I was presented with a new perspective on a controversial topic. The issues is the highly contentious issue of abortion.
The two sides of this highly debated issue are the (so called) “pro choice” and “pro life” sides. The argument surrounding miscarriage crossed my path recently, and made me realize why I find the issue confusing and ambiguous.
I realized that I could make arguments for either side that had incredulous statements, making both arguments unsound. Let me explain by presenting the incredelous arguments:
People arguing from the pro choice side believe that abortion should be available and legal to all. One of the primary challenges to this is the question of when life begins. Most pro choice people will deny that life begins at conception, since this is a simple collection of cells that has the potential to be a human.
But if life does not begin at conception, then when does it begin? This is where it gets messy, so I asked AI for its opinion on it. This is what it replied with:
“Biology can describe several clear developmental starting points, but there is no single universally agreed answer across science, philosophy, law, and religion about when “human life” or personhood begins. Many biologists and professional statements treat fertilization as the start of a new human organism, while others emphasize later milestones such as gastrulation, brain activity, viability, or birth.”
We already run into a problem, because we see that we cannot get a unanimous consent on even this issue. The range of when life can begin goes from fertilization all the way up to birth! This would mean that even pro choice biologists won’t be able to objectively decide on the window of when abortion should be legal. When you add in people from legal and academia, there will be an even bigger disconnect on the decision of this critical first idea.
It also wouldn’t be possible to take the case that it is ending a life, but that is OK. Because then we would have to open up the topic of whether murder in general was OK, and then we would enter the incredulous (and impractical) territory again.
So I would call out anyone taking a hard stand on a specific policy for when life begins as incredulous, because experts in science and philosophy cannot themselves agree on it.
So now we can look at the pro life argument. This is the stance that I realized also was not supportable for similar incredulous reasons. The thing that pushed me into this realization was the topic of miscarriage.
Pro life people will argue that abortion is murder, and they will generally argue that life begins at fertilization.
But what about miscarriage?
If we accept the two pro life premises, then we have to accept that miscarriage, at least under some or most circumstances, is manslaughter.
But I would like to argue not against that ethically, but from a practical point of view, which is how would that be enforced?
I asked AI for some information on miscarriage and this is what it said:
“Globally, an estimated 23 million pregnancies end in miscarriage each year, equating to about 44 losses every minute.” “Most miscarriages—around 80%—occur very early, during the first trimester (up to 13 weeks of pregnancy), with the highest risk in the first few weeks after conception. Of these early losses, a large portion happen before 6 weeks, often before many people even confirm pregnancy via ultrasound, sometimes classified as chemical pregnancies shortly after implantation.”
So if we had to practically police miscarriages for possible instances of manslughter, how would we be able to track 23 million of them every year? Somewhat like the pro choice argument, we hit an incredulous implementation.
The abortion debate has some very interesting aspects of it:
1) it is important, it deals with life or death 2) it has two very strong opposing sides 3) many of those on the opposing sides are absolutely convinced of the “rightness” of their arguments 4) the topic continues to be debated and legislated
But what if both sides conceded that they had immense logical and practical errors in their beliefs? Could we then pivot the debate into how we can “real world” implement solutions for this issue? With any luck we will.
