[A slippery slope. Image by Hans from Pixabay]

One of the features of abortion debates is that often you have someone advocating for something like a “middle ground”: late abortions are worse than early abortions, and/or it’s OK to have more restrictions on later abortions than on earlier abortions. In fact, most legal regimes that regulate abortion, including the Irish one, follow this pattern of few if any restrictions during the first trimester with increasing restrictions thereafter.

A common pro-life response to this line is to use what is often called a “slippery slope” argument. The idea is to say, what’s so special about twelve weeks? What happens at twelve weeks and zero days pregnant that doesn’t happen at eleven weeks and six days? What happens at twenty two weeks that doesn’t happen at twenty one weeks and six days? Etc. The idea behind this argument is to lean on the fact that the person is uncomfortable with abortion at at least some point in pregnancy, and to blur the line between the point at which they are comfortable with abortion and the point at which they’re not.

While this is a very common pro-life tool, I don’t think it’s a particularly good one. First of all, the argument itself is shaky. The idea is that by pointing out that there’s no clear line between the point in pregnancy at which abortion is permissible and the point at which it’s not, it therefore follows that there’s no point at which abortion is permissible. However, this doesn’t actually follow at all, and it’s a fallacy to claim otherwise. In fact, this fallacy has its own name: the fallacy of the beard. The idea is that sometimes it’s hard to tell for sure whether someone has a beard, or whether they just haven’t shaved in a while and have some stubble. Another way of putting it is to imagine someone who definitely has a beard, and imagine that every hair in the beard was cut by just a millimetre at a time, again and again, until the person was eventually clean-shaven. Could we tell for sure when they stopped “having a beard”? No, of course not: there’s no exact length at which the beard changes from being a beard to be just being stubble. However, just because there’s no way to say for sure when a beard becomes a beard doesn’t mean we can never say whether or not someone has a beard!

The same argument applies here: just because the person you’re talking to may not be able to say exactly “This is the point at which abortion becomes wrong” does not therefore mean that there is no such thing as a point at which abortion becomes wrong. In fact, we use hard and fast rules, that we all know are artificial, to make cut-offs all the time. Most people think it’s a good idea that every adult can vote, and that it’s a bad idea for young children to be able to vote. And so, we decide that there’s an arbitrary age at which we grant the right to vote: their eighteenth birthday. Does this mean that we all think that no one who is seventeen and three hundred and sixty four days old is incapable of voting and everyone who is eighteen years old is suddenly capable of voting? Of course not! But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s an age at which it makes sense to allow people to vote.

So if slippery slope arguments aren’t a good idea, what should we do instead? We recommend using the Equal Rights Argument. Here’s how the Slippery Slope approach might look compared to the Equal Rights approach, which we think works better:

Pro-choice person: I definitely think later abortions are wrong, like late term abortions or even abortions after twelve weeks. I just think it’s too extreme to ban abortion altogether, and it’s not realistic. 

Slippery Slope response: OK, so you think abortion is wrong at twelve weeks – but what about eleven weeks? What happens at twelve weeks to suddenly make it wrong?

Equal Rights response: OK, it sounds to me like we both think that late term abortions are wrong, so we seem to agree there! Would it be OK with you if I got some more details on your view? In fact, let’s forget about unborn babies altogether, and just focus on people who are born. My guess is we also agree that it’s wrong to kill anyone who is already born – am I right? So what is it about everyone who’s born that makes it wrong to kill us? What is it about us that gives us all that equal right to not be killed?

From here, you can make the standard Equal Rights Argument, which when done correctly will show why abortion is always wrong because of what the unborn is (a human) and not because any cut-off point feels arbitrary. The Equal Rights argument doesn’t fall into the fallacy of the beard, because it doesn’t rely on uncertainty about the exact point that a human becomes an equal rights-bearer. Instead, it argues that the only plausible basis of being an equal rights bearer is something that doesn’t vary at all throughout pregnancy.  For what it’s worth, I think this line of argument is also more intuitive than the Slippery Slope!

Muireann