Let’s try to make the best possible case for restricting abortion and see how far we get.
To make that case as strong as possible, let’s start from the presumption that we care about the interests of the unborn in just the same way as the interests of the born.
Now caring about someone’s interests is not a sufficient reason to defer to those interests, because there are usually competing interests that have to be weighed in the balance (in this case the interest of the mother). Often, competitions between interests play out in the marketplace, so that policymakers are unnecessary — if you and I both want the same house, we settle that conflict by bidding for it.
But sometimes markets don’t work very well, and then there’s a policy problem to resolve. For example, suppose your boat happens to be in the vicinity of my dock when it springs a leak and starts to sink. The only way to save the boat is to tie it to the dock. If I happen to be out sunning myself on that dock, we can strike a bargain. But if I’m nowhere to be found, the law enforces the outcome that we presumably would have reached and allows you to tie up to my dock.
The same fundamental problem applies in the case of abortion. You might be willing to pay a substantial fraction of your lifetime income to prevent yourself from being aborted, but at the time of the abortion decision, those negotiations are quite impractical. So by analogy with the boat and the dock, one might argue that the law should enforce the outcome that we presume those negotiations would have led to, by prohibiting the abortion.
But if that argument is correct, it applies to the unconceived as well as to the unborn — that is, it seems apparent that most adults who are glad they were not aborted are equally glad that they were conceived in the first place, and would have agreed to pay just as much to bring about the conception as to prevent the abortion. This suggests that if the law should strive to prevent abortions, it should also strive to bring about a considerable number of additional pregnancies.
But even if you accept that argument, it is not an argument for involuntary impregnation; it is at best an argument for subsidized impregnation. It’s a general principle of cost-benefit analysis that taxes and subsidies are almost always better than mandates, because they allow for different individuals to make different choices that account for circumstances invisible to the policymaker. That’s why it’s better to tax carbon than to mandate gas mileage. And likewise, even if you accept the anti-abortion argument, it is not an argument for banning abortion; it’s at best an argument for taxing abortion.
How big should the tax be? Another principle of cost-benefit analysis is that everyone’s interests should count equally. So if we take all of this seriously, then one additional pregnancy compensates for one additional abortion — one potential life is lost; another potential life is gained; and that’s a wash. Therefore the policy implication is that abortion should, at most, be taxed at a rate necessary to fund the subsidization of one additional pregnancy.
In other words — if A has an abortion but simultaneously coughs up enough money to induce B to become pregnant and carry a baby to term, then even if you buy the market-failure rationale for restricting abortion, the world as a whole is no worse off than before — and in fact better off, because the pregnancy has been voluntarily transferred from A to B. If A is willing to pay that price, I can’t find any reason to disallow it.
(In fact, one could well argue that the mere fact of A’s pregnancy is no reason to impose a tax burden on A — if A has an abortion, the rest of us can perfectly well pick up the tab to enlist B as a substitute, so that A doesn’t need to be taxed at all. I’m putting that argument aside only because I’m trying to bias the outcome in favor of a large deterrent.)
That sets a maximum penalty for abortion. If you’re skeptical of the initial premise that we care about unborn people the same way we care about everyone else (or skeptical of the market-failure argument) then the penalty should be lower — maybe a lot lower. In no case would you want to impose a ban.
To avoid those conclusions, you’d need (for starters) a clear reason to favor the conceived-but-unborn over the not-yet-conceived. Unless you’re prepared to descend into deontology, I think that reason is going to be hard to come by, again because I am exactly as happy to have been conceived as I am to have been unaborted. And even if you find that reason, you might be able to use it to argue for a higher tax but still not, I think, an infinite one.
Edited to add: The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the correct conclusion is that if we, as a society, care about preventing abortions then we, as a society, should be subsidizing births, and the cost of those subsidies should be spread widely, so that the right tax on abortion should in fact be zero.
