in front of you to die versus a person thousands of miles away dying when with a tiny bit of abstract thought you could easily save them. It says different things about who you are.
A lot of what we mean by morality is "based on your actions, CAN I TRUST YOU." I can trust someone that doesn't donate all their money to African kids. I can't trust someone allowing children to die in front of him (note, this is something people miss in the Bible, Jesus asks you to show mercy to people right in front of you but doesn't abstract to setting up an NGO).
But of course the philosophers are busy remaining us there is no difference.
I'm personally of a different camp. I don't think lives in Africa have value. In fact I think they have negative value. When you save a life in Africa, I think you are actively making the world a worse place.
But if we set aside the fact that I don't think all human lives are equal value, if those lives were equal value it would in fact be wrong. The thing is that "worthy lives" in a modern industrialized world rarely end up in situations where they can be saved on the cheap. If they were worthy, they wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.
This is the worst post Bryan has ever written. I have no idea how he turned an increase in poverty from 45-61%, which falls to "only" a 5% higher rate five years later, into a risk you can round down to zero and say isn't worth getting an abortion over. Bryan previously said, quite rightly, that men were behaving rationally if they refused to mentor women due to a 2% chance of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Why is this different?
Coincidentally, a few days ago I wrote a post about this very subject, how being pro-choice falls naturally out of the principle that voluntary exchange is better than coercion, a principle conservatives intuitively understand when it comes to most of life.
Well written and interesting. Worth noting too that in the Turnaway Study, most differences in economic outcomes resolved before the end of the study period.
For example, by the end of the study period both women who aborted and women denied abortion had similar household incomes, personal incomes, and levels of employment. At no point during the study were there statistically significant differences in terms of access to credit or ability to borrow money. Markers of financial distress (for example, debt sent to collection agencies or low credit scores) were worse initially for women denied abortion, but converged three years into the study.
Virtually all life experiences end up reverting to emotional baseline within a year. This is well studied. Losing the use of your legs or eyesight will make you upset for a bit and within two years you're fine. Same with winning the lottery. There is virtually nothing studied that shows long term emotional impact bc people adapt back to baseline. This is a horrible basis for moral decisions. By this reasoning I can chop off your legs or steal all your money, and no one should be particularly concerned bc within two years, you will have gotten over it. The fact that the denied women here in fact DO show measurably more depression five years later is actually quite a stark finding, bc hardly anything else tested in life shows up as making a difference years later.
And at any rate, who the hell are you Mr. "Libertarian" economist to decide for someone else, when it imposes zero cost or benefit on you whatsoever, what's bad enough for another adult person to be allowed to do? Especially if one creates a 65% chance of poverty, an astonishingly large figure for an economist who worships the $ above all else to dismiss. A 2% increase in tax rates or interest rates will send you into a hissy, but a 15% greater chance of poverty for a woman raising a child is apparently no big deal lol.
Last, the fact this study looked solely at women close to the cut-off is already a tiny sample and likely contains a huge overrepresentation of women who weren't sure or didn't feel that strongly or wavered. The ones who felt strongly about their life being ruined would have gotten the abortion pronto and not waited around several extra months.
These are all good points, but I’d like to highlight the last one because I totally missed it until you pointed it out.
The study looks at only women who seek abortions right around the cutoff time, which gives the study authors two groups of women where the main difference between the groups is that women in one group received an abortion from the clinic. The study used data from 30 different clinics, with a variety of cutoff dates ranging from 10 weeks to 29 weeks. This is better than having a single cutoff date, but more than half of the women who had abortions near the cutoff for the clinic they went to had the abortions at 21 weeks or later. The women denied abortions were, on average, later along in their pregnancies that the ones who received abortions. Since only 1.1% of abortions nationwide occur at 21 weeks or later, the study does not look at a representative sample of all women who seek abortions.
Yikes, I didn't even realize so many were at that late of a "cut off". Honestly I was assuming the cut-off was 12-15 weeks. 21 weeks is more than five months pregnant!
I am solidly pro-choice and feel zero moral feelings or qualms about embryos in a petri dish somewhere...but the idea of anyone getting an abortion at five or more months for anything but the most severe health reason is pretty sickening to me. That's very pregnant and quite far along in fetal development. Most abortions happen WAY before that, at a point where it would be impossible for any woman to even know for sure she was pregnant without a pregnancy test. So yes, for sure this is a completely unrepresentative sample and I can't imagine any woman who truly feels immediately that "her life will be ruined" is waiting around for *almost half a year* to actually go to the clinic...absent literal ability to get a day off work, transport, or ability to pay. I'm guessing probably a bunch of these women were in situations along the lines of initially intending to keep the baby and then something happened like the father never came around when she thought he'd get on board, or was and then changed his mind, or she caught him cheating or her or one of them lost a job or something similar, for the decision to be happening so late in the game. Definitely not reflective of the norm, which would be in the first trimester.
Yeah the guys sermonising on this thread probably do jackshit childcare so of course they think women are “hysterical” for thinking babies will ruin their lives. Because the dudes don’t have to stay up all night and destroy that circadian rhythm for years and change endless nappies and be chained to the home where most relationships are likely to get abusive where the financial independence option is taken away (see Zawn Villines surveys on this). Come back as a woman in your next life dudes and see how you like pumping out baby after baby with an emotionally incompetent man-baby who contributes nothing but feels entitled to on-demand coddling and f—-ing. M
The consequence of having a baby isn’t mere “inconvenience” - it is greater chances of being trapped in a relationship that has a high chance of becoming abusive because patriarchy
There's more than return to baseline in play. Only 4% of those denied reportedly regret it 5 years later. You can't really say the same about people who lose their legs. Sure, they return to a baseline of satisfaction. But they still regret losing their legs.
The "who are you to decide for someone else argument" neglects the interest of the unborn. Its conclusion is its premise. It's garbage that could justify the institution of slavery.
There’s a book called “Everybody Lies” that notes that many more people than we think regret having kids, it’s just too socially unacceptable to say it
Slaves are conscious beings that experience and suffer. I don't acknowledge that a being without the cortical level of development to have capacity for awareness or suffering knowing it's alive has "interests", these things are nothing alike. The parents may very well have very strong interests in it remaining alive to be able to develop those capacities, but if not, I see no interests in okay. That said I am talking about a 12 week or less fetus. Moral calculation is entirely different third trimester when there is very good reason to think the fetus has capacity to feel pain or some sensory experiences and consciousness. I think third trimester abortions for anything but the most severe health issue for the mother are grostesque and entirely different, in the same way that there's a profound difference between removing life support for a conscious or recovering person and one who is brain dead and will never recover.
Well, that's a very different argument. I don't like that one much either. It's permissible to pull the plug on someone with no potential future capacity for awareness. But it is consideration of their future prospects, not their present condition, that is relevant. If with normal care they would gain normal health, it is grotesque to withhold care from an unconscious patient just because they are unwanted. What is particularly grotesque isn't actually the killing; it's the unwanting.
