THBT: On balance, abortion is immoral [for @Bones]

Harm: To adversely affect

Modus ponens: A logical argument form

Person: An individual with inherent moral value

Prima facie: True under default circumstances

This debate should be judged on the basis of natural rights—rights that individuals are due, whether or not anyone else acknowledges them. Furthermore, the importance of a prima facie right is proportional to the loss in utility caused by violating it. A teenager’s right not to be stabbed, for example, is more important than their right to borrow a book from a library. We should default to prioritizing more important rights unless there is a very compelling reason to do otherwise.

There are two ways in which someone can behave in an immoral manner:

Note that both of these things are immoral prima facie. If abortion involves either of these (or, as I will argue, risks doing either of these), then abortion is immoral prima facie. Further, I will argue that avoiding the burden of pregnancy is not a sufficient justification for abortion, making it wrong all things considered.

I will make frequent use of analogies. I think that abortion is best discussed by starting with more obvious moral statements (such as “stabbing people is wrong”), and then remaining consistent with these ideals. Note that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. If the necessity of taxes outweighs my right to $50 of gold, then it would also outweigh my right to own $50 of silver, all things being equal, if I had silver instead.

I argue that an unborn child is a person with rights, but suppose there’s only a 2% chance that is the case. This would be akin to drunk driving, where the risk of killing a person is low but not negligible.

To determine the significance of this risk, I will use risk exposure, which calculates the expected harm from a particular risk. To give an example, we should be equally wary of killing 1 person and running a 10% chance of killing 10 people, all things being equal, as the expected (i.e. average) harm from each of these is equal.

With regard to abortion, the average lifespan is 73 years, and 2% of that is 1.46 years. Hence, even if there’s only a 2% chance that the unborn child has a right not to be aborted, the average expected rights violation from abortion would be depriving a person of over a year of their life. The ends (avoiding the burden of pregnancy) cannot justify the means, since the expected burden of pregnancy lasts less than a year.

Hence, for abortion to be morally permissible, Con must either establish that the risk of abortion violating someone’s rights is entirely negligible or provide a method superior to risk exposure for evaluating the morality of risking a person’s life.

Arguments 1-3 will deal with establishing the personhood of the unborn. Arguments 4-5 will show that as a result, abortion is immoral.

I hold that any human being who can be harmed is a person. Furthermore, having one’s lifespan reduced is a harm. Someone with CIPA may not physically suffer when they are killed, but they have been harmed nonetheless. The burden of a disease, for example, is often measured in “life years,” which includes both the reduction in quality of life and the reduction in the amount of life lived. Per this metric, unborn children can be harmed significantly by abortion. Prima facie, we ought to follow the non-aggression principle—if a human being can be harmed, we should avoid harming them without a sufficient justification. Hence, my criteria for personhood follows.

I will distinguish here between (1) impeding bodily functions and (2) not adding bodily functions. I hold that the first is a harm, while the latter is not. A bodily function is something an organism is in the process of doing via internal processes like mitosis that could potentially be impeded through nutritional imbalances or outside intervention.

For example, (1) removing one of someone’s limbs is harming them. Furthermore, if someone is in danger of having one of their limbs removed by a hostile third party or some other threat, we should try to protect them. However, if someone requests an operation which would add a third arm to their body, (2) refusing to perform this operation is not harming them.

Furthermore, starvation, suffocation, and hormone deficiency fall under (1) as well. Despite the fact that starvation results from a lack of resources, it results in direct adverse effects on the body, as can hormonal deficiency. If your child is starving, for example, that is a direct harm which you ought to prevent. Furthermore, if a child is suffering from hormonal deficiencies, this causes direct bodily harms such as elevated blood sugar levels; hence, their parents ought to treat them with medicine in order to mitigate this harm.

These examples are not exhaustive, but per Occam’s razor, we should accept the simplest definition of harm (i.e. the one I provided) that can explain these examples, unless Con can provide a competing definition of harm that explains them better.