It’s an interesting idea, but it seems to be that people who are against abortions have religious motives : abortion means killing a baby. If we follow that reasoning, your abortion tax sounds like a murder tax whose money would be used to save other lives, and who would ever agree to that ? And i guess that also for them, unborn babies have souls while unconceived babies don’t.
Olivier (#1): I think the key difference between an abortion tax and a murder tax is that pre-birth we are all a lot more interchangeable than we are post-birth (regardless of whether or when we acquire souls). That’s partly because, shortly after we’re born, we start making costly long-term investments in human capital which are lost if I murder you. It’s also because others make specific investments in us (so that if I kill you, I damage not just you but everyone who has come to rely on you as a family member, a lover, a friend or a business partner).
But I think most importantly, if murder were available for sale, it could be used to distort incentives in dreadful ways. Groups (or even just wealthy individuals) could announce that they will murder anybody who reads the works of a certain author, or campaigns for a certain candidate, or expresses a particular unpopular opinion. That sort of thing tends not to be an issue with fetuses, who all have exactly the same reading habits (another instance of interchangeability).
You could respond that none of this applies to, say, one-day old babies. Even if that’s true, if you want to go down that road, you have to decide where you’re going to draw your cutoff between one-day olds and twenty-year olds. To avoid endless argument about that, we’d want to pick a Schelling point, and birth seems like the obvious candidate.
Based on history, quickening was the obvious Schelling point. The current 12-15 week standard across Europe for unrestricted abortion is basically the same.
Would this same argument apply to murders of one year old children? Should the tax on the murder of one year old children, at most, be taxed at a rate necessary to fund the subsidization of one additional pregnancy?
Can you kill your one year old as long as you conceive another child?
The reason we punish murder is not to maintain a certain population so I don’t know why the subsidy required to create a new conception is relevant.
Olivier, I was too excited to make the same point without reading your comment first. I’m sorry about that.
Patrick (#4):
The reason we punish murder is not to maintain a certain population so I don’t know why the subsidy required to create a new conception is relevant.<
I did not **assume** the subsidy was relevant; I argued that its relevance **follows** from the same principles that might make you want to restrict abortion in the first place (and explained in my reply to Olivier why the same is not true in the case of murder).
Maybe my argument is wrong. Maybe you can talk me out of it. But you won’t succeed in that endeavor by acting as if I never made the argument in the first place.
The best possible case for restricting abortion is that life starts at conception. Or quickening. Either way, prior to departing the mother’s body. And that is generally the only case I have ever heard pro-life people make.
If you believe that, there is no obvious line to draw in your economic analysis between a 4 month old baby in the womb, a 1 year old baby already born, and a 20 year old. Pro life and pro abortion people would both reject your economic argument for killing (or threating to kill and negotiating with) the latter two on moral grounds.
So it only applies to the pre-born after rejecting the moral grounds and accepting the classic pro-abortion argument. Your economic case is the best that can be done from there. And it is pretty weak, approaching absurdity when you extrapolate to potential conceptions.
You aren’t alone out there though – some religious people believe birth control is wrong with a similar extrapolated argument from the moral grounds. But only inside of marriage.
“… if we, as a society, care about preventing abortions then we, as a society, should be subsidizing births.”
Don’t know if it helps to put it more starkly, or maybe I’m saying the same thing. I hope I got Coase right for this problem:
Under a no abortion regime, those wishing abortions must pay the right-to-lifers to be allowed an abortion. Under a free abortion regime, the pro-lifers must pay those wishing an abortion to prevent it. We get the same number of abortions in either case.
As we can’t actually carry out such trades, the law matters. Give the right to those who would pay more for the right. Hard to determine, but my guess is that pro-lifers are not willing to put up so much money as their noise indicates, but the free abortion people are. I could be deeply wrong here.
There are several dividing points that people have used for fetal life. Conception, implantation, heartbeat, quickening, viability, and birth.
There are many subsidies for births, such as welfare programs and public schools.
Steve,
I don’t think it’s relevance follows from the same principles that might make me want to restrict abortion. You’re misrepresenting the principles of every pro-lifer and I think you know this.