I don't disagree with your sliding scale of moral calculation from conception to full gestation, with a pretty sharp boundary somewhere early. I would draw it closer to 6 weeks than 12 weeks, but that's a quibble. My point of emphasis is that even at 2 weeks abortion is homicide. The facts that the victim feels no pain, has no friends, doesn't look very human, and is (apparently) a burden, introduce a problematic moral dimension when used to explain homicide. I can agree on an emotional basis that these facts make the homicide less depraved. I can't agree that they make it completely non-culpable.
I worry that some of the self-reported responses from women who were denied abortions are heavily influenced by social desirability bias. Looking at your child and thinking "I wish this kid was aborted" sounds horrible, so we should expect that mothers wouldn't say it, even if it were true and even if they said so anonymously.
If we take social desirability bias seriously, we should heavily discount the finding marked as point #3 in the post. Or perhaps we should view the reported numbers as lower bounds for the true values? Either way, this slightly undercuts our confidence in Caplan's conclusions.
Isn't this equally true in reverse? It's much easier to tell yourself that you are happy you terminated your unborn child than to grapple with the idea that you regret it.
Yeah that's definitely true, but I'd guess that the stigma against saying/thinking "I wish my child wasn't born" is a lot stronger than the stigma against saying/thinking "I regret not having that child." Both groups of respondents are probably biased into affirming the choice they took, but I'd expect the effect to be stronger for the mothers than the non-mothers.
What an odd anti-choice thought experiment. It takes no cognizance of whose embryos they are and what they’re there. Are they the embryos of a couple desperately trying to have a baby, which have been preserved at great expense and are about to de destroyed in a tragic accident or are they unwanted embryos of the sort that get destroyed all the time with no one other than the most zealous anti-abortionists thinking twice about it?
Yes, when I think of how I would feel if I heard that an unimplanted embryo in a lab had spontaneously failed, an embryo that no one was hoping to implant and bring to term, I get a dial tone.
Nearly everyone (except for committed-to-blindness ideologues) holds both positions:
(A) Forcing women to carry babies to term is a lot like slavery, but not quite
(B) Killing embryos is a lot like killing babies, but not quite.
And that makes things hard.
The positions aren't the same on either side of the split, but they are clearly related on both sides.
Further
(C) The entirety of women's choice, women's economic decisionmaking, women's economic planning rests on their ability to decide on their reproduction. And humans like sex. And other birth control is at best moderate reliability. No abortion is an ENORMOUS attack on female autonomy.
(D) Almost the entire fertility crisis in the modern world comes down to people who used to have kids on accident, not doing so any more.
The effectiveness of condoms is like 99%, but here its only 80% because "average use" means *not using is many of the times you have sex*. Not the condoms fault.
For those too dumb to take a pill every day or put a rubber on each time there are IUD and implants and other stuff that is 99%+ effective even if your a retard.
Having a kid is a choice and there are no "unpreventable" pregnancies.
Only tangentially related, but I think people shouldn't worry about the "fertility crisis". At least not in the long term. That's the sort of thing that evolution is exceptionally good at correcting. In a few generations people will be having lots of kids again, only the driver will be that people want to have kids rather than just wanting to have sex.
I’d be totally indifferent as to whether one, or a dozen, human embryos, burn or not.
The sadness from a miscarriage need not have anything to do with any belief about the “moral worth” of the embryo. It has much more to do with the sentimental worth of it.
Your metric is impossible to discern a priori. There is no way to be certain whether “the baby would ruin your life” in actuality until you’ve reached the end of it, by which point it would all be very moot.
Lol, these mental exercises are ridiculous. An embryo is nothing without a mother. I couldn't care less about saving a frozen embryo (probably the property of some company), and of course i would save a pregnant women if I could.
The author drops a 5,000-word manifesto on the algebra of morality as it applies to embryos, babies, and young pregnant women seeking abortions.
And he does it like a man.
1. “Everyone Is Wrong Except Me” Character
The author opens with the humility of someone who believes he has finally arrived to set this all straight — once and for all. His moral algorithm, based on personal vibes and pivot tables, is as he announces original and what we have all been waiting for.
His structure:
• “Pro-life is wrong.”
• “Pro-choice is wrong.”
• “The only correct position is mine, conveniently located in the exact center of the universe.”
Philosophically, this is not synthesis.
It is self-placement disguised as neutrality.
2. Thought Experiments: The Fire-Drill Philosophy Hour
His moral reasoning rests on emergency fire hypotheticals:
“If a baby and some embryos were burning, what would you do?”
The gold standard, apparently, for normative ethics.
If fires determined moral worth, the ranking would be:
1. Puppies
2. The plant
3. Passport
5. Embryos (in his system, lovingly assigned a B+)
Emergency intuitions are not moral indicators.
3. The Turnaway Study
The study’s actual conclusion:
“Denying abortion causes harm and should not be used to limit access.”
What he leaves out:
• Over 50% of the “denied abortion” group disappeared from follow-up.
• Long-term convergence in psychological impact occurs across all human experiences.
• Repeated testing (repetitively over 5 years) flattens the score measures.
4. Masculine Hysteria
He mocks “hysteria” while constructing a 5,000-word moral flowchart ranking embryos.
This is not rational detachment.
This is male-coded emotional overdrive disguised as logic.
• administrative hysteria (charts, tables, moral scoring algorithms)
Attempts to quantify moral worth using numerical systems is, simply, an organizing system to calm masculine hysteria tendencies.
5. Picking Cherries.
He trusts:
• women denied abortion who later say “it worked out”
But dismisses:
• the 95% of women who had abortions and say “that was right for me”
This is not analysis.
This is cherry-picking with a moral agenda.
6. The Porn Analogy
Using his exact reasoning, one could argue:
• Deny porn
• They freak out
• Wait five years
• They adapt
• Conclude:
“Porn is morally wrong except in severe emotional crises.”
The flaw is revealed instantly:
private, embodied decisions are not governed by population-level adaptation curves.
7. Nietzsche and the Limits of External Moral Construction
Nietzsche warned:
“No one can build you the bridge on which you must cross the river of life.”
Yet the original essay attempts to build the one bridge for every reproductive life, using personal intuitions, questionable premises, and a thin empirical foundation as scaffolding.
This isn’t moral guidance.
It’s moral architecture imposed from the outside.
Conclusion
After peeling apart the thought experiments, misread evidence, and moral arithmetic, the insight is simple:
Allow people to make the decisions they will live with.
And in the end, his manifesto and this rebuttal are just intellectual kink — philosophical porn dressed up as moral clarity, exposing the authors far more than the issue.
