Yesterday, while listening to the latest episode of Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense, I was reminded of a working paper I read a few years ago, which in turn reminded me of some photos I took previously of the back seat of my car. The reason I took these photos was to show some other parents how we managed to fit three car seats in one car. The working paper I was reminded of caused a bit of a storm within wonkish internet circles when it dropped in 2020 – the paper claimed to have found causal evidence that car seat requirements reduce the number of children people have.

The study design was pretty nifty – the authors exploit the fact that there is variation, across different States in the USA and across time, in the age at which a child must legally use a car seat. In particular, they found that the birth rate for women who already have two children in car seats was lower, all else equal, than other women that year (in general, three car seats means you need to buy a bigger car – this is why other parents were actually interested in seeing our car seat set up, because getting three seats across the back seat is tricky!). To further bolster their findings, the authors report that the effect only holds for families with access to a car, and for families where there is a male present – meaning the two front seats are more likely to be occupied.

I’m not proposing that we should start a campaign to relax car seat laws – I couldn’t possibly comment on the age at which the net benefits of requiring car seats turn negative. However, there are two things that this study underlines for me: people respond to incentives, and pro-life people have more skin in the game than pro-choice people when it comes to policies that impact on women, families and children.

The first point is one that people tend to agree with in general, but get nervous of when they think through the particulars. For example, almost everyone agrees with some form of financial support for families with children: child benefit, for example, has no political opponents, while there is also general support for Back to School grants, Working Family Payment, maternity and paternity leave, etc. 

However, consider a policy that gives every pregnant woman a cash payment of €15,000 when they hit the second trimester, no questions asked. It’s hard to imagine that this would not increase the birth rate. It’s also hard to imagine that this would not decrease the abortion rate. But would this policy have any real support? It feels a bit mercenary, if not downright distasteful – but this reaction probably shows that most people think it would work! People would respond to the incentive to have more babies. If something like the cost of a new car means people have fewer kids, then a cash bonus would also mean people have more kids.

I think it’s worth the pro-life movement having an honest reflection on the incentives that Irish women and families respond to when deciding to have children and/or abortions. We don’t have to endorse potentially dodgy policies like cash payments – but we should at least ask ourselves why such policies feel dodgy, or what this could tell us about how to more effectively advocate for the unborn.

On the second point, one aspect of the paper’s analysis is super odd: the quantification of the costs of not having babies. The paper estimated how many lives had been saved by car seats, and how many babies had not been born because of car seats – but putting a number of the “badness” of babies who were never conceived is…odd. There seemed to be a glaring omission: sure, lots of babies weren’t conceived as a result of car seat laws – but at least some babies must have been conceived and subsequently aborted. This fact didn’t feature in any discussion of the paper that I came across.

The silence on this topic could well stem, of course, from the fact that unlike many pro-choice people, pro-life people think unborn babies are our moral equals. Pro-life people don’t think unborn babies are potential people – they are actual people, under the pro-life view. For at least some pro-choice people, there’s no real difference between a policy that prevents conceptions and a law that causes abortions, but for someone who believes unborn babies are our moral equals, there’s a huge difference.

This is not, of course, to say that we shouldn’t consider the “potential” people that aren’t here due to car seat laws. It’s just that it’s much harder to figure what, if anything, is bad about people who never existed (as opposed to people who did exist and were subsequently killed). This brings us back to Harris’s podcast, which featured an interview with David Edmonds, a biographer of the late philosopher Derek Parfit. Parfit made a name for himself for, among other things, considering this very issue – how do we account for people who never existed, or may exist in the future but don’t exist right now? 

It’s certainly true that no matter what your views on abortion, there are important questions to be asked about policies that may make families more or less likely to have a child – such policies are not costless! For pro-life people though, we have more skin in this game. We are not just considering potential people who never came to be because of car seat laws. We must also consider the actual people who were killed, because of car seat laws. It feels odd to even type that sentence, but if we actually, really believe that abortion kills unborn babies, then I’m pretty sure such a bizarre sentence is nonetheless accurate.

More generally, pro-life people should provide extra scrutiny of policies that may influence people’s decisions about babies and family size, one way or the other. We can’t leave it to pro-choice people to lead the charge on policies concerning children and families. We can work with them on these issues, for sure, but we need to be even more engaged, not less, on these issues, all else equal. Consistency demands it of us, but even more importantly, so does compassion towards the unborn.

Muireann