I think there is a theoretical consequence and a practical consequence of the change in the law.
If I am following your argument correctly, you are saying that a mother killing her foetus at 39 weeks is equivalent to killing her three-year-old child, and she should be charged with murder. A week or two earlier is just as bad. 24 weeks is OK, but you don't say exactly where we should draw the line, but the point where the baby pops out is not significant. With the decriminalisation, mothers will be allowed to commit murder right up to the hour before birth.
Practically, though, abortion after 20 weeks is extremely rare, legal or not. Less than 1% of abortions are performed after 20 weeks, and less than 0.1% after 24 weeks. Late abortions are extremely rare, and when they occur, it is because of an extreme circumstance.
This Guardian article says that only 4 women have been prosecuted for a late-term abortion since 1867, but the number of women charged in recent years has increased dramatically. 100 women have been prosecuted for an unexplained miscarriage in the last ten years, even when there is no evidence of deliberate abortion. This is what the decriminalisation is designed to address.
Late abortion will still be illegal under the new law, and it will still be extremely rare. I doubt that it is the threat of prosecution that makes mothers prefer an earlier abortion.
Thanks for this, and for summing my view up correctly!
So, I’m aware that abortions after 24 weeks are rare, and, as a result, not *that* many abortions are at stake. That was why I made my example one of decriminalising the killing of conjoined twins with the rarest blood type and hair colour. I also agree with the hardline pro-lifers that if the foetus has a right to life (which they think starts at conception, and I think starts when the mind emerges), the only extreme circumstance that makes abortion permissible is a threat to the mother’s life: as a result, it’ll still follow from my view that most abortions performed after 24 weeks are murder.
It’s true there’s been a recent spike in investigations — though there are problems to be had with the police handling of some of these cases (just as there are problems to be had with individual police handlings of other murder investigations, and investigations of other acts that uncontroversially should remain criminalised), the spike is due to the fact that the police are increasingly aware of abuses in the telemedicine “pills by post” telemedicine scheme. I’m sure it’s true that in some cases, police have investigated pregnancy losses when there is no evidence of a crime — but the National Police Chief’s Council’s official policy is to only investigate pregnancy losses if credible evidence suggests a crime. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68305991 I would love to see legislation holding police more harshly to that standard! But the leap from that problem to decriminalisation was made only because the moral status of the foetus wasn’t considered at all: if it had been, a more fine-grained policy would’ve been proposed, one that didn’t decriminalise the murder of an entire age bracket of people.
My expectation is that late-term pregnancy loss is appallingly traumatic, whether it's an abortion or a miscarriage. I would guess that someone choosing a late abortion is already in very difficult circumstances, and given the choice, would always choose an earlier abortion where possible.
I accept your argument that illegal late abortions will happen all the same, and that they will be a calamity, but now we have a trade-off: would the police be causing more distress by allowing these calamities to happen, or by pursuing innocent women who have had miscarriages? I'll submit that the trauma caused by the police pursuing the women who abort causes more distress than it prevents.
If it is important to us to prevent late abortions, it would be better to pursue the "telemedicine" abortion providers. It would be more practical and less injurious than pursuing innocent women and the small number of women who have broken the law.
In England and Wales, 10-year-olds can be criminally convicted of murder. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's safe to say that being investigated for murder by the police at the age of 10 would be unbelievably traumatic. Still, I wouldn't be happy with decriminalising murder for 10-year-olds. I agree that allowing murders to happen when the victims are unborn foetuses causes less distress than criminalising; but I'm not a hedonist, and I think the law should care about justice, not just distress. (I agree police should pursue telemedicine providers, but in practice that's not going to happen effectively unless the police can at least question the women who made use of those providers - otherwise, what evidence do the police have to go on? It might not be literally nothing in all cases, but presumably it would be literally nothing in most cases.)
I suspect that one of us is more of a consequentialist than the other…
The ten-year-old murderer is more likely to be dangerous to society and more likely to repeat their crime. If the police are relatively sure that they have the right perp, I am quite comfortable with the murderer experiencing some trauma. What's the ratio of guilty to innocent suspects in murder cases? I'd guess it's a lot lower than in abortion cases.