Moral statutes only make sense in practice. To say that an action is wrong is to say that the effect of that action is undesirable; hence, the importance and existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects. (And even if unconscious people don’t literally express desires, we know that most humans wouldn’t want to be killed, which means that killing is harmful.) Murder prevents someone from living a human life—a life as it is experienced by the human mind. If removing someone’s ability to live part of a human life is a grave evil, then removing someone’s capacity to live an entire human life must be immoral as well. Rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations; if reducing a human lifespan is an undesirable effect, then we ought to attribute personhood to all humans with lifespans.

I bring this up to distinguish between (1) abortion and (2) contraception. An unborn child will keep growing and develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed (if their bodily functions are impeded through starvation or losing oxygen or hormonal deficiency). The zygote is already growing and will become a newborn unless this process of growth is impeded, much like a newborn is in the process of growing into later stages of development.

But sperm will not develop into a person unless combined with an egg (if bodily functions are added). Growth into a later stage of human development requires it to become an entirely new organism with entirely new bodily functions. Conception is categorically different from pregnancy in that an entire gamete is being added to merge with, rather than nutrients which prevent nutritional deficiency, or direct harm, in an existing organism. Again, this is not a comprehensive description of pregnancy, but this should establish that abortion causes direct harm that contraception does not cause.

My position here is actually a very modest one. As the examples above show, we already distinguish between (1) and (2) when it comes to born humans; hence, granting that abortion is immoral does not imply that contraception is immoral. Contrapositively, granting that contraception is not immoral does not imply that abortion is not immoral.

This is more of a preemptive rebuttal to a common objection, but with this out of the way, I will argue for why (1) is wrong.

The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that a human being is formed at conception. An unborn child is its own individual organism with unique DNA. As one source puts it, “A Chinese zygote implanted in a Swedish woman will always be Chinese, not Swedish, because his identity is based on his genetic code, not that of the body in which he resides.”

Note that a human being has the right not to have their lifespan reduced, regardless of their stage of development (infant, teenager, adult). We extend similar rights to teengers, adults, and infants not based on their stage of development (which vary between them) but because they can be harmed in similar ways. It hardly makes a difference to someone whether they are aborted as an embryo or killed painlessly in their sleep minutes after their birth. Hence, per Occam’s razor, the most straightforward conclusion is that both killings are immoral.

An alternate view holds that moral value should come from intelligence, past experiences, ability to feel pain, level of dependency, or level of development. But a few obvious counterexamples show this view to be flawed:

Suppose there is someone in a deep coma who will awaken in nine months without their memories. Killing them is still murder. (We’d save on social security by killing dementia patients in their sleep, but doing so would clearly be evil.) Note that any argument that the comatose individual has personhood can also be used to show that unborn children are persons.

Per the harm principle, actions should generally be considered moral unless they cause some kind of harm to someone else. Therefore, if the action of killing the comatose person is wrong, it must be because it has one or several harmful effects. I can think of several:

These harms also occur when an unborn child is killed. Hence, unless Con can provide some harms that occur to the comatose individual but not to the unborn child, we should naturally conclude that killing the unborn child is as harmful as killing the person in the coma. And even if Con can provide harms that occur solely to the person in the coma, the harms listed above establish that killing an unborn child is still significantly harmful.

Suppose there is an operation that can be performed on an unborn child that will hinder their eyesight in the future with no medical benefit. This operation would clearly be harmful, even though it removes potential experiences, rather than ones that the unborn child is currently capable of.

Removing more potential experiences (hearing, taste, etc.) would be worse, not better.

It is sometimes argued that abortion is simply “letting someone die” in early stages of pregnancy when the unborn child depends on the mother. However, refusal of bodily support can still equate to direct killing in some circumstances. To understand why, consider the following scenario:

A woman carries a child deep into a forest on a camping trip. For whatever reason, she leaves the child there, where it is eaten by wild beasts. Clearly, this is immoral.

I argue that abortion is morally comparable to this. Despite the fact that carrying the child into the forest puts the child in a state of physical dependency, carrying the child into the forest alone is not a direct harm. Parents bring their children to all sorts of places, but harm does not occur until the child is abandoned. Similarly, when a woman aborts a child she conceived, removing bodily support is a direct harm to the child.

