Solving the Abortion Equation

An answer that should satisfy almost everyone

Luc Koch put out a short piece today commenting on the recent spat between antiwoke post-academic James Lindsay and the trad-Christian right over the abortion question. I don’t know the specifics of the drama and nor do I particularly care, but in Luc’s characteristically thoughtful and incisive fashion he emphasized an aspect of the debate which, once he drew attention to it, crystallized the source of the acrimony. Namely, the insistence on a binary distinction between human/not-human, or living/not-living.

The abortion debate revolves around the issue of when life begins. At one extreme are Christian fundamentalists who insist that life begins at conception, a position lampooned by Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ skit. At the other extreme are feminists with side-shaves and blue armpit hair who shout their abortion as a prayer to Moloch and demand the right to smash open a baby’s head with a hammer as it pokes out during birth. Both sides are ridiculous in their own way, and I think the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle. I just can’t find it in myself to get terribly upset over a pregnancy being terminated in the first month or so, when it really is just a clump of cells. On the other hand, dismantling a five-month old fetus by pulling its limbs off with forceps is ghoulish.

Much of this seems to come down to a legal system that requires a sharp distinction between permissible and impermissible. Before a certain stage in development, the fetus is not considered human or alive, and can therefore be terminated without opprobrium. After a certain stage it’s murder, and therefore forbidden. The fight then degenerates into a rugby scrum over just where that line is to be drawn, and as is the nature with any such contest, the two sides invariably polarize around the two extreme goals of absolute prohibition vs. absolute license.

The problem is that this isn’t at all how life works. The boundary between animate and inanimate is famously hard to define: are viruses alive or dead? Is the freshly-picked lettuce in your fridge alive or dead? Similarly, growth of any organism is not a discrete process, but a continuous one. At what point does a baby become a toddler, a toddler a child, a child a teenager, a teenager an adult? It’s a similar problem to defining where the mountain ends, and the valley begins.

And yet, there are mountains and valleys, children and teenagers, living creatures and dead objects.

It seems to me that the abortion fight could be solved to most peoples’ satisfaction if the legal framework were to be adjusted to account for the ill-defined boundary between ‘clump of cells’ and ‘tiny person’. Rather than a relatively arbitrary date being assigned, before which it is allowed and after which it is not, we could instead treat it the way that traffic violations are handled.

If speeding on the highway was disincentivized in the same binary fashion abortion is, then below the speed limit there would of course be no fine, but above it one would be thrown behind by bars for a decade, and whether the speed limit was exceeded by 1 km/s or 100 km/s would make no difference to the penalty. This would obviously be absurd, since there’s clearly a considerable difference between puttering through the school crossing zone and ever so slightly above the posted limit as you’re slowing down to meet it, and stomping on the gas so you can careen through the crosswalk at Formula 1 speeds. Thus, speeding tickets adopt an escalating gradation of punishment in proportion to the degree that the limit is exceeded, from the entirely nominal (and rarely enforced) to the ruinous.

In exactly the same way, abortion could be disincentivized with, for instance, an escalating fine. As an illustrative example, we might adopt a rule that the woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy must pay a tax of n^2 dollars¹, where n is the number of days from conception. On day 0 no fine would be levied, which seems appropriate to what is, realistically, about on the same level as shedding a skin cell. At the end of the first month, it would be about $900 – pricey enough to hurt, but doable for most people. By the end of the first trimester, which is the point at which the fetus starts to resemble a human, it would cost $8100, enough to dissuade most people but a price some would be willing to pay if they really didn’t want to have a kid with that guy. By the end of the second trimester – a point at which the fetus is well past ‘resembling’ a human – the procedure would incur a fine of $32,400. A partial birth abortion of a full-term baby would cost a cool $72,900, which unless you’re independently wealthy you will not want to pay.

The only real objection I can think of to such a system (beyond those that would be raised by the extremist positions on either side, who can tolerate no compromise) would be that it dehumanizes life by putting a price on it. This is, I suppose, true, but realistically we do this all the time, whether in terms of life insurance payouts or class-action lawsuits against corrupt pharmaceutical corporations. I don’t see any particular reason why abortion should be treated any differently.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Are you really suggesting that women be taxed for getting abortions?”

Why yes, I am implying that they should be financially responsible for their own moral choices.

“But what if she was raped!?”

Leaving aside that rape-induced pregnancy and consequent abortion is a vanishingly rare corner case, I’d be quite happy for the rapist, if convicted, to be on the hook for the cost, along with in jail for the rape.

Something like 65% of abortions are performed in the first 8 weeks, meaning a maximum fine of around $3200. If a woman is really serious about not having that baby, I think she’d be willing to pay that. In other words, for the vast majority of women, an escalating fine system would make very little difference to the availability of the procedure. This is the time window within which abortions are chemically induced, the drugs for which can cost several hundred dollars in any case. Thus, this system would essentially just result in a marginal increase in cost for most abortions, leaving availability unchanged, and keeping the feminists mostly happy.

Surgical abortions, which are the really grisly procedures involving sucking the baby out with a vacuum or cutting it to shreds inside the uterus before reassembling the pieces in a tray to make sure there’s nothing left to rot in the haunted womb, are performed up to about 24 weeks – at which point the fine or tax would be $28,000, a stiff enough price tag to persuade most people to just keep the sprog. It’s surgical abortions that elicit the visceral disgust and rage in most people, and this should cut down the number of such procedures dramatically, so abortion opponents should be mostly satisfied, too.

A geometrically increasing abortion tax is just one possible example of a continuous treatment of the problem. Maybe the fine should be steeper: $n^3, with a partial birth abortion coming in at a cool $20 million. Perhaps other penalties might be deployed, such as escalating periods of community service ranging from hours to years. These are all details, none of which are salient to the main point, which is to bridge the gap between the morally neutral act of killing a just-fertilized egg and the monstrous crime of smashing open a baby’s head, and to stop trying to pretend as though these very different actions are somehow morally equivalent whether one way or the other. Pro-lifers look stupid when they insist that every sperm is sacred, and pro-choicers look like Satanic ghouls when they celebrate baby murder with their abortion doulas. Most reasonable people don’t much want to be part of either camp of lunatics, but so long as the the two sides continues to collide on the football field as they try to push the line between murder and medical procedure this way and that, we’re all going to keep getting dragged in to it, and our political leaders can continue using the issue as a way to avoid doing anything about the myriad problems that are affecting all of us.

1. When I composed this in OpenOffice, because fuck Microsoft, I had that exponent all nicely formatted with a proper superscript, which formatting disappeared upon ctl-V-ing into Substack. C’mon, guys, get that fixed, we need proper equation editing. I’m not asking for LaTeX or anything, although that would be cool, but superscripts and subscripts isn’t asking much.