I've heard you refer to the saving-embryos-in-a-fire thought experiment before but I don't think it is really that relevant. People have long had an intuition to save "women and children" before men in an emergency situation, but that doesn't mean men don't have the right to life even if it establishes a moral difference between them and women/children You yourself have written on how we should prioritize children more than elders during Covid, but obviously that doesn't mean you think children don't have the right to live. In short, the subject of relative moral values between different human lives doesn't have that much influence (imo) on the more fundamental and relevant question: At what point are we morally and legally obliged to protect the life of a human being?
I think you are straw-manning the deontological argument for pro-choice. Here I will try to make it, though since I'm not myself a deontologist, I might not be the best person to do so.
Either conception is rights-violating or it isn't. If conception is rights-violating, then the perpetrators (the parents, in this case) can make restitution by restoring the conditions before the rights-violation. Abortion returns the fetus to non-existence, thus fulfilling the requirement. So in this case, abortion is justified. If conception is not rights-violating, then the fetus has no moral claim on the woman's womb. The woman is thus free to eject it. In this case, she should use the least force possible and not unduly reduce the fetus' chance of surviving on their own, but she is not obligated to carry it to term.
Huh? You've leapt into the middle of what seems to be an utterly insane argument centered around the question of whether conceiving a fetus violates its right to not exist, as if this is just a normal part of discourse that everybody has close to the top of their mind. Who in the world has ever even discussed such a ridiculous argument?
It's actually pretty common, it's a variant of that whole fashionable animal rights argument that happened a couple months ago across social media, I forget the pet animal of the time, maybe shrimp. That thing about how are you saving infinite harm by preventing insects from reproducing as by definition a insect can only suffer hence by non existent ad infinitum generations forth, it's good to sterilize them.
This is a variant of that, i.e. "I never asked to be born and as life is pain, you harmed me via creation". It's stupid but it's a real, and sound, moral philosophy.
I meant sound as in a strictly defensible moral philosophy, not sound as in proper, real, or a world anyone would actually want to live in.
And I meant common as in "common enough" as in it's in the active narrative, not that a significant minority even holds that view. But it's not rare, you come across variants of it weekly, or at least I do, even in social conversations in real life.
I don't quite understand the question. Which particular point or points are you asking about? In terms of who, there are lots of deontologists in the world. I'm not saying they would all construct the argument exactly like this, but some would follow the general gist.
I just would never have thought of any single detail of your argument as in any way relevant to any deontological argument around abortion I would ever have thought up. The question of whether conceiving a fetus violates its right to not exist has simply never arisen in my mind and it is mentally painful to attempt to take it on arguendo. The deontological argument for pro-choice, in my mind, is simply that there is no rule against killing things that aren’t people when convenient.
If we had artificial wombs and there were zero physical imposition on the woman, I predict the abortion rate would barely budge.
What women really don’t want to do is raise the kid. Nor do they want the guilt of abandonment. They want it “to never have happened”, and if society will bless that decision they are cool with it.
The whole bodily autonomy thing is just an excuse.
I agree that most women don't abort their child because they don't want to shoulder the pregnancy, but because they don't want to raise the child, but that doesn't mean abortion rates wouldn't be very significantly impacted by the artificial womb.
Why? Because then the choice would be between "aborting the baby" and "transferring it to an artificial womb". It would make the fetus feel much more like a "real person" and make abortion look much closer to "murder" if they also had the choice to let it live outside their body. Many of them would choose the latter, and then when it comes to the aftermath of its "birth", many of them would choose raising the child over abandoning them.
I think current public opinion around this subject, which tends to oppose later term abortions but support earlier ones, probably maps a fetus' intermediate moral value acceptably. A blastocyst has zero intrinsic moral value, but slowly acquires some as it grows. Most people don't think it's a big deal when they discover the scientific fact that 70+% of embryos miscarry at very early stages of development. However, they do think its a big deal when a five or six-month old pregnancy miscarries.
In terms of legality, it might be workable to make an analogy to something else that people think has intermediate moral value: animals. Most people think it is morally wrong to have a pet put down for no good reason. I am not sure anyone thinks it should be illegal.
I'm pro-life but getting poors and dumbs to stop aborting is low on my priority list. Mainly I want smart people to have a pro-fertility attitude, and being pro-choice has a strong correlation with being anti-fertility amongst smart people.
I basically see pro-choice as dysgenic. Poors keep having kids anyway and don't abort enough to change that, but smarts end up not breeding because we have a culture that says kids make you so unhappy its fine to murder them.
It's the complete opposite: abortion patients are disproportionately* low-income, uneducated, and unmarried, conditions that correlate with low intelligence.
*and more disproportionately than the disproportionality of the fertility rates
Poor people, whether they support or get abortions or not, are still chugging away at replacement+ fertility despite abortion.
The entire fertility shortfall is amongst the high IQ. High IQ conservatives are close to replacement (2.1). High IQ liberals have a TFR of 0.6.
Poor people don't have ideologies or a worldview. They kind of just do stuff instinctually. Smart people change their behavior based on their believes. Abortion says "kids make your life miserable and it's OK to murder them for any reason." People who believe that have a lot fewer kids.
I think it's odd you treat all embryos as equal. Human intuition, and law, typically considers a 2 week embryo to have dramatically less moral weight than a 20 week fetus. Lack of acknowledgement of that felt like an oversight in this post
I took that as implicit. Since birth elevates the status from fetus to human, and at some point embryos are elevated to fetus status, it only stands to reason that the status changes gradually, not in huge discrete steps.
What not an absolute right at the start? The power to destroy implies ownership but then why do women alone own the child without recognition of the male co-pro creator?
And why can't "owners" of embryos enter into contracts to sell them at birth?
Doubtless there is a "market" for breeding female sex slaves - the Turkish sultans seemed to like doing so.
I'm going to call you Sweetie because I know it will angrify you.
Sweetie, I was answering a very narrow question. Your rant had nothing to do with what I said, nothing to do with what I was responding to. Railing and ranting does not change people's minds, and since you are more interested in ranting and railing than changing people's minds, you go right ahead ranting and railing and contributing zero to the conversation.
Sorry darling, it did.
Why is a right to exist accrued gradually? It's a 0,1 binary question.
Why does an hour or so going through the birth canal make such a difference?
Why and how does that make human what was not before?
The common law recognised inchoate rights as belonging to a child en ventre sa mere.
Why does the birth canal matter, good question. Why do we celebrate birth days instead of conception days, hmmmm?
Because we often don't know the day of conception - but mothers do bond with their babies.
“Why is a right to exist accrued gradually? It's a 0,1 binary question.”
That’s an assertion. What’s the support for it?
Logic?
Same
The women in this study were near the age cutoff, so we should assume they are
Anyway, we found that in practice the time issue hasn't had too much salience. Its more signaling then something people really believe in. I've yet to see a pro-choice person go "man, the fact that you allow this before X weeks means we are cool."
