Abortions and morality

 Many base their thinking about abortion on the wrong premise.  They think if something is "wrong," it should be illegal.

Largely speaking that serves, but "wrongness" is a slippery concept and people will disagree based on culture and belief.  It is at heart a religious matter.  For a secular state, where religion is kept at arm's length, a different basis for deciding what should be illegal than wrongness is needed -- namely the effect of the act on society and its members.  Even when it is shown that there is a definite negative effect, the power of the law should be applied selectively and carefully, as the very act of making something illegal can make its effects even worse or create other negative effects.

I think abortions, at least mid to late term, are immoral and would never personally have one and would urge others to seek alternatives.  There are times, however, when personal morality takes a backseat to public good, and criminalizing something does have the perverse effect of making criminals.  Further, do not think morality is an all or nothing thing; some immoral things are more immoral than others (and in fact some immoral acts are overwhelmed by an ensuing harm, rendering not doing it in fact the immoral act).  The Gestapo asking the whereabouts of Anne Frank.

So the relevant questions regarding making something illegal have to do with pragmatic effects on society, not moral grounds.  Analysis of ensuing harms: unwanted and abused babies, back alley abortions, suicides.

What you've outlined is a distinction that many people find difficult to maintain in public debate: the distinction between moral judgment and legal prohibition.

In ordinary life we constantly recognize the difference. Lying to a friend, breaking a promise, being unfaithful to a spouse, behaving cruelly toward a family member, neglecting one's elderly parents—many people regard these as morally wrong, sometimes gravely wrong, yet do not necessarily think they should be crimes. Conversely, some acts are illegal not because they are deeply immoral in themselves but because society needs workable rules. Driving on the wrong side of the road is an example.

Political philosophers sometimes refer to this as the difference between morality and the "harm principle," associated most famously with John Stuart Mill. The idea is not that morality becomes irrelevant, but that the state's coercive power requires additional justification beyond "I believe this is wrong."

Your abortion argument follows that line. You are essentially saying: even if one concludes that abortion is morally troubling, it does not automatically follow that criminalization is the best social response. The next question becomes empirical and pragmatic: What happens when it is prohibited? Does prohibition reduce the thing being prohibited? What secondary harms arise? How severe are they? Are there less coercive means of achieving the same ends?

That does not settle the abortion debate, because opponents can respond in different ways. Someone who regards a late-term fetus as morally equivalent to a newborn infant may argue that the state has an obligation to prohibit abortion despite adverse consequences, just as it prohibits homicide despite the existence of black markets, prison costs, and social disruption. In that framework, the question is not merely one of balancing harms but of protecting a being with a right to life.

The deepest disagreement therefore often lies earlier than people realize. It is not primarily about whether morality should become law. It is about what, exactly, the fetus is and what moral status it possesses at various stages of development.

What I find interesting in your formulation is that it avoids a common false dichotomy. Many discussions proceed as if there are only two coherent positions:

    Abortion is morally acceptable and should be legal.

    Abortion is morally wrong and should be illegal.

But there is a third position, which is essentially the one you've described: abortion may be morally wrong, perhaps seriously wrong, while nevertheless concluding that criminal prohibition would create greater harms or be an inappropriate use of state power.

Historically, that position has been held by quite a few people across the political spectrum, although it often gets drowned out because public debate tends to reward clearer slogans than nuanced distinctions.

Your example of lying to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of Anne Frank also illustrates another point: moral reasoning itself is often consequentialist to some degree. Many people reject the idea that morality consists solely of rigid rules. They recognize that duties can conflict and that circumstances matter. If morality itself involves weighing harms and outcomes, then it is not surprising that legal policy—which governs millions of people with different beliefs—often requires even more attention to consequences.

Where people will part company with you is on how much weight to assign to the fetus's interests compared with the social harms of prohibition. But the structure of your argument—that illegality requires more justification than mere moral disapproval—is a longstanding and serious position in political philosophy, not an evasion of the moral question. It is a recognition that the law is a blunt instrument, and blunt instruments can cause damage even when wielded for reasons that seem morally admirable.

I don't know if this is myth or not, but I've heard of societies where when twins are born one is always killed, as it is understood otherwise both will die.  At what point do we become a person?  The law traditionally says at birth, but it is not a before/after thing.  The reality is we are becoming a person, during pregnancy and for a time after birth.

That is one of the central difficulties. Human development is continuous. Nature does not provide us with a flashing sign that says, "Personhood begins here."

As for twins, there have indeed been societies that practiced infanticide under certain circumstances, including some reports involving twins. Usually the reasons were economic, religious, or practical rather than a belief that one twin must die for the other to live. Anthropologists have documented a variety of such customs, though they were never universal and should be treated cautiously because early accounts were sometimes exaggerated or misunderstood.

Your larger point is the more philosophically interesting one. Birth is a legally convenient line because it is observable and objective. Before birth the fetus is physically part of the mother's body; after birth it exists independently. The law likes bright lines.

Biology, however, gives us a gradual process. A fertilized egg is genetically human. A fetus at 20 weeks differs dramatically from a zygote. A newborn differs dramatically from a fetus. A one-year-old differs dramatically from a newborn. And a toddler differs dramatically from an infant. There is no moment at which a switch flips from "not a person" to "person."

Many philosophers have therefore argued that personhood itself may be gradual. Capacities associated with personhood—consciousness, awareness, memory, relationships, language, self-recognition—appear over time rather than instantaneously. By that account, we are indeed "becoming a person" during gestation and continuing to become one after birth.

The difficulty is that rights and laws generally require categories. Courts cannot easily work with "37% person" or "82% person." So societies choose thresholds: conception, implantation, viability, birth, or some developmental milestone. Each threshold has advantages and philosophical problems.

Historically, the law's choice of birth was not because people thought a baby was a non-person one minute before delivery and a person one minute after. Rather, it was because birth is a clear, public event that marks a profound biological transition. The law often prefers clear rules to metaphysical precision.

Your observation also explains why abortion debates are so persistent. If personhood develops gradually, then both extremes become harder to defend. It becomes difficult to say that a newly fertilized egg and a newborn are morally identical. It also becomes difficult to say that a late-term fetus and a fertilized egg are morally identical. The gradual-development view tends to imply that moral status increases over time, which is why many people intuitively feel that ending a pregnancy at six weeks and ending one at thirty-six weeks are not morally equivalent acts, even if they disagree about where legal restrictions should begin.

In that sense, the law's binary categories collide with a biological reality that is more like a dimmer switch than an on-off switch. That tension may never be completely resolvable, because legal systems need boundaries while nature often provides only continua.