(Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay)

If you’re the typical sort person who reads pro-life blogs, the pro-life position probably seems to you not just true, but obviously true. It doesn’t feel like an edge case, one where you’re having to struggle to see whether the general principles you’re committed to apply. You have a confidence in your view that you don’t have about your opinions about the correct marginal tax rate or the appropriateness of white lies. Don’t kill babies: it’s obvious.

You might think that learning more about the complexities of the abortion debate might swiftly remove that sense of obviousness. But the more you actually look into it, the more the pro-life view seems distinguished by its clarity and simplicity. Your feelings about the foetal personhood debate might be captured by this (very uncharitable) meme.

(Is it wrong though?)

There are other reasons which might bolster your sense of the obvious wrongness of abortion. When discussing anything other than abortion, people usually refer to the unborn as babies. People don’t post ‘lovely foetus’ under their friends’ ultrasound pictures, or refer to ‘the product of conception’s first kick’. Most children are horrified when they’re first introduced to the concept of abortion unless it’s cloaked in heavily euphemistic language. The pro-life position, it seems to you, has a sort of default status. It’s what any person would believe unless they’d been very badly misled.

Maybe this describes your own view. If it doesn’t, it probably describes that of plenty of pro-lifers you know. At the very least, you can probably see something compelling about the view described. But it leaves behind a puzzle.

The puzzle is this: if it’s so obvious, why isn’t everyone pro-life?

One possible answer is that pro-choice people just have really bad characters. But that doesn’t ring true. Look around you: you’ll see pro-choice people who are kind, loyal, honest, brave. You’ll see pro-choice people who give up their time and energy to fight for the rights of refugees, of women in the workplace, of children. If most pro-choice people are terrible, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that most pro-lifers are too.

Another possibility is that people have been misled or tricked. The media, the NGOs, the elites, the political class, the neoliberals, the capitalists, the academics: some combination of these have led people astray. But there’s something unsatisfying about this too. If abortion is so obviously wrong, why are so many of the people around you so easy to fool? You don’t think that a prolonged campaign from the Irish Times arguing for infanticide would convince anyone.

So doubt creeps in. Maybe people are just honestly mistaken. What’s more, as you look even deeper and come to understand pro-choice arguments better, some of them do seem to have some serious force, even if they never convince you. Even more than that, you see how the values the pro-choice person defends (bodily integrity, freedom, the equality of women) are good values, even if they’ve here been misapplied in defence of a really bad conclusion.

Maybe, you think, the issues at play are really complex, and getting the right answer depends on being right about some quite tricky questions that themselves don’t seem so obvious. And if that’s true, then maybe abortion’s wrongness itself isn’t so obvious either.

Where does that leave you? Let me abandon my coy use of the second person and put my cards on the table. I think that most pro-lifers could stand to do a much better job of understanding and empathising with pro-choicers. If giving up on the sense that abortion is obviously wrong helps us be less self-righteous and more likely to listen to people who disagree with us, we’re probably in a better position than we were before.

But I don’t think that answer is fully satisfying. Just as some things about the abortion debate make more sense when you think the right answer isn’t obvious, there are other things that make more sense when you think it is. What is going on with the fact that children tend to be instinctively pro-life? Why do people talk about unborn babies that way? Why does the ‘human rights for all humans’ position seem to fit so much better with the spirit of past human rights movements than does a permanent exclusion of some humans from the circle of equality?

Perhaps most fundamentally, I believe as a general matter that getting the right answer on an absolutely fundamental ethical question like this shouldn’t require a degree in philosophy. Moral knowledge, at least of basic questions like ‘who matters?’ is something that we can all get. It’s not, or it shouldn’t be, the preserve of an intellectual elite that performs highly abstract calculations then hands out the correct conclusions to the rest of us.

Is there a way of preserving a spirit of charity, goodwill, and understanding towards pro-choice people, and of acknowledging the difficulties and complexities of the abortion debate, while affirming that there’s an important way in which the pro-life position is indeed obvious? I think there is. I hope to write about it in another blog.

Ben