Modus Ponens

The forest analogy establishes P1, and P2 is true under usual circumstances, as the vast majority of abortions arise from consensual sex. P1 follows even if the pregnancy is not the intended consequence of sex—the woman from our earlier analogy might have gotten lost in the forest by accident, yet bringing the child there is still a result of her actions. Hence, abandoning the child would still be a direct killing.

Hence, the question that matters is whether a justification exists in the case of abortion for directly killing one’s child. For the ends to justify the means, the good achieved from an action would have to at least outweigh the bad. But being killed as a child prevents one from experiencing their entire life, while pregnancy burdens someone for only nine months. Therefore, the former is a greater harm, and the ends cannot justify the means.

Even if abortion were simply “letting someone die,” I argue that supporting the fetus that one directly created would still be a moral obligation.

I argue that parents have specific responsibilities to children, based on their familial relationship and the responsibility to help those whom one has directly put in a dangerous situation.

Infanticide through abandonment was common in ancient times. These killings were clearly unjust, so it stands to reason that parents have a moral obligation to prevent their children from dying. In ancient times, this would include carrying a child around, feeding them, housing them, and in many cases, breastfeeding.

The infanticide example establishes P1. Hence, I will argue for P2. It is simply the case that raising a child in ancient times would require physical labor, which can lead to all sorts of health conditions. The loss in utility from raising a child through adolescence is greater than that lost from pregnancy, but infanticide in Ancient Rome was still immoral. Recall that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. By similar logic, the child’s right to live outweighs the parent’s right to abandon them, so it certainly outweighs the parent’s right to avoid pregnancy.

p1. An action is morally impermissible if it violates the moral entitlements of a person or it has morally unacceptable consequences. 

p2. Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of a person.  

p3. Abortion does not have morally unacceptable consequences.

c1. Abortion is not morally impermissible. 

p2.1 An entity E has moral entitlements (is a person) if and only if either (i) E has a non trivial interest N at t or (ii) N is in E’s interest at t and E is capable of having a non trivial interest in N at t. 

p2.2 The fetus is not E

p2.3 If the fetus is not E, abortion does not violate its moral entitlements 

c2.1 Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of E (a person).

The Effects of Abortion (p3) 

I argued that direct harm and failing a moral duty are both immoral prima facie. Con uses a similar framework, arguing that violating moral entitlements (i.e. failing a moral duty) and causing morally unacceptable consequences are both wrong. I argue that causing harm to a human being violates their moral entitlement to live.

However, Con does not address my argument that risking violating a moral entitlement is also immoral.

Extend my argument that if there is even a 2% chance that an unborn child has entitlements (i.e. as long as it’s even a remotely reasonable possibility), abortion is immoral. Con does not contest my analogy to drunk driving, nor does he contest my calculations comparing the risk exposure from a 2% chance of violating someone’s right to live against the burden of pregnancy. Drunk driving might not violate anyone’s rights if the drunk driver gets lucky, but Con does not dispute that it’s still immoral to take that risk.

Extend that impeding bodily functions is a morally significant harm when it leads to some loss in future utility. (Starvation, cutting off someone’s arm, etc.)

I stated in R1 that an unborn child will “develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed,” similarly to a coma patient. This is not true of a philosophical zombie. I made it clear that harm must cause a “loss in utility” such as a “reduction in life years.”

Yes, I argued it’s an unjustified killing. Abortion also has negative effects on society as a whole, as I will argue later.

Extend my earlier argument that “killing a child is as bad as killing an adult, if not worse. Thus, it is clear that the potential to live a long life is morally significant.” (i.e. much more morally significant than past experiences)

Suppose that a child is in a coma, but they had non-trivial sentience for a single minute in the past. Their death would be a tragedy, and Con would rightfully condemn someone who killed them. Suppose the murderer asked why killing the child was wrong. Presumably we would say that they deprived the child of a long life and that many opportunities were stolen from them. Would we even bother to mention the one minute in the past that the child had non-trivial sentience?

