Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies

I propose a simpler hypothesis: we do not see unborn babies (of any age). Therefore we do not empathize with them nearly as strongly as we do with humans we see and interact with, such as babies. Therefore we don't care as much about them being killed.

The line typically does not get drawn at birth. The legal cutoff in most countries that allow abortion is around 20 weeks after conception (it varies by a few weeks depending on the country). Before then women are free to get elective abortions and many do, after that abortions are only permitted in special circumstances and are very rare. Wikipedia has a graph of abortion timing in the United States and other relevant information, including a poll showing that most Americans think that first trimester abortions should be legal and third trimester abortions should be illegal.

An early stage embryo/fetus does not have a functioning brain and is not viable outside the womb. It seems like it could be reasonable to draw the line during pregnancy, before either of those two things have happened. Since brain development and viability are gradual processes, people could argue for drawing the line at a later part of the process, so a cutoff during the first half of a pregnancy could be seen as a relatively safe, conservative choice.

You know, I'd gotten so used to the idea of "We use birth as the cutoff line because we need some sort of law and it's the obvious Schelling point" that I'd forgotten that many people actually care about birth and consider it to make a moral difference...

It's just an arbitrary moment in the child's development.

That kind of talk is crazy talk, irrespective of your position on abortion. There are a number of hugely significant and factually obvious differences that divide the period prior to birth and the period after. Feeding is just one example that comes to mind within 10 seconds of thinking about it.

To say "the moment of birth is not special with respect to personhood" is to reveal a tacit conclusion about personhood: that your personhood predicate is not relational but solely based on intrinsic properties of the organism.

Empirically, it turns out that many of the nodes associated with the node "personhood" hinge on relational factors: a baby who has no one to talk to will not develop language, for instance (the "critical period hypothesis").

Similarly to say that the moment of birth is not special, with respect to how one should view the act of killing a baby, is to reveal a tacit assumption about what makes killing a baby "right" or "wrong": that only the difference it makes to the baby's future prospects should be taken into account.

Empirically, a death before or after the moment of birth makes a huge amount of difference as far as the mother's interests are concerned, for the same type of reasons that make the moment of birth special: feeding and other caretaking behaviours kick in at that moment. (Granted, some forms of bonding start well before birth. The psychological aspects of pregnancy are complex, as the phenomenon of pregnancy denial illustrates strikingly.)

My intuition is that (as social animals) there is much more to our attitudes toward babies' deaths than our unconscious evaluations of their reproductive potential, and the conclusion that "if our attitudes were allowed to drift toward a new evolutionary equilibrium which took account of technology, we'd come to hate abortions again" strikes me as seriously unfounded.

Of course, life doesn't really begin at conception, either. Sperm and unfertilized egg cells are just as alive as fertilized egg cells are, after all. Life carries forward from one self-replicating cell to its replicant; it doesn't emerge spontaneously from inert materials.

So does nothing interesting happen at conception? Well, that's not true either.

What is created at conception is not life, but a unique individual, one we consider importantly different from other organisms (well, we sometimes consider the difference important).

Seen from this perspective, something interesting happens at birth, also: independent viability seems like an important part of what we mean when we call something an individual.

And seen from this perspective, something interesting also happens at some less-clearly-defined point after birth... a newborn infant isn't viable in the same way a mature adult is.

Of course, "independent viability" for a human is pretty much always a matter of degree. Our social groups are part of our identities, and much of our viability depends on them.

Hn, there's a bit of a strawman here, although maybe I'm wrong. I know very few people who've actually thought about it and still allow abortion and who think that "life begins at birth," for instance.

Most people I've talked to want to start requiring reasons for abortion fairly early, so there goes the problem with making an argument from person-ness. And I think there is a pretty obvious reason why birth is special when considering only the subset of abortions done for the health of the mother.

If you want to talk about "ancestral environment," then note that infanticide is quite common in many cultures, as far as I can tell including hunter-gatherers.

As far as life can be said to "begin" anywhen, it begins at conception.

You think womens' rights trump kids' rights or the other way round, okay.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/ http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer

You're arguing definitions, claiming that your definition of "life" is universal, and using an ambigious definition of "kid" to pull emotional strings. I think we all agree on the anticipated outcomes of a pregnancy. Given how emotional "life" and "kid" are, taboo them.

