The arguments in favor or against the practice grew old and stale very quickly leading the two sides into some sort of detente. Legalized abortion became the new normal and people found other things to worry about. That is, until recently.
The issue of abortion is taking on a new urgency because of various demographic and technological developments resulting in renewed hostility in the Culture Wars. The arguments aren't new, and this essay isn't trying to advance another one. But the political and social climate has certainly changed and this is what I want to articulate.
The Chink in the Armor of Roe v Wade
Roe v Wade's decision was never meant to be an unrestricted license to abortions. Many proponents of abortion would like to think this is the case, but it's not. The court rejected the argument that life began at conception. However, the justices did acknowledge that the question of whether or not a woman should be permitted to have an abortion revolves around the personhood of the developing fetus. When does personhood happen? Unfortunately, nobody had a clear answer in 1973. In the majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun writes:
We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, in this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.Blackmun continues:
The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment. The appellant conceded as much on reargument.I don't intend to give a history lesson on Roe v Wade or abortion practices or to argue whether or not it was the correct decision. Stare decisis is a legal doctrine that suggests that future court rulings should be consistent with and uphold previous court decisions. However, Blackmun's opinion allows a way for Roe to be overturned if we can answer some questions that border on the metaphysical.
Medicine Marches On
If we are going to reject that life begins at conception because it's obviously "too early" to consider a clump of cells to be a person, and also, that birth is considered "too late" because the baby is obviously a person at that point, and the whole birthing experience is a process that can last many hours, then life obviously begins at some point between conception and birth.
The average human pregnancy lasts 40-42 weeks. This is different than a gestational period, which is typically longer, but this difference doesn't matter much for this discussion. It's common for infants to be born earlier than 40 weeks and still survive without medical intervention. We have no problem, as a society, determining that that baby born a little early as a person.
Likewise, we also try and save babies born prematurely that wouldn't survive without medical intervention. We clearly consider them to have personhood at this point, also. What has changed over the past 45 years is that babies being born prematurely at an earlier and earlier point of pregnancy are having better and better chances at surviving due to advances in medicine.
Recent news has reported on a baby born prematurely in California. "Saybie" was born after a mere 23 weeks gestation and weighed less than a can of Pepsi. There's no question that this would have ended up being a miscarriage or stillborn when Roe was decided because medical science wasn't as advanced. But after 5 months in neonatal intensive care, Saybie ended up going home from the hospital with her parents.
Maybe this was an exception for the moment. Maybe Saybie beat some long odds of survival and we shouldn't hang our hats on it when deciding personhood. But what if this becomes the norm? No doubt that the doctors and nurses at the hospital learned a few things while treating her and decide to share information that ends up saving a lot of other Saybies. What then?
Pro-Choice advocates will argue that saving Saybie was a courtesy granted to the mother (the father has no say) because the mother wanted the baby. This effectively argues that a person has rights dependent on the whims of his mother. The only problem is that this argument is inconsistent with Roe. Blackmun writes for the majority opinion:
Before you think I'm going off the deep end with this line of thought, I want you to consider Norma McCorvey. She was the one who sued over the right to have an abortion and was the plaintiff in Roe v Wade. She seemed to have regretted her responsibility in the Roe ruling once the social impact on women and society became apparent. She became a Pro-life activist who tried to get Roe overturned until her death in 2017.
So yes, it's completely within the realm of possibility that younger generations might want to do away with the practice after realizing the impact it has had on their peer group.
Behavioral genetics is another branch of study that is providing evidence to support the idea that some behavioral traits have a genetic foundation and influence. Some research is even indicating that our politics and religious belief systems may have genetic roots. It would be an oversimplification to say that there is a Pro-life gene or Pro-choice gene, but perhaps the interaction and expression of multiple genes (the genotype) creates a psychological and behavioral framework that would cause an individual to gravitate towards being Pro-life or Pro-Choice.
Both population genetics and behavioral genetics will explain the tendency of our population to become more Pro-life over time and could result in the passage of laws and court cases that restrict abortion or even overturning Roe. The reasoning is pretty straight-forward. Since 1973 many people that may have inherited the psychological and behavioral genotype that would favor a pro-choice orientation aren't being born in sufficient numbers because many of those pregnancies are being aborted, hence reducing the occurrence of that genotype being expressed in future generations. Meanwhile, the pro-life genotypes are being passed down at a greater rate by virtue of being born. So we start to see a shift in population genetics because now the social and legal environment is selecting against pro-choice genotypes while allowing pro-life genotypes to thrive.
The changes in these demographics might be imperceptible at first, but when these changes get compounded over years and generations, it could result in a significant change in the population genetics in favor of pro-life. The college student that so vigorously advocated for her right to have abortions in 1973 might be scratching her head right about now, wondering why there are so many pro-life people coming out of the woodwork. Simply, the population genetics that existed in the US in 1973 has changed because pro-choice people aren't passing on their genes as effectively. They are now a rapidly-dwindling minority.