I don't think that's really true. Sure I think the very radical pro-life or pro-choice wouldn't recognise the differences but I think most people would see a vast difference between terminating an embryo in the first weeks where it's just a microscopic ball of cells vs a near-term fetus where it's recognisably a baby.
https://www.invitra.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fetal-development-at-week-10-670x285.png
This is what a baby looks like at three months, which is still considered the first trimester. It's hardly a "clump of cells".
A majority of Americans think it should be legal to kill that baby and basically every referendum since Dobbs has backed that up.
94% of abortions happen in the first trimester and here is their breakdown.
Within the first 6 weeks: 40.2%
Between 7 and 9 weeks: 38.4%
Between 10 and 13 weeks: 14.2%
An awful lot of those are happening to a fetus that clearly looks like a child.
I think your average person thinks "1st trimester is long enough I can get an abortion if I want one no problem." Fetal developments got nothing to do with it.
There are a lot of problems with this sort of analysis, but the most obvious is that we generally aren't permitted to violate someone's autonomy just because there's a good chance they won't ultimately regret it being violated. I mean, just think about immigration - I'm sure a bunch of people who are denied entry into the US ultimately end up feeling good about their lives in Mexico or Thailand or whatever, but that's not a good argument for arbitrarily preventing their freedom of movement, right? Or you could even imagine something much worse, like child marriage, or bride kidnapping, or whatever. Just because people who are denied some right ultimately adjust to the results of that denial can't possibly justify the denial itself!
Also, for the record, I'd just say that plenty of people *don't* think an intermediate fetus has inherent moral value, and actually think there's no coherent or plausible analysis that says they do. I personally can't understand how value could exist on a sliding scale like that at all, or how it could be the case that something with no conscious experiences or psychological properties of any kind could be harmed in any way at all, which is all that should matter here.
Who exactly are you attributing *no* conscious experiences or psychological properties of *any* kind to? Do you imagine these things suddenly snapping into place at the moment of birth, or is it that a fetus becomes inherently valuable at the moment it begins to have conscious experience in the womb, whenever that is, or that a newborn does at the moment its blooming, buzzing confusion begins to resolve into genuinely conscious experiences? By polling if nothing else, it seems that the vast majority of people think third-trimester fetuses have pretty similar moral worth to newborns, and that seems like by far the most obvious intuition.
I definitely agree there's currently ambiguity as to when exactly conscious experience arises in a newborn, but I think there's good reason to believe it takes place significantly after the vast majority of abortions ever take place. Certainly late-term abortions are a more complicated issue - but even there, there are actually perfectly plausible theories of consciousness that do have it arising at the moment of birth or perhaps during the process of labor.
I’m pretty sure you don’t actually want to decide whether to do something that might be murder on the basis of any theory of consciousness, let alone one of many “plausible” ones, though I surely believe you that arguments pinpointing consciousness to birth exist. Anyway, I’m not sure what you meant by “intermediate fetus”, then, but the main response is that most people who consider the unborn to be morally valuable before they’re conscious, or more often before they’re able to feel pain, use a moral system that focuses on the harm to the killer of the unborn, not to the unborn themselves. But you already know this so I assume you’re just going to say you think such a position is inherently incoherent, or something.
I relate to your desire to stay on the side of caution. But you have to base views on some type of theory of consciousness, otherwise, who's to say eating a potato isn't murder.
Easy, murder is not defined by consciousness, it’s defined by being a human.
I mean, we use theories of consciousness to determine whether a killing is immoral all the time - that's why, for example, we allow taking people in persistent vegetative states off life support. But even if you really want to err on the side of caution, you could be something close to absolutely sure that the majority of abortions take place before any mentation at all is even possible. And it seems to me that it just isn't possible to harm something in a morally relevant way if it has no psychological features whatsoever.
Society might support you taking a comatose person off life support. But it wouldn’t support you if the comatose person is guaranteed to wake in a few months.
But that's because a comatose person who will one day wake up still has a wide range of psychological features and dispositional desires, whereas a fetus has literally no psychological features or desires of any kind whatsoever. A comatose person is still "in there" in a meaningful way, while the fetus' mind has never existed at any point.
As I said, most people who consider the unborn to be morally valuable before they’re conscious use a moral system that focuses on the harm to the killer of the unborn, not to the unborn themselves. And the same group certainly doesn't use a theory of consciousness in deciding whether to take someone off life support.
What would the harm to the killer of the unborn be in this case?
If there's no law banning abortion, then there's no violation of autonomy here. He doesn't advocate for such bans in the post. He says he's unsure what to conclude about them.
I think you’re right that many people assign no moral value to a fetus. Many of those same people assign no moral value to human life in general, and if they do, they are very quick to revoke that moral value of the human in question is say, “too old” or “too fascist”.
This is why abortion was originally a pet issue of eugenicists and its modern advocates remain anti-human at root.
I personally assign great value to any conscious creature who is capable of suffering or flourishing - why else would anything matter?
Traditionally your family, village, nation, race, and God would matter to you more than a shrimp. But the modern mind is too advanced for such things.
I mean, I'm actually on the other side of the shrimp debate - I think it's likely they aren't conscious at all. But still, this isn't a meaningful response either way. Can you explain why I should care about my race or my nation above and beyond the wellbeing of the people inside it?
The same reason you should care about your family more than Somalians. Before the last 100 years, your neighbors would be your extended family, your town would be a collection of the same families for hundreds of years, and so on and so forth.
Everyone in the world who isn’t white understands this intuitively and would find your question bizarre. The Somalians in Minnesota who steal from the local government and send it overseas without remorse understand this. They know where their loyalties lie. Likewise their clan loyalties supersede national loyalties, so they failed to elect the mayoral candidate from the wrong clan. Concentric circles of concern are normal. This seems to have been bred out of white liberals. We’ll see how that plays out evolutionarily.
I guess I don't get it then - it sounds like you have contempt for these Somali immigrants, but aren't they just doing what you're suggesting by privileging their own national and racial compatriots over a basic commitment to equality and fairness for all? It's hard for me to understand why you would suggest we should have these kinds of loyalties if it also makes you angry when other people act on them. Do you think we should all adopt third-world values or not?
(I think this got misthreaded)
You are either completely misreading the post, or your analogy is terrible. Someone immigrating from Mexico to the US will, in fact, almost certainly get many multiples the lifetime income than if they stay in Mexico. The main point of this post is that people misjudge, ex ante, the harms that will befall them if they don’t get an abortion.
Let’s stipulate that borders and abortion bans are unjust restrictions on personal autonomy. (100% endorse.) if it turned out that moving to the US made immigrants’ lifetime earnings go up by a few hundred dollars, but they were leaving their families behind over dreams of earning 100x what they could make at home, it’s valid to point out that leaving makes less sense than the people think it does. A better analogy would be a ban on moving to Alaska to join the gold rush. Such a ban would be much less harmful than a ban on moving from Mexico to the US because the *actual* benefits of the former are much less aligned with expectations than the latter.