What would my position be if we could be sure of justice? I don't know. I do believe, though, that the woman experiencing an abortion is already suffering, and given the opportunity, would prefer an earlier abortion regardless of what the law says. I don't think this is true of your ten-year-old murderer.
This doesn't really seem to address the meat of ragged clown's point. The fact that there are so many investigations but the number of prosecutions hasn't increased seems to indicate that this is largely a moral panic. Women aren't actually aborting late term at greater rates. The change in law is an attempt at quelling the moral panic.
Presumably what’s happening is this: the police suspect that more women are self-inducing late abortions, and suspect that these numbers are increasing. (Numbers that are hard to record, since women won’t self-report their illegal abortions.) However, proving that this has happened in any given case is really difficult, but there usually isn’t much to go on. The use of abortion pills makes the crime very easy to get away with. As a result, there has been an increased number of investigations, to respond to the problem the police believe is out there, but very few convictions, since it’s really hard to prove that a miscarriage was self-induced beyond a reasonable doubt. I think this is a more likely explanation than a moral panic, partly because there is no moral panic in the UK about abortion or abortion telemedicine more generally — like most European countries, abortion is not on the cultural agenda, and is very rarely talked about. Given this, it would be bizarre if an abortion-related moral panic — untethered from any reasonable suspicions — had suddenly taken ahold of the police.
Surely the fact it’s historically been illegal is the main reason for the fact it’s rare.
Where there is a legal limit in place, a rational person will bring forward the decision to terminate a pregnancy where the cost of failing to do so is gaol. Where there is no longer any cost associated with making a decision in week 28, 34 or 39, it’s reasonable to assume some women will postpone the decision.
Even with the new law, abortion after 24 week is still illegal and clinicians will still be punished for performing them. A women who is making a rational choice will choose to have her abortion before 24 weeks when she can get the help she needs.
There will still be desperate women who choose to self-administer an abortion after 24 weeks, but I expect the line drawn by the law will be less significant to her.
Ok… so to be clear (i’m not British, and not fully across it), you will not be punished for getting a late-term abortion, but the individual who performs it will?
I just find it baffling when people confidently assert that "there is no morally relevant difference between killing a toddler and killing a foetus in the final months of pregnancy." How could anyone assume that so quickly, given that the latter uniquely intersects both with a wide range of concerns around bodily autonomy *and* with complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former? (And that isn't even getting into the massive difference between motivations and other external circumstances that are generally involved.) Even if you ultimately come to the conclusion that all those issues end up not mattering, it's totally unjustified to declare them to be unimportant from the start. And while I'm certainly not the one to scold anyone on this issue, I do think glib statements like that are part of the reason people see the pro-life position as intertwined with misogyny - it should be shocking and offensive to women, and to anyone who identifies with feminism, that we would have a culture where people think it obviously doesn't matter whether or not someone or something is literally inside a woman's body, relying on her for continued sustenance, and subjecting her to an extremely painful and traumatic harm.
“How could anyone assume that so quickly, given that the latter uniquely intersects both with a wide range of concerns around bodily autonomy *and* with complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former?”
I think there’s a slip from the quickness with which I wrote that there’s no relevant difference to the quickness with which I assumed it; I have read the standard pro-infanticide texts! I originally had a footnote addressing a very recent symmetry breaker between infanticide and late abortion (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27197805), but I cut it because it was like 5 miles long
I'm not sure what you mean by "the standard pro-infanticide texts" - my claim is that there are many extremely plausible reasons to believe the comparison between a late-term fetus and a toddler is unjustified, not that they comparison is justified but that the tension should be resolved in favor of saying it's okay to kill both!
Ah, lol, sorry — my mind must’ve melted halfway through typing. (I must have been half tracking, because the essay I was originally going to include a response to was a defence of the asymmetry between late abortion and infanticide, not a defence of infanticide.)