Genetics, alone, won't explain the change in attitude of the public towards abortion. Socialization and persuasion does play a part as well. But socialization and persuasion would be the only tools available to the pro-choice cause. They aren't replacing their numbers by reproducing. Pro-life people are reproducing at a much faster rate and the developments in science and medicine that I described above are making their job at persuasion a lot easier.
The average human pregnancy lasts 40-42 weeks. This is different than a gestational period, which is typically longer, but this difference doesn't matter much for this discussion. It's common for infants to be born earlier than 40 weeks and still survive without medical intervention. We have no problem, as a society, determining that that baby born a little early as a person.
Likewise, we also try and save babies born prematurely that wouldn't survive without medical intervention. We clearly consider them to have personhood at this point, also. What has changed over the past 45 years is that babies being born prematurely at an earlier and earlier point of pregnancy are having better and better chances at surviving due to advances in medicine.
Recent news has reported on a baby born prematurely in California. "Saybie" was born after a mere 23 weeks gestation and weighed less than a can of Pepsi. There's no question that this would have ended up being a miscarriage or stillborn when Roe was decided because medical science wasn't as advanced. But after 5 months in neonatal intensive care, Saybie ended up going home from the hospital with her parents.
Maybe this was an exception for the moment. Maybe Saybie beat some long odds of survival and we shouldn't hang our hats on it when deciding personhood. But what if this becomes the norm? No doubt that the doctors and nurses at the hospital learned a few things while treating her and decide to share information that ends up saving a lot of other Saybies. What then?
Pro-Choice advocates will argue that saving Saybie was a courtesy granted to the mother (the father has no say) because the mother wanted the baby. This effectively argues that a person has rights dependent on the whims of his mother. The only problem is that this argument is inconsistent with Roe. Blackmun writes for the majority opinion:
Physicians and their scientific colleagues have regarded that event [live birth] with less interest and have tended to focus either upon conception, upon live birth, or upon the interim point at which the fetus becomes "viable," that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.Blackmun seems to acknowledge that if we're going to reject birth or conception as the points of where human life begins then the only other criteria we have is viability, even with medical aid. We may still reject conception as when human life begins, but there's no question that the viability standard established by Roe is trending earlier and earlier in the pregnancy. A state may decide to ban abortions after 23 weeks gestation and it would be fully consistent with Roe.
Embryos and Trollies
Pro-Choice advocates like to play a game. It goes something like this:
At this point, I recommend sitting down with the smug pro-choice advocate, pour him a cup of tea, and break the news to him that he isn't as clever as he thinks. We can play this game all day. What if, instead of a child and a cart of embryos, you had to choose between your mother or an outlaw biker with tattoos and a felony record? Or between a man or a woman? Or a black man and a white man? Are you any more or less of a hypocrite if you choose one over the other?
The Fire in the Hospital Game is a modern version of the Trolley Problem--a similar thought experiment which makes you decide who you'd rather save. And this problem reveals a lot of characteristics about human nature that have been confirmed in social science research. It's the tendency of people to prefer children over adults, women over men, your own race over other races, patriots over traitors, etc. Research even shows that the traits can be completely arbitrary or randomly assigned. People have selected preferences over shirt color, whether or not the person is wearing a hat, or their taste in music!
What this philosophical conundrum doesn't do is dispute that we are all entitled to equal rights and protections under the law. The fact that you would probably choose to save the child in the burning hospital doesn't dispute whether or not the fertilized embryos are people.
What if you had enough time to look inside the test tubes in the cart full of fertilized embryos and see this:
You may still decide to save the unconscious 5-year-old child in the hospital fire but I bet the decision became harder to make. And some readers might have changed their mind depending on the circumstances. The above image is a screen capture of a 4D ultrasound of a 10 week embryo. It already has the appearance and morphology of a human infant but is half the age of Saybie and only 2 inches long!
You're in a hospital that has caught fire and are heading to the exit. You are alone when you notice in a room to your right that there is a cart of test tubes containing human embryos about to be consumed by the fire. In another room to your left you notice an unconscious, 5 year-old-child who is also about to be consumed by fire. Seconds count and you can only spare enough time to save one of them or else you all get consumed by fire. Do you save the cart of embryos or the child?If they're honest, most people would choose to save the child instead of the embryos. Which is suppose to trigger an "A-HA!" moment from the pro-choice crowd that supposedly means that even pro-life people wouldn't value the embryos enough to rescue them. Pro-life advocates have painted themselves into a corner that is philosophically indefensible, right?
At this point, I recommend sitting down with the smug pro-choice advocate, pour him a cup of tea, and break the news to him that he isn't as clever as he thinks. We can play this game all day. What if, instead of a child and a cart of embryos, you had to choose between your mother or an outlaw biker with tattoos and a felony record? Or between a man or a woman? Or a black man and a white man? Are you any more or less of a hypocrite if you choose one over the other?