Well sure, my point isn't that denying women abortions has a roughly similar material impact as denying a Mexican citizen the right to immigrate. I'm just saying that, in general, it's not enough to justify a restriction on an essential right just because people self-report being okay with the life-altering consequences afterwards. Human beings are notoriously good at adapting to circumstances, but that doesn't mean anything you can properly adapt to ceases to be a harm.
Right… but I think the point I’m (still) not quite sure you’re addressing is that the ill effects people expect from having children *don’t happen*, not that they happen but people end up being okay with them, as you just said. My point isn’t that your analogy is bad because moving to the US has benefits of a certain size, but getting an abortion has benefits of a different size. It’s that people move to the US because they want to make more money than they can in their home countries, and that does in fact happen. This makes it fundamentally different from someone who gets an abortion under the mistaken belief that it is the only way to fend off financial ruin, when in fact empirical reality suggests that isn’t likely to happen.
Take another example. People who try but fail to commit suicide overwhelmingly end up being glad that they’re alive. Knowing that, if someone feels like they should commit suicide because they don’t think their life is worth living, they should revise their belief to recognize they are probably wrong and that their future self will be very much glad to be alive. I think that suicide is not only a tragedy, but also almost always a *mistake*.
In the end, I tend to agree that we shouldn’t ban either abortion or suicide on grounds of personal autonomy. But Bryan’s post is about something else entirely.
I see what you're saying, and to be clear, I agree it's perfectly reasonable to correct misapprehensions about objective material impacts, and to encourage women to avoid catastrophizing. But when it comes to more generalized claims about overall well-being and how that impacts the moral question, that's where I think the logic breaks down.
For example, Caplan cites this figure: "One week after abortion denial, 65% of participants reported still wishing they could have had the abortion; after the birth, only 12% of women reported that they still wished they could have the abortion. At the time of the child’s first birthday, 7% still wished they could have had an abortion. By five years, this went down to 4%." This is the sort of thing I'm talking about - although this might be valuable information for a woman who's conflicted about having an abortion, it's not really valuable when it comes to determining whether abortion restrictions are justified or even just determining the permissibility of abortion more broadly. To use the classic analogy, if you wake up attached to a comatose violinist, then whether or not you're allowed to unplug yourself shouldn't depend on a study that says people who stay plugged in are basically just as happy as the ones who unplug.
To your fire hypothetical: If you could save one 6 month old baby or 12 octogenarians which would you choose? I think most would choose the baby, does that mean the elderly only have intermediate worth?
I think adults have worth proportional to remaining life expectancy.
With children it's trickier.
I would expect most people to say that when choosing between babies and the elderly you should pick the baby. Even, possibly especially, the elderly would say that. Are you unfamiliar with the phrase "Women and children first?"
And when it came to that, the old choose a tiny increase in live over mass torment for children during COVID.
My point in this example is just to show that the fire hypothetical is not sufficient to demonstrate that embryos have intermediate moral worth.
I am and I generally respond post feminism I fully agree, they can eat their cake and die first like they wanted on the pyre of equality.
I agree with your generally gist though I'm utterly confident that most middle age intersectionality feminist would say kill the infant, especially if male.
when you exit the christian framework of “we’re all created in the image of God and our souls are equally valuable to Him” framework one is forced to reckon with the fact that not all humans are equally valuable. The law might still treat all of us the same, but society doesn’t. 6 month old babies have more moral worth than octogenarians. I can’t tell you how many octogenarians would have to be on the line for me to not choose the baby, but at least 12. Once babies are no longer in the womb, and survive to an age where they are almost guaranteed to live to adulthood, which is not a very high age these days (a healthy 6 momth old has an amazing chance these days. Coupled with the low birth rate, each baby is precious), they gain almost infinite value relative to everyone else. I mean ask new mothers. Many are treated like goddesses during pregnancy, because a healthy, wanted fetus has infinite value. An unwanted fwtus has no value. When the baby is dependent on the mother and no one else can take over care, she decides what social value it has. After it’s out, its value becomes infinite, because she is no longer an irreducibly important to the baby.
Many moms report this. Once the baby is out, they feel like chopped liver next to the tiny messiah. Even their own relatives basically fall to their knees before the baby and forget about the mom, because she’s gone back to the same moral status as everyone else.
While it is true that embryos have intermediate moral value between nothing (as in your thought experiment) and a baby, this does not really imply they have more moral value than a womans choice and freedom not to have a baby, which is a load-bearing assumption on your part.
Or put it another way you might prefer, if you asked someone wether they would spend 10$ to save an embryo, would you expect different answers? What about if you ask them to spend the average amount of time and money involved in child care to save the embryo? then your thought experiment will likely reveal most people, especially the pro choice demographic, would assign their time and money to have a higher value than an embryo.
Most people wouldn't regularly spend $10 to save a child dying from malaria in Africa. Unfortunately, people are selfish pieces of crap. That's a given for any moral debate, though. How many pro-choice people would regularly spend $10 to ensure other people could access abortion services in Africa? Basically none.
That would be a fun start up.
We all value those closer to us - genetically and geographically - more than those far away.
We have little choice. Suppose the planet Mars had 10,000 trillion people dying from malaria, who could be saved at $1 each. We're fine with that as long as we don't know about it.
Once we know, what's it worth to *us* to help them? Not 10,000 trillion dollars. That much money doesn't exist.
It's fine to value people closer to you, but if you value a $100 Christmas gift to a family member more than, say, 10 lives of strangers, that would typically suggest a defect of moral character.
Suppose you had to walk by and ignore these 10 strangers while they died, on your way to buy the Christmas gift, when you could have stopped and saved all 10 of their lives instead. Surely it would be monstrous to prioritize the gift, no? I imagine that someone being raped is much less bad than 10 people dying, but it would similarly be monstrous to walk by and ignore an ongoing rape just so that you could make it to the gift shop on time or whatever.
Now, I understand that what makes something monstrous is somewhat relative to what humans can reasonably be expected to do. We couldn't expect someone to give up everything to devote their life to saving 10 strangers (i.e. they wouldn't be monstrous to refuse), but people can surely be reasonably expected to do a lot more than they actually do, so it remains a major moral defect that they don't.
Dude you literally do that everything you buy a present at the mall instead of buying malaria nets for Africa.
Well, malaria nets take thousands of dollars on average to save a single life, but yes, that is correct. If you often have spare money and you buy yourself an extra special TV for thousands that you don't need and never donate money to help save lives, you are a selfish piece of crap. Again, if you were walking down to buy the TV and saw somebody dying who you could save, and you chose the TV over their life, that is a moral defect.