I don’t believe there are any relevant symmetry breakers: I think bodily autonomy matters, but I don’t think Thomson-style considerations apply to post-viability foetuses, and I don’t think the conditions necessary for justified defensive killing are met in non-lethal pregnancies. You write about “complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former”; I take is there is empirical dispute about (a) when it is first like something to be a human, and (b) when there is first higher-order thought. But I take it that there is no disagreement of the form “sone say there is a conscious property that the foetus only gains at the moment of birth, while others deny this”. But that’s the sort of the dispute there’d need to be for a complex controversy in the science of foetal consciousness to challenge the moral symmetry between late foetuses and newborns. There are other putative asymmetries between late foetuses and newborns having to do with relational properties (parental, conventional, mereological, etc.) that a foetus gains of loses after birth; I’m happy to say why I don’t think they work either, but I think they’re either implausible on independent grounds or end up implying that infanticide is permissible in a subset of cases where it clearly isn’t.
That’s part of the worry (if the unconscious fat man is falling down the well and you’re at the bottom, I’m not sure you can vaporise him with your ray gun); but also, in non-lethal pregnancies, I don’t think it’s permissible to deliberately defensively kill the foetus, on the grounds that, in roughly analogous cases, it doesn’t seem okay (to me) to use lethal defensive force. Suppose a mad scientist has kidnapped you and grown me out of your body (such that we’re conjoined twins), and gives you two options: (1) cut my head off, (2) wait nine months and then undergo a v. painful (but safe and temporary) separation operation. Seems to me you can’t do (1).
I have no comment on the misogyny angle, but one obvious moral difference is that toddlers clearly have self-awareness (as opposed to mere sentience), a concept of their own persistence through time into the future, and a preference to continue doing so, whereas fetuses probably have none of those things. If you kill a toddler, you are violating that strong preference; if you kill a fetus, you probably aren't.
Although this is massively controversial, I don't think it's wrong in principle to kill a newborn who is also probably lacking any kind of cognitively high-level desire to continue existing tomorrow; but we need some kind of Schelling point at which we legally treat it as cold-blooded murder even if there are moral false positives, and birth seems like a pretty decent one.
Most pro-lifers agree that abortion is okay in cases where the mother’s life is at risk — I agree with this. But “at risk” is vague. Every act — including raising a toddler — carries some non-zero mortality risk. Maternal mortality rates differ from country to country, but in the UK, the maternal mortality rate is around 0.013%. Is that risk high enough to justify lethal defensive force against a person, assuming the foetus is a person? I think this where toddler-comparisons become really useful in thinking about the question! Suppose you have a toddler, and, at time t, the toddler has a 0.013% chance of causing your death. Are you justified in using lethal defensive force against it at before t? I’m inclined to say no. (Without comparing the pregnancy case to a toddler case, this might not have been as clear — this is why I think the analogy is useful!)
thank you for the thoughtful reply. do you have any thoughts on how to legislate acceptable risk? thinking about how abortion restrictions are playing out in red states, where abortion is permissible when the woman's life is at risk but some doctors are still reluctant to act because of this vagueness.
From the public messaging around the relevant amendment, it just doesn't seem like they've considered the interests of a late stage foetus at all. The animating drive behind this is a desire to prevent women who lose their pregnancy late from being investigated by the police. (Though the recent spike in investigations is because of another liberalising measure – on demand abortion pills through the post.) They just simply don't care about anything else.
Why are you not pro-life across the board given the moral risk argument? Is it just that you find it exceedingly unlikely that an early foetus is a moral patient?
Yeah, I’m just way more confident about early abortion—my credence in zygotes having moral status roughly equals my credence in unfertilised eggs having moral status
@Rob Kurzban has shown pretty definitively that pro-life belief has nothing to do with life but rather the desire to add costs to short-term mating. The key is to look at predictive correlates. The best predictor of being anti-abortion are preference for long-term vs short term mating variables - number of premarital sex partners both desired and actual, moral beliefs about premarital sex, etc. That is, anti-abortion belief is predicted by your likelihood of needing one and your cultural self-interest in adding costs to short-term mating to make the tradeoff structure better for long term mating. https://pleeps.org/2015/01/15/abortion-and-self-interest/
Didn't like, too much strawman, contrived dichotamy reality role-playing and category error. Author clearly read Freakonomics at the chapter pick 'n' mix bookshop. Won't be subscribing.