The Fire in the Hospital Game is a modern version of the Trolley Problem--a similar thought experiment which makes you decide who you'd rather save. And this problem reveals a lot of characteristics about human nature that have been confirmed in social science research. It's the tendency of people to prefer children over adults, women over men, your own race over other races, patriots over traitors, etc. Research even shows that the traits can be completely arbitrary or randomly assigned. People have selected preferences over shirt color, whether or not the person is wearing a hat, or their taste in music!
What this philosophical conundrum doesn't do is dispute that we are all entitled to equal rights and protections under the law. The fact that you would probably choose to save the child in the burning hospital doesn't dispute whether or not the fertilized embryos are people.
What if you had enough time to look inside the test tubes in the cart full of fertilized embryos and see this:
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| From the Endowment for Human Development |
Empathy is a tendency to sympathize and have feelings for the experiences of other people. Although empathy is credited as a pro-social emotional element for many different animals--and evolutionary psychology considers empathy to be a behavior adaptation that occurred in our evolutionary past that increased a species chances of survival--empathy is not shared equally among members of a species. Despite the fact that we try to treat everyone equally in a legal sense, our greatest feelings of empathy are reserved for people that we determine to be more vulnerable such as women and children, or even pets. Our feeling of empathy manifests itself in legal and social customs such as default custody arrangements favoring mothers in divorce cases, rescuing women and children first from sinking ships as well as considerably more public funding for breast cancer research than for all other diseases, to name a few examples.
Being able to see the embryos in the cart changes the circumstances in the hospital fire entirely because of our sense of empathy. Before this, we still could talk about whether or not an embryo is a person, but the conversation felt abstract. Seeing the physical resemblance of embryos to human beings with your own eyes triggers empathic feelings. It's instinct!
As somebody who has a scientific background, I find these developments fascinating--and not just in a technical sense. Science is a very reductionist way of thinking: We are trying to take complex phenomena and systems and break them down into simpler components to study, understand them and hope to make some accurate predictions. If any field of epistemology were to describe a human embryo as "just a cluster of cells" or " a parasite" it would be science. However, due to our intervention earlier and earlier into the pregnancy to save lives and being able to look at what is inside the womb in unprecedented level of detail, scientific knowledge has had a significant impact on our definition of personhood according to Roe.
The Missing Generation
We talked about the technical and legal aspects. What about demographics? They're changing and in ways unforeseen by the people that advocated for and defended Roe.
How many adults--do you think--feel lucky to be born to mothers that chose to have their babies instead of aborting them? When Roe was decided in 1973 this wasn't a question many would have asked because they never knew of a different time. Some desperate souls might have gone the risky route of a back alley abortion but this was rare and could be dismissed as something "other people" did.
Well, people born in 1973 became the people of Generation X followed by Millenials, both of whom can vote now. Generation Z is following close behind and approaching voting age with some polling indicating Generation Z to be the most conservative generation since the silent era.
How lucky do you think a lot of these people think they are? Maybe they think that they barely dodged a doctor's scalpel? How are they looking at the generations before them that implemented segregation? How will they look at the Baby Boomers that ushered in free love and when the expected pregnancies occurred, decided to sue over their right to end them instead of accepting the consequences? How do you think they would feel knowing that by the time they reached voting age, an excess of 50 million of their peers never got to experience life. This is equivalent to the number of people killed in World War II!
Before you think I'm going off the deep end with this line of thought, I want you to consider Norma McCorvey. She was the one who sued over the right to have an abortion and was the plaintiff in Roe v Wade. She seemed to have regretted her responsibility in the Roe ruling once the social impact on women and society became apparent. She became a Pro-life activist who tried to get Roe overturned until her death in 2017.
So yes, it's completely within the realm of possibility that younger generations might want to do away with the practice after realizing the impact it has had on their peer group.
Pro-choice Falling to Natural Selection
Population genetics studies the distribution of certain traits within populations and how environmental factors can effect how often those traits appear within that population. Some traits are better suited in the environment and will thrive, resulting in these traits appearing more often in the population than attributed to chance due to the individuals with that trait outcompeting individuals without that trait. Traits that aren't suited for the environment tend to appear less frequently in that population or be eliminated (extinct) entirely because they simply can't thrive in that environment.Behavioral genetics is another branch of study that is providing evidence to support the idea that some behavioral traits have a genetic foundation and influence. Some research is even indicating that our politics and religious belief systems may have genetic roots. It would be an oversimplification to say that there is a Pro-life gene or Pro-choice gene, but perhaps the interaction and expression of multiple genes (the genotype) creates a psychological and behavioral framework that would cause an individual to gravitate towards being Pro-life or Pro-Choice.