However, I don't think this applies to every purchase of thousands, since I don't think we can reasonably expect people to sacrifice every expensive thing that makes them happy to save other's lives. Imagine if, every time you went out to buy something nice for yourself, people were on the ground dying. You would not be monstrous for ignoring them some of the time to prioritize yourself and your family, but you would be if you ignored them almost all of the time, which is what we actually do.
Yes, it would say something worse about you if you allowed a person in front of you to die versus a person thousands of miles away dying when with a tiny bit of abstract thought you could easily save them. It says different things about who you are.
A lot of what we mean by morality is "based on your actions, CAN I TRUST YOU." I can trust someone that doesn't donate all their money to African kids. I can't trust someone allowing children to die in front of him (note, this is something people miss in the Bible, Jesus asks you to show mercy to people right in front of you but doesn't abstract to setting up an NGO).
But of course the philosophers are busy remaining us there is no difference.
I'm personally of a different camp. I don't think lives in Africa have value. In fact I think they have negative value. When you save a life in Africa, I think you are actively making the world a worse place.
But if we set aside the fact that I don't think all human lives are equal value, if those lives were equal value it would in fact be wrong. The thing is that "worthy lives" in a modern industrialized world rarely end up in situations where they can be saved on the cheap. If they were worthy, they wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.
Isn’t the moral situation different because the woman’s actions have created the embryo in question?
So what? Smokers actions create lung cancer, that does not mean lung tumour tissue has moral value.
Eventually you have to argue about the moral value of the embryo itself
This is the worst post Bryan has ever written. I have no idea how he turned an increase in poverty from 45-61%, which falls to "only" a 5% higher rate five years later, into a risk you can round down to zero and say isn't worth getting an abortion over. Bryan previously said, quite rightly, that men were behaving rationally if they refused to mentor women due to a 2% chance of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Why is this different?
https://www.econlib.org/fear-of-mentoring/
Coincidentally, a few days ago I wrote a post about this very subject, how being pro-choice falls naturally out of the principle that voluntary exchange is better than coercion, a principle conservatives intuitively understand when it comes to most of life.
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/why-abortion-prohibition-is-dysgenic
Well written and interesting. Worth noting too that in the Turnaway Study, most differences in economic outcomes resolved before the end of the study period.
For example, by the end of the study period both women who aborted and women denied abortion had similar household incomes, personal incomes, and levels of employment. At no point during the study were there statistically significant differences in terms of access to credit or ability to borrow money. Markers of financial distress (for example, debt sent to collection agencies or low credit scores) were worse initially for women denied abortion, but converged three years into the study.
Virtually all life experiences end up reverting to emotional baseline within a year. This is well studied. Losing the use of your legs or eyesight will make you upset for a bit and within two years you're fine. Same with winning the lottery. There is virtually nothing studied that shows long term emotional impact bc people adapt back to baseline. This is a horrible basis for moral decisions. By this reasoning I can chop off your legs or steal all your money, and no one should be particularly concerned bc within two years, you will have gotten over it. The fact that the denied women here in fact DO show measurably more depression five years later is actually quite a stark finding, bc hardly anything else tested in life shows up as making a difference years later.
And at any rate, who the hell are you Mr. "Libertarian" economist to decide for someone else, when it imposes zero cost or benefit on you whatsoever, what's bad enough for another adult person to be allowed to do? Especially if one creates a 65% chance of poverty, an astonishingly large figure for an economist who worships the $ above all else to dismiss. A 2% increase in tax rates or interest rates will send you into a hissy, but a 15% greater chance of poverty for a woman raising a child is apparently no big deal lol.
Last, the fact this study looked solely at women close to the cut-off is already a tiny sample and likely contains a huge overrepresentation of women who weren't sure or didn't feel that strongly or wavered. The ones who felt strongly about their life being ruined would have gotten the abortion pronto and not waited around several extra months.
These are all good points, but I’d like to highlight the last one because I totally missed it until you pointed it out.
The study looks at only women who seek abortions right around the cutoff time, which gives the study authors two groups of women where the main difference between the groups is that women in one group received an abortion from the clinic. The study used data from 30 different clinics, with a variety of cutoff dates ranging from 10 weeks to 29 weeks. This is better than having a single cutoff date, but more than half of the women who had abortions near the cutoff for the clinic they went to had the abortions at 21 weeks or later. The women denied abortions were, on average, later along in their pregnancies that the ones who received abortions. Since only 1.1% of abortions nationwide occur at 21 weeks or later, the study does not look at a representative sample of all women who seek abortions.
Yikes, I didn't even realize so many were at that late of a "cut off". Honestly I was assuming the cut-off was 12-15 weeks. 21 weeks is more than five months pregnant!
I am solidly pro-choice and feel zero moral feelings or qualms about embryos in a petri dish somewhere...but the idea of anyone getting an abortion at five or more months for anything but the most severe health reason is pretty sickening to me. That's very pregnant and quite far along in fetal development. Most abortions happen WAY before that, at a point where it would be impossible for any woman to even know for sure she was pregnant without a pregnancy test. So yes, for sure this is a completely unrepresentative sample and I can't imagine any woman who truly feels immediately that "her life will be ruined" is waiting around for *almost half a year* to actually go to the clinic...absent literal ability to get a day off work, transport, or ability to pay. I'm guessing probably a bunch of these women were in situations along the lines of initially intending to keep the baby and then something happened like the father never came around when she thought he'd get on board, or was and then changed his mind, or she caught him cheating or her or one of them lost a job or something similar, for the decision to be happening so late in the game. Definitely not reflective of the norm, which would be in the first trimester.
Yeah the guys sermonising on this thread probably do jackshit childcare so of course they think women are “hysterical” for thinking babies will ruin their lives. Because the dudes don’t have to stay up all night and destroy that circadian rhythm for years and change endless nappies and be chained to the home where most relationships are likely to get abusive where the financial independence option is taken away (see Zawn Villines surveys on this). Come back as a woman in your next life dudes and see how you like pumping out baby after baby with an emotionally incompetent man-baby who contributes nothing but feels entitled to on-demand coddling and f—-ing. M
The consequence of having a baby isn’t mere “inconvenience” - it is greater chances of being trapped in a relationship that has a high chance of becoming abusive because patriarchy
There's more than return to baseline in play. Only 4% of those denied reportedly regret it 5 years later. You can't really say the same about people who lose their legs. Sure, they return to a baseline of satisfaction. But they still regret losing their legs.
The "who are you to decide for someone else argument" neglects the interest of the unborn. Its conclusion is its premise. It's garbage that could justify the institution of slavery.