No abortion opponent makes the argument that abortion to end a pregnancy is as unjust as contraception to prevent a pregnancy (even if they oppose contraception). So instead of assuming that all pro-lifers aren’t thinking this through as well as you are, I think you should ask yourself whether you’re begging the question.
Your argument that murder harms people who have some positive connection with the victim implies that murdering someone who is unloved and unvalued would not be a problem if you replace that person with someone you conceive and allow to be born.
It goes back to when you compared Terry Schiavo to a toaster. I don’t think it’s descending to deontology to think it’s much more wrong to murder an unknown unloved person than to not have one more offspring.
Steve, one last reply – thank you for responding earlier.
“But I think most importantly, if murder were available for sale, it could be used to distort incentives in dreadful ways. Groups (or even just wealthy individuals) could announce that they will murder anybody who reads the works of a certain author, or campaigns for a certain candidate, or expresses a particular unpopular opinion.”
I agree these scenarios are dreadful but how is that not descent into deontology?
I think the murder of fetuses is as dreadful than the murder of people who read a certain author. We differ on which incentives are more dreadful but my side is the only one dismissed as deontological.
PS I’m sorry about the typos, I am writing too fast as I need to get back to work to pay for the children we didn’t abort!
Perhaps we can apply a Harsanyi-esque situation in which we’ve forgotten where we are in society, and offer decisions on that basis. In this situation, in a 50-50 equation, you could be a pregnant woman, but you could also be the unborn foetus. If the consideration is between a pregnant woman’s right to decide and an unborn foetus’s right to life, where in Harsanyi’s principle I have a 50% chance of being a pregnant woman and a 50% chance of being the unborn foetus that might never make it to birth, the cost seems greater if I’m an unborn foetus about to be aborted than it is if I’m a woman who has to give birth and decide whether to send her baby for adoption or keep it.
Therefore, on that basis, one might suggest an ethical position is that having the baby and giving it up for adoption (assuming a favourable demand curve for prospective adopters) is always preferable to aborting it at the foetal stage.
“so that if I kill you, I damage not just you but everyone who has come to rely on you as a family member, a lover, a friend or a business partner)”
Easy. You also kill the family member, lover, friend and business partner.
Infact, one may genocide an entire isolated population and use the resources freed up to subsidize the settlement and growth of another group of people.
yogi (#14): point well taken, and consistent with what I’ve said here.
But this fails to address the other reason why I think we don’t want to allow this sort of genocide, which is that if it’s allowed, the threat of it can be used to blackmail entire groups. Fetuses are pretty much insusceptible to blackmail.
While it is true that the threat of genocide can be an effective blackmail strategy, it’s so far down the list of reasons to oppose it that I’m surprised it’s mentioned.
I am always fascinated by what you write even (especially?) when I disagree. I would love to read more about why you seem uninterested in deontology – I’m sure you know far more about it than I do. It’s the morality of the act itself that matters to me, not the consequences of it (how many people care about the person, how many people are blackmailed, etc).
Patrick (#16): I’ve changed my mind about this more than once and might change it again, but it seems to me that if we’re going to appeal to deontology, then we have pretty much no mechanism for settling disputes. You state that an action is immoral if it meets criteria A, B and C; I say it’s immoral only if it meets criteria D, E and F; how are we to settle that?
A partial answer is that you could show me examples of acts that fail to meet my criteria but which I recognize as immoral. And I do think there’s something to be learned from that kind of conversation. But in the end we are left with “these kind of acts are immoral because they feel immoral to me”, and if those acts don’t feel immoral to you, then we are entirely at an impasse.
And if there really is no way to settle those disputes, that suggests to me that there is no important sense in which there is such a thing as a right answer.
So I am pretty dismissive of deontology these days. I wasn’t always this dismissive, though I’m pretty sure I was always at least skeptical (though it wouldn’t surprise me if you could find something I wrote thirty years ago that contradicts my memory).