Both Sides Brigade already answered the "morally equivalent" part better than I would. The other part of your argument is that something this bad should not be decriminalised, i.e that morals should translate to law.
But criminalising and prosecuting a new category of actions has its own downsides. The role of the legislative is not to prohibit everything immoral, but to weigh costs (both moral and economic) vs gains each time. Costs include: 1) a more complicated, less trustful code that everyone has to live through; 2) the moral cost of the inevitable misfires, where the law operates on bad information and condemns or harasses the innocent, or comes upon a corner case that legislators didn't consider and doesn't match common intuition; 3) the actual economic cost of investigating and policing, and 4) the opportunity cost where those resources could have been used to prevent more pressing evils.
In this case, the poster child for this legislative change was a lady who went through the system and thought her fetus was early enough, and so did the doctors. Plus the entire thing happened at a time of emergency (Covid). This is an obvious misfire.
The other kind of case are women far enough outside of the system to get unlicensed abortions or try to do it themselves, at a considerable risk to their lives. This is a rare occurrence, and is surely better handled by cracking down on the unlicensed providers, and doing social outreach to get those ladies culturally integrated enough not to do that.
I think there is a theoretical consequence and a practical consequence of the change in the law.
If I am following your argument correctly, you are saying that a mother killing her foetus at 39 weeks is equivalent to killing her three-year-old child, and she should be charged with murder. A week or two earlier is just as bad. 24 weeks is OK, but you don't say exactly where we should draw the line, but the point where the baby pops out is not significant. With the decriminalisation, mothers will be allowed to commit murder right up to the hour before birth.
Practically, though, abortion after 20 weeks is extremely rare, legal or not. Less than 1% of abortions are performed after 20 weeks, and less than 0.1% after 24 weeks. Late abortions are extremely rare, and when they occur, it is because of an extreme circumstance.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/abortion-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2021/abortion-statistics-england-and-wales-2021
This Guardian article says that only 4 women have been prosecuted for a late-term abortion since 1867, but the number of women charged in recent years has increased dramatically. 100 women have been prosecuted for an unexplained miscarriage in the last ten years, even when there is no evidence of deliberate abortion. This is what the decriminalisation is designed to address.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/16/abortion-law-injustice-mps-can-act-to-revoke-legislation-this-week
Late abortion will still be illegal under the new law, and it will still be extremely rare. I doubt that it is the threat of prosecution that makes mothers prefer an earlier abortion.
This argument seems quite convincing to me and seems to reveal the flaws in using a philosophical approach, as Amos does, to evaluate public policy.
See my reply!
Thanks for this, and for summing my view up correctly!
So, I’m aware that abortions after 24 weeks are rare, and, as a result, not *that* many abortions are at stake. That was why I made my example one of decriminalising the killing of conjoined twins with the rarest blood type and hair colour. I also agree with the hardline pro-lifers that if the foetus has a right to life (which they think starts at conception, and I think starts when the mind emerges), the only extreme circumstance that makes abortion permissible is a threat to the mother’s life: as a result, it’ll still follow from my view that most abortions performed after 24 weeks are murder.
It’s true there’s been a recent spike in investigations — though there are problems to be had with the police handling of some of these cases (just as there are problems to be had with individual police handlings of other murder investigations, and investigations of other acts that uncontroversially should remain criminalised), the spike is due to the fact that the police are increasingly aware of abuses in the telemedicine “pills by post” telemedicine scheme. I’m sure it’s true that in some cases, police have investigated pregnancy losses when there is no evidence of a crime — but the National Police Chief’s Council’s official policy is to only investigate pregnancy losses if credible evidence suggests a crime. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68305991 I would love to see legislation holding police more harshly to that standard! But the leap from that problem to decriminalisation was made only because the moral status of the foetus wasn’t considered at all: if it had been, a more fine-grained policy would’ve been proposed, one that didn’t decriminalise the murder of an entire age bracket of people.