There’s a book called “Everybody Lies” that notes that many more people than we think regret having kids, it’s just too socially unacceptable to say it
Slaves are conscious beings that experience and suffer. I don't acknowledge that a being without the cortical level of development to have capacity for awareness or suffering knowing it's alive has "interests", these things are nothing alike. The parents may very well have very strong interests in it remaining alive to be able to develop those capacities, but if not, I see no interests in okay. That said I am talking about a 12 week or less fetus. Moral calculation is entirely different third trimester when there is very good reason to think the fetus has capacity to feel pain or some sensory experiences and consciousness. I think third trimester abortions for anything but the most severe health issue for the mother are grostesque and entirely different, in the same way that there's a profound difference between removing life support for a conscious or recovering person and one who is brain dead and will never recover.
Well, that's a very different argument. I don't like that one much either. It's permissible to pull the plug on someone with no potential future capacity for awareness. But it is consideration of their future prospects, not their present condition, that is relevant. If with normal care they would gain normal health, it is grotesque to withhold care from an unconscious patient just because they are unwanted. What is particularly grotesque isn't actually the killing; it's the unwanting.
I don't disagree with your sliding scale of moral calculation from conception to full gestation, with a pretty sharp boundary somewhere early. I would draw it closer to 6 weeks than 12 weeks, but that's a quibble. My point of emphasis is that even at 2 weeks abortion is homicide. The facts that the victim feels no pain, has no friends, doesn't look very human, and is (apparently) a burden, introduce a problematic moral dimension when used to explain homicide. I can agree on an emotional basis that these facts make the homicide less depraved. I can't agree that they make it completely non-culpable.
I worry that some of the self-reported responses from women who were denied abortions are heavily influenced by social desirability bias. Looking at your child and thinking "I wish this kid was aborted" sounds horrible, so we should expect that mothers wouldn't say it, even if it were true and even if they said so anonymously.
If we take social desirability bias seriously, we should heavily discount the finding marked as point #3 in the post. Or perhaps we should view the reported numbers as lower bounds for the true values? Either way, this slightly undercuts our confidence in Caplan's conclusions.
Isn't this equally true in reverse? It's much easier to tell yourself that you are happy you terminated your unborn child than to grapple with the idea that you regret it.
Yeah that's definitely true, but I'd guess that the stigma against saying/thinking "I wish my child wasn't born" is a lot stronger than the stigma against saying/thinking "I regret not having that child." Both groups of respondents are probably biased into affirming the choice they took, but I'd expect the effect to be stronger for the mothers than the non-mothers.
What an odd anti-choice thought experiment. It takes no cognizance of whose embryos they are and what they’re there. Are they the embryos of a couple desperately trying to have a baby, which have been preserved at great expense and are about to de destroyed in a tragic accident or are they unwanted embryos of the sort that get destroyed all the time with no one other than the most zealous anti-abortionists thinking twice about it?
Yes, when I think of how I would feel if I heard that an unimplanted embryo in a lab had spontaneously failed, an embryo that no one was hoping to implant and bring to term, I get a dial tone.
Nearly everyone (except for committed-to-blindness ideologues) holds both positions:
(A) Forcing women to carry babies to term is a lot like slavery, but not quite
(B) Killing embryos is a lot like killing babies, but not quite.
And that makes things hard.
The positions aren't the same on either side of the split, but they are clearly related on both sides.
Further
(C) The entirety of women's choice, women's economic decisionmaking, women's economic planning rests on their ability to decide on their reproduction. And humans like sex. And other birth control is at best moderate reliability. No abortion is an ENORMOUS attack on female autonomy.
(D) Almost the entire fertility crisis in the modern world comes down to people who used to have kids on accident, not doing so any more.
"Forcing women to carry babies to term is a lot like slavery, but not quite"
Artificial wombs will have no impact because its really about the costs of raising a kid and/or the guilt over abandonment.
"And other birth control is at best moderate reliability."
Birth control is 99.999% reliable.
https://americanpregnancy.org/unplanned-pregnancy/birth-control-pills-patches-and-devices/birth-control-failure/
"Failure Rate (average use)"
lol
The effectiveness of condoms is like 99%, but here its only 80% because "average use" means *not using is many of the times you have sex*. Not the condoms fault.
For those too dumb to take a pill every day or put a rubber on each time there are IUD and implants and other stuff that is 99%+ effective even if your a retard.
Having a kid is a choice and there are no "unpreventable" pregnancies.
odds of prevention success rise dramatically with good decision-making, agreed.
But I've never thought that plans should sit on the assumption of people usually making good decisions.
We don't get away with murder because we are bad decision makers.
If your too dumb to use a condom or get an IUD, consider abstinence.
Murder is fundamentally different from abortion in its disruptiveness to society, and it's also significantly less common.
Only tangentially related, but I think people shouldn't worry about the "fertility crisis". At least not in the long term. That's the sort of thing that evolution is exceptionally good at correcting. In a few generations people will be having lots of kids again, only the driver will be that people want to have kids rather than just wanting to have sex.
I’d be totally indifferent as to whether one, or a dozen, human embryos, burn or not.
The sadness from a miscarriage need not have anything to do with any belief about the “moral worth” of the embryo. It has much more to do with the sentimental worth of it.
Your metric is impossible to discern a priori. There is no way to be certain whether “the baby would ruin your life” in actuality until you’ve reached the end of it, by which point it would all be very moot.
Lol, these mental exercises are ridiculous. An embryo is nothing without a mother. I couldn't care less about saving a frozen embryo (probably the property of some company), and of course i would save a pregnant women if I could.
Abortion Mortality---And Philosophical Porn
The author drops a 5,000-word manifesto on the algebra of morality as it applies to embryos, babies, and young pregnant women seeking abortions.
And he does it like a man.
1. “Everyone Is Wrong Except Me” Character
The author opens with the humility of someone who believes he has finally arrived to set this all straight — once and for all. His moral algorithm, based on personal vibes and pivot tables, is as he announces original and what we have all been waiting for.
His structure:
• “Pro-life is wrong.”
• “Pro-choice is wrong.”
• “The only correct position is mine, conveniently located in the exact center of the universe.”
Philosophically, this is not synthesis.
It is self-placement disguised as neutrality.
2. Thought Experiments: The Fire-Drill Philosophy Hour
His moral reasoning rests on emergency fire hypotheticals:
“If a baby and some embryos were burning, what would you do?”
The gold standard, apparently, for normative ethics.
If fires determined moral worth, the ranking would be:
1. Puppies
2. The plant
3. Passport
5. Embryos (in his system, lovingly assigned a B+)
Emergency intuitions are not moral indicators.
3. The Turnaway Study
The study’s actual conclusion:
“Denying abortion causes harm and should not be used to limit access.”
What he leaves out:
• Over 50% of the “denied abortion” group disappeared from follow-up.
• Long-term convergence in psychological impact occurs across all human experiences.
• Repeated testing (repetitively over 5 years) flattens the score measures.
4. Masculine Hysteria
He mocks “hysteria” while constructing a 5,000-word moral flowchart ranking embryos.
This is not rational detachment.
This is male-coded emotional overdrive disguised as logic.