When I wrote a book about fairness in public policy (“Fair Play”), I defined fairness as “things that people recognize as fair when they observe their children interacting” and then asked to what extent various public policies are fair. That flirts with deontology, but is not exactly the same thing, because I was asking whether people in the voting booth live up to their own expressed standards, not some objectively correct standards.
My inclinations on this subject are surely not based on knowing more than you do. I have no doubt I know more than you do about some things, and that you know more than I do about some other things, but I don’t claim to know very much at all about what’s been said re the merits/demerits of deontology. Maybe if I were better educated, I’d have a different perspective.
Thank you for that. Part of the reason I’m so sure you know far more about deontology is that I had to google “What is deontology” – ha!
Your response that I greatly appreciate further demonstrates it. I agree with you that there is no way to settle those basic disputes of right and wrong.
If I were to try to be Coaseian about this, I’d be dishonest – I would just be looking for stories to tell that support that basic feeling that I’m not willing to budge from, I wouldn’t be going about it objectively and honestly.
The “dismissal” of deontological considerations here reminds me of Robert Nozick’s critique of John Rawls’ “behind the veil” construct – in that case, if you rig the game by restricting yourself to end-state principles of justice while ruling out any role for *process* principles (the justness of the path by which you arrived at a particular distributional state), you’ve effectively pre-ordained the outcome. In this case of course the analogous point (made by others) would be that for many people the concern isn’t primarily about the net sum of lives or other associated “utilitarian” considerations, but the rights potentially acquired by particular, actual, *conceived* individual lives.
And on that note Nozick provides an excellent example of how there’s much richness and reward to be gained from engaging on that level (with the requisite skill and expertise). Some might call it one of the fundamental or “big questions”?
[BTW Jim WK also makes a nice attempt to frame the issue within Rawls’ own terms.]
And the lower likelihood there will be universal agreement on such questions at that level seems more like an argument for allowing for different resolutions across more localized jurisdictions
iceman:
And the lower likelihood there will be universal agreement on such questions at that level seems more like an argument for allowing for different resolutions across more localized jurisdictions
Agreed.
SL: “You might be willing to pay a substantial fraction of your lifetime income to prevent yourself from being aborted, but at the
time of the abortion decision, those negotiations are quite impractical… one might argue that the law should enforce the
outcome that we presume those negotiations would have led to, by prohibiting the abortion.”
hmmm…. We don’t allow children to enter into legally enforceable contracts, therefore we mandate the birth, and mother’s obligation
to support him until age 18.
At that point, they negotiate his existence. She might consider him a major burden, a real crimp in her lifestyle at the time of pregnancy, and later. So she demands big compensation.
Perhaps he’s unable to compete, even accounting for future earnings. She sues to enforce the contract, i.e. the result of this auction/negotiation. Should the judge have the right to enforce compliance, via retroactive abortion?
It reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode, a future war, with ‘virtual bombs’, computer generated, to avoid property damage. The bombing victims would then voluntarily report to incineration facilities, the next day. Very clean!
Richard (#22): The usual principle — which is justified in many textbooks, though I’ll not try to summarize that here — is that we enforce the parts of the implicit contract that affect the allocation of resources (e.g., in this case, the womb) but not the parts that affect the distribution of income (e.g. the actual payment). If my ship is going down, I am allowed to tie up to your dock because we believe I’d have agreed to pay your price for that. I am **not** required to actually pay that price. So your scenario departs pretty far from the usual legal, economic and philosophical standards.
I couldn’t get past your second paragraph. Where does this presumption come from and what exactly does it mean? What does this ‘we care for’ phrase mean? It would help me understand what you are trying to say if you could spend the opening time clearly and carefully defining the terms you are going to use, and base all presumptions on something other that the ether.
Commodore (#24): It means that the social welfare function takes as arguments the utility of individual fetuses, the utility of individual (post-birth) people, and treats those arguments symmetrically.
Robin Hanson thought along similar lines of subsidizing births rather than banning abortion:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/10/win-win-babies-as-infrastructure.html