My expectation is that late-term pregnancy loss is appallingly traumatic, whether it's an abortion or a miscarriage. I would guess that someone choosing a late abortion is already in very difficult circumstances, and given the choice, would always choose an earlier abortion where possible.
I accept your argument that illegal late abortions will happen all the same, and that they will be a calamity, but now we have a trade-off: would the police be causing more distress by allowing these calamities to happen, or by pursuing innocent women who have had miscarriages? I'll submit that the trauma caused by the police pursuing the women who abort causes more distress than it prevents.
If it is important to us to prevent late abortions, it would be better to pursue the "telemedicine" abortion providers. It would be more practical and less injurious than pursuing innocent women and the small number of women who have broken the law.
In England and Wales, 10-year-olds can be criminally convicted of murder. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's safe to say that being investigated for murder by the police at the age of 10 would be unbelievably traumatic. Still, I wouldn't be happy with decriminalising murder for 10-year-olds. I agree that allowing murders to happen when the victims are unborn foetuses causes less distress than criminalising; but I'm not a hedonist, and I think the law should care about justice, not just distress. (I agree police should pursue telemedicine providers, but in practice that's not going to happen effectively unless the police can at least question the women who made use of those providers - otherwise, what evidence do the police have to go on? It might not be literally nothing in all cases, but presumably it would be literally nothing in most cases.)
I suspect that one of us is more of a consequentialist than the other…
The ten-year-old murderer is more likely to be dangerous to society and more likely to repeat their crime. If the police are relatively sure that they have the right perp, I am quite comfortable with the murderer experiencing some trauma. What's the ratio of guilty to innocent suspects in murder cases? I'd guess it's a lot lower than in abortion cases.
What would my position be if we could be sure of justice? I don't know. I do believe, though, that the woman experiencing an abortion is already suffering, and given the opportunity, would prefer an earlier abortion regardless of what the law says. I don't think this is true of your ten-year-old murderer.
This doesn't really seem to address the meat of ragged clown's point. The fact that there are so many investigations but the number of prosecutions hasn't increased seems to indicate that this is largely a moral panic. Women aren't actually aborting late term at greater rates. The change in law is an attempt at quelling the moral panic.
Presumably what’s happening is this: the police suspect that more women are self-inducing late abortions, and suspect that these numbers are increasing. (Numbers that are hard to record, since women won’t self-report their illegal abortions.) However, proving that this has happened in any given case is really difficult, but there usually isn’t much to go on. The use of abortion pills makes the crime very easy to get away with. As a result, there has been an increased number of investigations, to respond to the problem the police believe is out there, but very few convictions, since it’s really hard to prove that a miscarriage was self-induced beyond a reasonable doubt. I think this is a more likely explanation than a moral panic, partly because there is no moral panic in the UK about abortion or abortion telemedicine more generally — like most European countries, abortion is not on the cultural agenda, and is very rarely talked about. Given this, it would be bizarre if an abortion-related moral panic — untethered from any reasonable suspicions — had suddenly taken ahold of the police.
Surely the fact it’s historically been illegal is the main reason for the fact it’s rare.
Where there is a legal limit in place, a rational person will bring forward the decision to terminate a pregnancy where the cost of failing to do so is gaol. Where there is no longer any cost associated with making a decision in week 28, 34 or 39, it’s reasonable to assume some women will postpone the decision.
Even with the new law, abortion after 24 week is still illegal and clinicians will still be punished for performing them. A women who is making a rational choice will choose to have her abortion before 24 weeks when she can get the help she needs.
There will still be desperate women who choose to self-administer an abortion after 24 weeks, but I expect the line drawn by the law will be less significant to her.
Ok… so to be clear (i’m not British, and not fully across it), you will not be punished for getting a late-term abortion, but the individual who performs it will?
If this is the case, i see your point!
That’s more or less right.