Can we agree that morality is a set of rules that maximizes global "fun" when executed locally by each person? That's what it is to me. I don't think that it's obvious that the moral definition of "life" is constant, and that we should therefore expect a constant mapping to a biological definition. If you have a morality where allowing all life to end naturally has a constant value that would be quite critical, but I can't think of a society that values all unnatural termination of life equally.

Is it moral to assign more value to one life than to another? Is the life of the head of a household with 7 dependents worth more than the life of a hermit, since his family will take a big "fun" hit?

Do we actually mean ending remaining life, seeing as all lives will end at some point, and you can't take away the ones that already happened? Are some years more fun than others? Are some years in fact negative fun? Do individuals get to decide what is fun for them? Is there some point before which individuals aren't responsible enough to know what will give them the most fun?

Is it less moral to kill someone when they are awake and die in terror than to kill them in their sleep so that their life simply ends and they don't experience any more fun?

Answer a bunch of questions like this and I can determine how immoral it is to terminate a life at fertilization (genetic code is unique except for your identical siblings), gastrulation (no more twins can form), various levels of brain activity (beginnings of a mind), birth (eats, breathes, poops, and communicates), infancy, or cancer-ridden old-age. Arguing over whether something is a "life" or not with no moral context is about as useful as arguing over what a "sound" is.

Likelihood to survive seems like a good explanation.

25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Miscarriage is common and (at least in the culture I'm familiar with) causes grief, but nowhere near the same kind of grief as losing a born child. The hospital procedure is routine and not attended with the same kind of reverence as death usually is. I think it's because miscarriage is so common that it's not generally considered to have the same gravity as death. I don't even know if there's research being done to reduce miscarriage. (If 25% of humans died of a given disease, you can bet we'd be researching it.)

I think that in point of social fact fetuses aren't granted the same status as babies, even among pro-life people.

Before birth, destruction is the only way to get rid of your babies. After birth, you can give them away. What's the word? Donate your babies? Or sell them if you're lucky. That way you don't produce a little bundle of biohazards and, for those who don't like killing people, you have the added advantage of never even coming close to killing it after it gets personhood.

"On the way to victory, if you get to choose between destroying and not destroying without negative repercussions from not destroying, don't destroy" seems like a reasonable moral precept. If victory is having fewer babies, and it is, birth is an objectively special moment.

The NHS goes to the effort of saving unborn babies from miscarriage from 22 weeks because, IIRC (I can't find the reference quickly), there are no cases of babies surviving below that gestation time. Also, there's no knitted nervous system before then. This provides IMO a plausible "big and sharply defined hurdle", now that premature babies do remarkably better than even a few decades ago.

This model of human psychology implies that, in order to get people to care about mortality, we should work on maintaining the ability to reproduce into old age. Dying at eighty will start looking a lot more tragic if people are having kids at ninety.

Mental development? Intellectual abilities?

Correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems to me that your logic works like this: because two-years-old kids, dogs, and unborn children share the same level of intellectual abilities, we should apply the same rules (regarding killing them) to all of them. There is a missing link in your logic. And that is, intellectual abilities are a sufficient condition for whether or not their lives are at our mercy. It's like saying that because they share ONE trait, they are equivalent in terms of policy target. I hope down syndrome people are not reading this.

The correlation?

If the mathematical relationship between X and Y is very similar to the mathematical relationship between Z and Y, then what can we say about the causal relationship between X and Z? Please tell me. I have a background in social science and my brain seems to be unable to solve this puzzle.

"An unborn kid is a creature that hasn't yet passed this big and sharply defined hurdle, so we instinctively discount our sympathy for its reproductive potential by a large factor without knowing why."

Good point. But in society where young kids (let's say aged 2-10) are more likely to die due to illness, malnutrition and war, is the discount rate higher? I doubt it.

I think the reason is simple. Really. My theory - borrowed from group psychology - is that people don't harm anything that looks like themselves. Babies look much more like adults than unborn children do. In the old days, white ppl thought blacks didn't look like them, so it was okay to enslave the blacks. Suppose that one day, there is a species that is obviously not human (say, internal organs are completely different)... but their external appearance looks exactly like humans, are we able to kill them? I guess not.

The kinds of mothers than want to abort their unborn child are the kinds of mothers I wouldn't want having children anyway out of sympathy for their children.