Now suppose the murderer revealed that the comatose child was actually not sentient in the past, although they would have awoken all the same. Con’s view holds that this information alone should absolve the killer of any moral culpability, that the absence of this minute of past sentience completely justifies what would otherwise have been murder. In fact, if the child wasn’t considered useful by those around them, Con might even argue that killing them was a moral good.

My view is much more modest. Even if you attribute some moral significance to past sentience, I argue that a reduction in life years is still a morally significant harm, as evidenced by the fact that people place great value on the ability to continue living.

Con’s view demands that you place no intrinsic value on potential sentience. In fact, his view holds that a single minute of past consciousness (even a minute the child likely wouldn’t remember) is enough to outweigh the wrongness of depriving a child of the entire rest of their life (possibly even a hundred years).

Con asks that we defer to the “best available explanation,” based on our domain of knowledge. However, his framework demands that we accept a very illogical weighting of past and present experiences when evaluating moral experience. Therefore, my criteria for personhood is a much better explanation.

Extend that missed opportunities are a significant harm (as is a reduction in life years, which is consistently used to measure the burden of a given affliction).

Con ignores my argument that rights and entitlements are “predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable (i.e. harmful) effects” (as I said in R1). Even if Con denies this, he must admit that moral entitlements (e.g. not being shot or stabbed) generally involve preventing harm. Hence, avoiding harm is most likely a moral entitlement. And Con does not contest that abortion causes a significant harm (reduction in life years) that is considered undesirable and morally significant in almost every other context, even applied to unconscious people. Per Occam’s razor, the most straightforward conclusion is that unborn children also have moral entitlements.

Extend. Con does not dispute that mutilating an unborn child to harm their eyesight in the future is wrong, nor does he dispute that abortion similarly removes an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences. Hence, the conclusion follows that abortion is immoral.

A highly complex robot would be more akin to the “philosophical zombie” Con describes later. We have plenty of computer programs that simulate human behavior, but an LLM predicting the next word does not mean it is actually conscious (whereas an unborn child will develop actual consciousness). But for the sake of argument, I will envision a scenario where a magic robot will somehow develop actual consciousness.

This is a misunderstanding of my standard for “bodily functions.” As I said in R1, “a bodily function is something an organism is in the process of doing via internal processes like mitosis.” Con implies the charging is entirely done by the charger and the process of deployment can’t start until the battery is at 100%. The robot isn’t growing or doing anything with the energy yet to push itself toward a form capable of having conscious experiences. However, an unborn child has an internal growth process that pushes it toward sentience even though said process must be aided by external nutrients. Unplugging the charger doesn’t disrupt any internal processes in the robot, but starvation has direct adverse effects on the body, even for unborn children.

No, but charging isn’t a bodily function at all.

Con does not dispute either of my arguments that if an unborn child has personhood, abortion is immoral. Hence, voters should accept this premise as given; if a fetus has personhood, the resolution is affirmed.

Addressed in the framework section.

Con stakes his entire case here, since he disputes both of my arguments that if an unborn child has personhood, abortion is immoral. If Con is wrong about personhood (in fact, if there’s even a 2% chance that he’s wrong), the resolution is affirmed.

Disembodied heads and corpses are entities that were once conscious (when the human was alive) and hence had interests at some prior mental state, but they are not persons any more than a severed limb is a person. These counterexamples immediately show Con’s framework to be flawed.

Note that all of these examples from Con are also consistent with my criteria for personhood, not having bodily functions that will lead to consciousness unless impeded. A robot with no potential for consciousness, chairs, tables, etc. fail my criteria for personhood, while you and your parents would pass.

“specific entities which we deem to be persons, but does not have sentience…Suppose that we have a baby who has never been sentient, but will be in five minutes…it is not protected under the proposed rights theory”

Con agrees here with my categorization of a presentient newborn as a “specific entity which we deem to be a person.” Even though Con argues that the newborn is not a person, he seems to agree that his position is very counterintuitive.