I just find it baffling when people confidently assert that "there is no morally relevant difference between killing a toddler and killing a foetus in the final months of pregnancy." How could anyone assume that so quickly, given that the latter uniquely intersects both with a wide range of concerns around bodily autonomy *and* with complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former? (And that isn't even getting into the massive difference between motivations and other external circumstances that are generally involved.) Even if you ultimately come to the conclusion that all those issues end up not mattering, it's totally unjustified to declare them to be unimportant from the start. And while I'm certainly not the one to scold anyone on this issue, I do think glib statements like that are part of the reason people see the pro-life position as intertwined with misogyny - it should be shocking and offensive to women, and to anyone who identifies with feminism, that we would have a culture where people think it obviously doesn't matter whether or not someone or something is literally inside a woman's body, relying on her for continued sustenance, and subjecting her to an extremely painful and traumatic harm.
“How could anyone assume that so quickly, given that the latter uniquely intersects both with a wide range of concerns around bodily autonomy *and* with complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former?”
I think there’s a slip from the quickness with which I wrote that there’s no relevant difference to the quickness with which I assumed it; I have read the standard pro-infanticide texts! I originally had a footnote addressing a very recent symmetry breaker between infanticide and late abortion (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27197805), but I cut it because it was like 5 miles long
I'm not sure what you mean by "the standard pro-infanticide texts" - my claim is that there are many extremely plausible reasons to believe the comparison between a late-term fetus and a toddler is unjustified, not that they comparison is justified but that the tension should be resolved in favor of saying it's okay to kill both!
Ah, lol, sorry — my mind must’ve melted halfway through typing. (I must have been half tracking, because the essay I was originally going to include a response to was a defence of the asymmetry between late abortion and infanticide, not a defence of infanticide.)
I don’t believe there are any relevant symmetry breakers: I think bodily autonomy matters, but I don’t think Thomson-style considerations apply to post-viability foetuses, and I don’t think the conditions necessary for justified defensive killing are met in non-lethal pregnancies. You write about “complex and disputed scientific evidence regarding consciousness, neither of which are present with the former”; I take is there is empirical dispute about (a) when it is first like something to be a human, and (b) when there is first higher-order thought. But I take it that there is no disagreement of the form “sone say there is a conscious property that the foetus only gains at the moment of birth, while others deny this”. But that’s the sort of the dispute there’d need to be for a complex controversy in the science of foetal consciousness to challenge the moral symmetry between late foetuses and newborns. There are other putative asymmetries between late foetuses and newborns having to do with relational properties (parental, conventional, mereological, etc.) that a foetus gains of loses after birth; I’m happy to say why I don’t think they work either, but I think they’re either implausible on independent grounds or end up implying that infanticide is permissible in a subset of cases where it clearly isn’t.
>I don’t think the conditions necessary for justified defensive killing are met in non-lethal pregnancies.
Does this have anything to do with the *passivity* of a foetus in-utero? Greasley mentioned something like this in her book.
>(parental, conventional, mereological, etc.)
What would you say about each of those?
That’s part of the worry (if the unconscious fat man is falling down the well and you’re at the bottom, I’m not sure you can vaporise him with your ray gun); but also, in non-lethal pregnancies, I don’t think it’s permissible to deliberately defensively kill the foetus, on the grounds that, in roughly analogous cases, it doesn’t seem okay (to me) to use lethal defensive force. Suppose a mad scientist has kidnapped you and grown me out of your body (such that we’re conjoined twins), and gives you two options: (1) cut my head off, (2) wait nine months and then undergo a v. painful (but safe and temporary) separation operation. Seems to me you can’t do (1).
That Singh paper made my eyes bleed when I first read it.
The bit at the end about orphan children nearly killed me
I have no comment on the misogyny angle, but one obvious moral difference is that toddlers clearly have self-awareness (as opposed to mere sentience), a concept of their own persistence through time into the future, and a preference to continue doing so, whereas fetuses probably have none of those things. If you kill a toddler, you are violating that strong preference; if you kill a fetus, you probably aren't.
Although this is massively controversial, I don't think it's wrong in principle to kill a newborn who is also probably lacking any kind of cognitively high-level desire to continue existing tomorrow; but we need some kind of Schelling point at which we legally treat it as cold-blooded murder even if there are moral false positives, and birth seems like a pretty decent one.
