How to Argue About Abortion

Seeing the arguments of today in the light of the abortion debate's long history

The leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court case is still reverberating through all parts of the American political system. In last week’s post, I answered some speculative questions and warned in broad strokes that the upcoming period will be quite turbulent no matter what happens.

One consequence of a possible overturning of 1973’s Roe v. Wade is that the laws governing abortion will return to where they are throughout most of the free world: electoral politics. Of course, that’s a big reason why this upcoming period will be turbulent — especially on the right, the judicial system acquitted itself much more honorably in the Trump years than the politicians. But it also means that voters’ views will much more directly affect the outcome in many states throughout the country for the first time.

As has already started happening, voters should and will debate the subject. Like I wrote last time, I’m not going to resolve the debate in a single blog post. Instead, I’d like to help set the stage for those debates, starting with a bit of the history and identifying the core intuition at the root of many of the common modes of thinking on the matter.

About half of this post is drawn from a (virtual) talk I gave in the fall of 2020 as a part of a class on politics that I helped lead at my church in Boston.

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We’ve been arguing about abortion basically as long as we’ve been arguing. “When does a human become a human?” is one of the simplest possible big questions that everyone has tried to answer.

In broad strokes, the major Greek philosophies came down in different places on that question. The Pythagoreans, with their quasi-mathematical heuristic of simplicity, reasoned that it must be at conception. We see a lot of that same thinking today, updated with references to later discoveries like DNA.

Meanwhile, the Stoics, with their rejection of emotive reasoning, considered all stages of human development prior to birth to be plant-like, lower even than animals. We see this attitude reflected in language like “clump of cells” or analogies to tumors today.

We might ask what the doctors thought, but the answer is a bit less interesting — surgical abortion was forbidden by the Hippocratic oath, but that’s because all surgery was forbidden. An extreme version of “do no harm,” to be sure, but also reflected in part on both sides of the debate today, expressing wariness of taking any sort of action.

The closest thing to a consensus came from Aristotle, who generally valued the observable. Accordingly, he placed the beginning of life at quickening, an archaic term for the stage in the pregnancy when the mother begins to feel fetal movement. The quickening threshold would retain that understood significance for a couple millennia, particularly as many of Aristotle’s views were brought into Christian theology by Thomas Aquinas.

To be clear, from the very early days, Christians had always viewed abortion at any stage as a sin, part of an ethic that also led them to famously take in female infants abandoned by disappointed Roman parents. But that determination, which many Christians today share, does not settle the question of the severity of the sin, and the corresponding interest of governmental authorities in restricting it. For instance, covetousness is a sin, but it was never going to be made illegal. For that purpose, following Aquinas, quickening came to serve as the dividing line determining severity, after which various governments asserted an interest in protecting fetuses.

It’s worth emphasizing that while quickening is indeed a sign of life, it’s also just about the only recognizable stage of development prior to modern medical technology. And in the context of abortion, it makes for particularly poor law, as the would-be mother is the only witness to whether quickening has occurred.

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Accordingly, at least in the United States, laws only started changing with the advent of modern medicine in the second half of the 19th Century. “They’re like us!” is the core moral intuition justifying a sense of a common humanity. And as medicine revealed more about fetal development, more commonalities could be identified, often earlier in pregnancy than would have otherwise been expected, pushing timelines for fetal personhood back, a process that received an additional boost with the development and subsequent widespread use of ultrasound technology a century later.

In the 19th Century, physicians were the main proponents of laws banning abortions, but not entirely for the fetus-regarding reasons we’re familiar with today. Instead, these seem to have been at least in part an attempt to professionalize the practice of medicine and drive out underground abortionists. Many of these laws were riddled with therapeutic exceptions, judged by the physicians themselves, that wealthy patients could basically ensure they met. Never underestimate the power of personal self-interest.

These sorts of exceptions, and the availability of discreetly-advertised abortifacient drugs, ensured that despite the laws on the books, an estimated 20-25% of pregnancies still ended in abortion, only slightly fewer than today. Criminalization has its limits.

They were, of course, ultimately struck down in many states throughout the country when second-wave feminism swept the country in the 1960s. Similar movements in Europe produced legislation broadly supportive of abortion rights, especially early on. In the US, the area of the country that kept its laws the longest was the largely Catholic Northeast, as Catholic teaching had itself evolved along with the 19th Century laws, asserting from 1869 onwards that abortion at any stage is a grave sin.

While some conservatives might still bristle at its reference, it’s important to acknowledge many of the other achievements brought by second-wave feminism that we often take for granted today. Integration of women into the workforce, the blossoming of women’s sports under Title IX, and laws against marital rape were just some of the outcomes that enjoy very widespread, if not entirely unanimous, support today. It’s natural to view those very real gains for women as related to, or contingent on, the right to an abortion.

Complicating that story, of course, is the parallel development of more and more effective contraceptives, famously starting with The Pill in 1961. While health classes and the occasional personal anecdote still emphasize that no technique is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy, those efficacies have been improving, and side effects diminishing, reducing the risk of sex leading to unwanted pregnancy to lower than ever before.

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What good is it to know this history? I think it ultimately helps ground us, allowing us to recognize the heart behind the arguments in both directions with some needed remove.

Without this understanding, the default is often to assume that the other side simply believes the opposite of the arguments that are most convincing to you. If you’re pro-choice for feminist reasons, then anyone who’s pro-life just wants to control women. And if you’re pro-life because you see human resemblance in ultrasound images of fetuses, then anyone who’s pro-choice is a monster who wants to kill babies.

In reality, the arguments on each side are incredibly compelling. If you don’t fully comprehend this, I recommend reading all the way through Caitlin Flanagan’s excellent 2019 Atlantic essay, “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate,” which goes in nauseating details into what she finds the most compelling cases for each side. Flanagan concludes:

This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.

In 2019, this felt like a comfortable place to end debate. But in 2022, should the ultimate Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson largely resemble the draft opinion, Americans will need to debate it once again.

And a good starting point will be to acknowledge the unavoidably substantial weight on each side of the ledger. Abortion law is ultimately a question of tradeoffs, a balancing of substantial harms, which is why it inspired ethics’ famous trolley problem, the central conceit of my first post on the matter, A Real-Life Trolley Problem.

This acknowledgement doesn’t argue for mushy compromises on this or any other matter. Ultimately, you might still come down firmly closer to one end of the spectrum than the other. But by going through that honest accounting of the costs on both sides, even if you consider one of them significantly weightier, you can approach discussions and debates from a much healthier place than many of the loudest voices.