However, Con earlier advocated for abduction, in his words, “looking at our domain of knowledge and deferring to the best available explanation.” Con advocates looking around at “any entity who you think is a person.” In the case of a presentient baby, where our views differ, the intuitive solution supports my framework for personhood over Con’s, since an unborn child is an “entity which we deem to be a person.” Hence, abduction supports my view on personhood, not Con’s view.

If you turned a baby into a doll, it would no longer be a pre-sentient being and couldn’t be sentient in five minutes, nor would it have bodily functions that could be impeded. Because, you know, it’s a doll.

In Con’s hypothetical, somehow this doll is about to become sentient. Con doesn’t say how, but I will reaffirm my view and say that a baby (made of fabric or otherwise) with bodily functions that will develop consciousness unless impeded is a person. Babies with artificial limbs are still persons despite those limbs being made of synthetic materials.

Con’s argument is that we can imagine a hypothetical where the baby is a doll, therefore the baby isn’t a person, but this argument fails when you remember Con’s proposed criteria. If a conscious person temporarily turns into a doll but will regain their consciousness in a few minutes, Con considers them a person. Con’s framework also accepts people with neural prosthetics as persons, even though neural prosthetics are made of synthetic materials. For any entity that we consider a person, we can imagine a hypothetical where they are a magic doll made of synthetic materials. Hence, this is insufficient to negate personhood.

This also applies to the baby in the coma. Con agrees that the baby is an “entity which we deem to be a person,” hence his view relies on rejecting our intuition. However, if largely agreed-on intuition is sufficient to grant other coma patients rights, then surely it must also be sufficient to grant rights to a preconscious infant, and hence, to reject Con’s view of personhood.

An unborn child’s bodily functions (which will lead to consciousness unless harmed and give them rights) exist already. However, the expected benefit of a right need not have occurred yet for the right to exist.

Someone in a coma has a right not to be killed if they will awaken in five minutes. But if they are brain dead, we can unplug them. Hence, potential conscious experiences are what give the coma patient the right to live, even though those experiences have not occurred yet.

To give another example, if someone mails me $100 as a surprise, and you steal the money before I ever find it, you have still significantly wronged me, even though the benefit (potentially finding and using the money) that made the gift valuable did not occur at the time my right was violated.

Con argues that negative effects on society at large make an action immoral. By this standard, abortion is immoral even if an unborn child is not a person.

Again, Con bets his entire case on a fetus not being a person. But even if a fetus has no moral entitlements, abortion has negative effects on society.

Since society is made up of people, society at large is better off when more people enjoy economic surplus and the benefits of being alive (people place a significant economic value on the ability to live longer) and when the labor force is larger. The loss of 630,000 unborn lives a year would equate to 32% of GDP. This is assigning a human life a value of $10.9 million, a figure arrived at by studying the amount people will pay to avoid some risk of mortality. Furthermore, since abortion directly shrinks the labor force, it weakens the solvency of programs like Social Security and Medicare that rely on workers to care for the elderly.

Correlation does not imply causation. (Ice cream sales correlate with homicides, but that doesn’t imply ice cream causes homicides.) The article Con links to seems to make the opposite assumption, that people in countries with lower GDP are more likely to be religious and have restrictive views on abortion. Religion is just one potential confounding variable, and Con doesn’t establish that abortions cause an increase in GDP.

Again, the article Con links to makes the opposite assumption, that economic freedom increases legal access to abortion. And legal access isn't even the subject of this debate, abortions themselves are. Adultery, for example, is immoral regardless of the effects of passing laws against adultery. Con makes no argument for how getting an abortion somehow increases economic freedom.

Again, this debate isn’t about the legality of abortion, just about whether it’s immoral. Bringing up harm from illegal abortions simply aids my case that abortion causes harm, since illegal abortions are abortions. Also note that abortions to save the mother’s life are not a “under usual circumstances” and hence fall outside the scope of this debate. (Even if Con’s argument here were relevant to the resolution, maternal mortality rates in the US are already very low, around a 0.0104% risk of death per live birth. Even if this rate were increased by 21%, the chance of maternal death per live birth would remain around a hundredth of a percent. Abortion has a 100% risk of mortality for the unborn child.)