The Tragic Hysteria of Abortion

The radical pro-life position — “Abortion is as immoral as murdering a baby” — is easily refuted with a simple thought experiment. Namely: If you could either save one human baby from a fire, or a dozen human embryos, what are you morally obliged to do? Almost no one even claims they should choose the embryos over the baby — and virtually no one would in fact do so.

Why not? Because almost everyone recognizes that an embryo has far less moral worth than an actually-existing baby.

Yet on reflection, the radical pro-choice position — “Abortion is morally neutral” — is also easily refuted with a parallel thought experiment. Namely: If you could either save one human embryo from a fire, or just let it burn, what are you morally obliged to do? Again, only a small minority even claims they would shrug and walk away. Why not? Because a large majority recognizes that a fertilized egg has intermediate moral value. Abortion is not murder, but neither is it the same as removing a wart.

Another way to grasp the same point: The death of a child is objectively much worse than a miscarriage. But telling a couple that has experienced a miscarriage, “Sure, this is sad for you. But your embryo wasn’t sufficiently developed to have any independent moral value” isn’t merely rude. It is absurd. When a miscarriage occurs, a reasonable person recognizes the tragedy — not just for the parents, but for the fetus who will never be born.

My friend Richard Hanania is deeply dismissive of the pro-life position: “Somehow pro-lifers have convinced themselves there’s a non-religious basis to their beliefs.” But the aforementioned moral intuitions about the intermediate moral value of an embryo are hardly sectarian. I’m an atheist of the highest order, and the aforementioned moral intuitions make perfect sense to me.

What are the implications? To start, abortion is definitely morally justified in extreme scenarios. If a woman will die unless she gets an abortion, she should get an abortion, because the embryo matters far less than her actual human life. The same holds if a pregnant woman is so poor that one of her existing children will starve to death if she doesn’t get an abortion.

The same plausibly holds if having her baby would cause zero fatalities, but truly ruin the life of the pregnant woman. Preventing the lifelong ...