Both population genetics and behavioral genetics will explain the tendency of our population to become more Pro-life over time and could result in the passage of laws and court cases that restrict abortion or even overturning Roe. The reasoning is pretty straight-forward. Since 1973 many people that may have inherited the psychological and behavioral genotype that would favor a pro-choice orientation aren't being born in sufficient numbers because many of those pregnancies are being aborted, hence reducing the occurrence of that genotype being expressed in future generations. Meanwhile, the pro-life genotypes are being passed down at a greater rate by virtue of being born. So we start to see a shift in population genetics because now the social and legal environment is selecting against pro-choice genotypes while allowing pro-life genotypes to thrive.
The changes in these demographics might be imperceptible at first, but when these changes get compounded over years and generations, it could result in a significant change in the population genetics in favor of pro-life. The college student that so vigorously advocated for her right to have abortions in 1973 might be scratching her head right about now, wondering why there are so many pro-life people coming out of the woodwork. Simply, the population genetics that existed in the US in 1973 has changed because pro-choice people aren't passing on their genes as effectively. They are now a rapidly-dwindling minority.
Genetics, alone, won't explain the change in attitude of the public towards abortion. Socialization and persuasion does play a part as well. But socialization and persuasion would be the only tools available to the pro-choice cause. They aren't replacing their numbers by reproducing. Pro-life people are reproducing at a much faster rate and the developments in science and medicine that I described above are making their job at persuasion a lot easier.
The Canary in the Coal Mine
I think we should be paying more attention to what is happening in black communities. Not just because we are suppose to be a tolerant and inclusive nation, although that should be a big reason. It's because any policies or laws that we implement are going to be felt first by the black communities. Second, the effect of those laws seem to be more pronounced in black communities compared to other communities. This doesn't mean that white communities won't feel the effects. They'll just feel them later and in a diminished fashion.
In effect, black communities are the Canary in the Coal Mine when it comes to the health of our society. By this model I'm proposing, we can evaluate the effects of Roe on our society by looking at how it impacts the black community and it hasn't been good. Devastating, in fact. Is there such a thing as self-genocide?
Let's consider that blacks make up 12-13% of our population. Let's assume that half of that are black women. So about 6-7% of the population is black women. This small segment of the population is responsible for 28% of the abortions in the US during 2014! Which puts the abortion rate among black women 3 times higher than for white women.
In a city like New York City, there are more black babies aborted than born alive! Even when controlling for poverty or low household income, black women are over represented in abortion statistics. Gang violence and police shootings get a lot of press these days, but abortion rights has truly been a silent killer in black communities.
Don't think that this is just a black problem. It's a white problem too. Liberalism itself is actively being culled and this is effecting the demographics of our country, both ideologically and racially.
In effect, black communities are the Canary in the Coal Mine when it comes to the health of our society. By this model I'm proposing, we can evaluate the effects of Roe on our society by looking at how it impacts the black community and it hasn't been good. Devastating, in fact. Is there such a thing as self-genocide?
Let's consider that blacks make up 12-13% of our population. Let's assume that half of that are black women. So about 6-7% of the population is black women. This small segment of the population is responsible for 28% of the abortions in the US during 2014! Which puts the abortion rate among black women 3 times higher than for white women.
In a city like New York City, there are more black babies aborted than born alive! Even when controlling for poverty or low household income, black women are over represented in abortion statistics. Gang violence and police shootings get a lot of press these days, but abortion rights has truly been a silent killer in black communities.
Don't think that this is just a black problem. It's a white problem too. Liberalism itself is actively being culled and this is effecting the demographics of our country, both ideologically and racially.
Public Opinion is Misleading
When looking at public opinion, you wouldn't think that anything I've just described is having any effect on public opinion polls. Besides a large spike in pro-choice support immediately after Roe was decided, public opinion on the issue of abortion is roughly 50/50 pro-life/pro-choice.
However, there is nuance. Many people that identify as pro-choice still favor restrictions on abortion. Most of them oppose partial birth abortions, for example. And more than you think seem in favor of restricting abortion practices to the first trimester of pregnancy. It's as if they acknowledge personhood of a developing fetus at a certain point, even if on a subconscious level. Blackmun's opinion in Roe also suggest that there could be a compelling interest of the state to regulate the practice. There are also pro-choice advocates that would never seek an abortion themselves. They simply believe that the government shouldn't decide the issue.
On the other hand, pro-life advocates are accepting of abortion to save a mother's life. As well as numerous allowances for other extenuating circumstances such as rape or incest.
There seems to be a spectrum of abortion practices that people tolerate and it varies among individuals. Where do you think this might shift the spectrum as science starts informing us about what is actually happening inside the womb? What does this do to the spectrum when one side is no longer being born? What does this mean to public attitude in the aggregate? What laws do we expect to be enacted because of this?