Two kinds of hysteria exist:
• expressive hysteria (crying, trembling, catastrophizing)
• administrative hysteria (charts, tables, moral scoring algorithms)
Attempts to quantify moral worth using numerical systems is, simply, an organizing system to calm masculine hysteria tendencies.
5. Picking Cherries.
He trusts:
• women denied abortion who later say “it worked out”
But dismisses:
• the 95% of women who had abortions and say “that was right for me”
This is not analysis.
This is cherry-picking with a moral agenda.
6. The Porn Analogy
Using his exact reasoning, one could argue:
• Deny porn
• They freak out
• Wait five years
• They adapt
• Conclude:
“Porn is morally wrong except in severe emotional crises.”
The flaw is revealed instantly:
private, embodied decisions are not governed by population-level adaptation curves.
7. Nietzsche and the Limits of External Moral Construction
Nietzsche warned:
“No one can build you the bridge on which you must cross the river of life.”
Yet the original essay attempts to build the one bridge for every reproductive life, using personal intuitions, questionable premises, and a thin empirical foundation as scaffolding.
This isn’t moral guidance.
It’s moral architecture imposed from the outside.
Conclusion
After peeling apart the thought experiments, misread evidence, and moral arithmetic, the insight is simple:
Allow people to make the decisions they will live with.
And in the end, his manifesto and this rebuttal are just intellectual kink — philosophical porn dressed up as moral clarity, exposing the authors far more than the issue.
I've heard you refer to the saving-embryos-in-a-fire thought experiment before but I don't think it is really that relevant. People have long had an intuition to save "women and children" before men in an emergency situation, but that doesn't mean men don't have the right to life even if it establishes a moral difference between them and women/children You yourself have written on how we should prioritize children more than elders during Covid, but obviously that doesn't mean you think children don't have the right to live. In short, the subject of relative moral values between different human lives doesn't have that much influence (imo) on the more fundamental and relevant question: At what point are we morally and legally obliged to protect the life of a human being?
Sorry that should read "...obviously that doesn't mean you think elders don't have the right to live."
I think you are straw-manning the deontological argument for pro-choice. Here I will try to make it, though since I'm not myself a deontologist, I might not be the best person to do so.
Either conception is rights-violating or it isn't. If conception is rights-violating, then the perpetrators (the parents, in this case) can make restitution by restoring the conditions before the rights-violation. Abortion returns the fetus to non-existence, thus fulfilling the requirement. So in this case, abortion is justified. If conception is not rights-violating, then the fetus has no moral claim on the woman's womb. The woman is thus free to eject it. In this case, she should use the least force possible and not unduly reduce the fetus' chance of surviving on their own, but she is not obligated to carry it to term.
Huh? You've leapt into the middle of what seems to be an utterly insane argument centered around the question of whether conceiving a fetus violates its right to not exist, as if this is just a normal part of discourse that everybody has close to the top of their mind. Who in the world has ever even discussed such a ridiculous argument?
It's actually pretty common, it's a variant of that whole fashionable animal rights argument that happened a couple months ago across social media, I forget the pet animal of the time, maybe shrimp. That thing about how are you saving infinite harm by preventing insects from reproducing as by definition a insect can only suffer hence by non existent ad infinitum generations forth, it's good to sterilize them.
This is a variant of that, i.e. "I never asked to be born and as life is pain, you harmed me via creation". It's stupid but it's a real, and sound, moral philosophy.
I’m not sure how it can be both stupid and sound, but regardless, I flatly deny that it’s at all common among reasonably normal people.
I meant sound as in a strictly defensible moral philosophy, not sound as in proper, real, or a world anyone would actually want to live in.
And I meant common as in "common enough" as in it's in the active narrative, not that a significant minority even holds that view. But it's not rare, you come across variants of it weekly, or at least I do, even in social conversations in real life.
I don't quite understand the question. Which particular point or points are you asking about? In terms of who, there are lots of deontologists in the world. I'm not saying they would all construct the argument exactly like this, but some would follow the general gist.
I just would never have thought of any single detail of your argument as in any way relevant to any deontological argument around abortion I would ever have thought up. The question of whether conceiving a fetus violates its right to not exist has simply never arisen in my mind and it is mentally painful to attempt to take it on arguendo. The deontological argument for pro-choice, in my mind, is simply that there is no rule against killing things that aren’t people when convenient.
If we had artificial wombs and there were zero physical imposition on the woman, I predict the abortion rate would barely budge.
What women really don’t want to do is raise the kid. Nor do they want the guilt of abandonment. They want it “to never have happened”, and if society will bless that decision they are cool with it.
The whole bodily autonomy thing is just an excuse.
I agree that most women don't abort their child because they don't want to shoulder the pregnancy, but because they don't want to raise the child, but that doesn't mean abortion rates wouldn't be very significantly impacted by the artificial womb.
Why? Because then the choice would be between "aborting the baby" and "transferring it to an artificial womb". It would make the fetus feel much more like a "real person" and make abortion look much closer to "murder" if they also had the choice to let it live outside their body. Many of them would choose the latter, and then when it comes to the aftermath of its "birth", many of them would choose raising the child over abandoning them.
I think current public opinion around this subject, which tends to oppose later term abortions but support earlier ones, probably maps a fetus' intermediate moral value acceptably. A blastocyst has zero intrinsic moral value, but slowly acquires some as it grows. Most people don't think it's a big deal when they discover the scientific fact that 70+% of embryos miscarry at very early stages of development. However, they do think its a big deal when a five or six-month old pregnancy miscarries.
In terms of legality, it might be workable to make an analogy to something else that people think has intermediate moral value: animals. Most people think it is morally wrong to have a pet put down for no good reason. I am not sure anyone thinks it should be illegal.
Current public opinion is that the time at which abortion should be denied is one minute after I happen to want one.
That's a win for you, no?
I'm pro-life but getting poors and dumbs to stop aborting is low on my priority list. Mainly I want smart people to have a pro-fertility attitude, and being pro-choice has a strong correlation with being anti-fertility amongst smart people.
I basically see pro-choice as dysgenic. Poors keep having kids anyway and don't abort enough to change that, but smarts end up not breeding because we have a culture that says kids make you so unhappy its fine to murder them.
It's the complete opposite: abortion patients are disproportionately* low-income, uneducated, and unmarried, conditions that correlate with low intelligence.
*and more disproportionately than the disproportionality of the fertility rates
Poor people, whether they support or get abortions or not, are still chugging away at replacement+ fertility despite abortion.
The entire fertility shortfall is amongst the high IQ. High IQ conservatives are close to replacement (2.1). High IQ liberals have a TFR of 0.6.
Poor people don't have ideologies or a worldview. They kind of just do stuff instinctually. Smart people change their behavior based on their believes. Abortion says "kids make your life miserable and it's OK to murder them for any reason." People who believe that have a lot fewer kids.