We need to criminalize spelling “decriminalize” with an s
We made you
is it useful to compare killing a toddler and killing a fetus, given that the act of birth is life-threatening?
Most pro-lifers agree that abortion is okay in cases where the mother’s life is at risk — I agree with this. But “at risk” is vague. Every act — including raising a toddler — carries some non-zero mortality risk. Maternal mortality rates differ from country to country, but in the UK, the maternal mortality rate is around 0.013%. Is that risk high enough to justify lethal defensive force against a person, assuming the foetus is a person? I think this where toddler-comparisons become really useful in thinking about the question! Suppose you have a toddler, and, at time t, the toddler has a 0.013% chance of causing your death. Are you justified in using lethal defensive force against it at before t? I’m inclined to say no. (Without comparing the pregnancy case to a toddler case, this might not have been as clear — this is why I think the analogy is useful!)
thank you for the thoughtful reply. do you have any thoughts on how to legislate acceptable risk? thinking about how abortion restrictions are playing out in red states, where abortion is permissible when the woman's life is at risk but some doctors are still reluctant to act because of this vagueness.
Not really unforch. I sometimes read about some of these red state laws and they seem so incompetent, but I don’t know what I’d do as a legislator
What convinced you that a third trimester foetus is conscious?
Higher-order evidence: I take that to be the consensus view among pain scientists and philosophers who have studied foetal consciousness. https://www.rcog.org.uk/guidance/browse-all-guidance/other-guidelines-and-reports/fetal-awareness-updated-review-of-research-and-recommendations-for-practice/; https://academic.oup.com/book/57949/chapter/475704570
From the public messaging around the relevant amendment, it just doesn't seem like they've considered the interests of a late stage foetus at all. The animating drive behind this is a desire to prevent women who lose their pregnancy late from being investigated by the police. (Though the recent spike in investigations is because of another liberalising measure – on demand abortion pills through the post.) They just simply don't care about anything else.
Why are you not pro-life across the board given the moral risk argument? Is it just that you find it exceedingly unlikely that an early foetus is a moral patient?
Yeah, I’m just way more confident about early abortion—my credence in zygotes having moral status roughly equals my credence in unfertilised eggs having moral status
@Rob Kurzban has shown pretty definitively that pro-life belief has nothing to do with life but rather the desire to add costs to short-term mating. The key is to look at predictive correlates. The best predictor of being anti-abortion are preference for long-term vs short term mating variables - number of premarital sex partners both desired and actual, moral beliefs about premarital sex, etc. That is, anti-abortion belief is predicted by your likelihood of needing one and your cultural self-interest in adding costs to short-term mating to make the tradeoff structure better for long term mating. https://pleeps.org/2015/01/15/abortion-and-self-interest/
Didn't like, too much strawman, contrived dichotamy reality role-playing and category error. Author clearly read Freakonomics at the chapter pick 'n' mix bookshop. Won't be subscribing.
Both Sides Brigade already answered the "morally equivalent" part better than I would. The other part of your argument is that something this bad should not be decriminalised, i.e that morals should translate to law.
But criminalising and prosecuting a new category of actions has its own downsides. The role of the legislative is not to prohibit everything immoral, but to weigh costs (both moral and economic) vs gains each time. Costs include: 1) a more complicated, less trustful code that everyone has to live through; 2) the moral cost of the inevitable misfires, where the law operates on bad information and condemns or harasses the innocent, or comes upon a corner case that legislators didn't consider and doesn't match common intuition; 3) the actual economic cost of investigating and policing, and 4) the opportunity cost where those resources could have been used to prevent more pressing evils.
In this case, the poster child for this legislative change was a lady who went through the system and thought her fetus was early enough, and so did the doctors. Plus the entire thing happened at a time of emergency (Covid). This is an obvious misfire.
The other kind of case are women far enough outside of the system to get unlicensed abortions or try to do it themselves, at a considerable risk to their lives. This is a rare occurrence, and is surely better handled by cracking down on the unlicensed providers, and doing social outreach to get those ladies culturally integrated enough not to do that.