My case
I will affirm my argument with the following syllogism:
P1: An unborn child is a person from the point of conception
Determining the best Standard for Moral Consideration
Per Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference, we should generally assume that the most likely model is the simplest one that accounts for our empirical observations. In the case of morality, the closest thing we have to empirical observations are foundational moral assumptions, or strong, widely-shared moral intuitions. We should accept the simplest definition or standard that accounts for our strong, widely-shared moral intuitions.
“Ability to be Harmed” as a Standard for Moral Consideration
When an entity is considered to be a person, there are certain rights that seem straightforward to grant that entity. For example, if a person has an internal biological process that would grant them utility down the road, disrupting that process (such as by poisoning them and stunting their growth) is a violation of their rights. Furthermore, if a dependent, such as a child, is suffering from a deficiency that is harming/disrupting an internal biological process (such as from lack of oxygen, a hormone deficiency, or starvation, which can cause direct adverse effects on the body), then their parents have a responsibility to mitigate this harm or seek treatment for it, given they have the capability to do so. Note that a child has the right to the continued internal process even if the process must be aided by nutrients or some amount of external support. However, it is not an automatic moral obligation to help someone generate a new internal process, even if they strongly desire it. I have no obligation to help someone create an immortality potion, for example, or to perform an operation that would enable someone to fly, even if those things were somehow feasible. These differences are essentially between a process that is in progress and must be aided vs. a process that has not begun at all.
Since these moral intuitions seem pretty foundational, we should be seeking the simplest set of standards for moral consideration that incorporate them and other foundational intuitions. The model I propose is that we maintain the criterion of “internal biological process that would grant an entity utility down the road” as the only criterion for moral consideration. Essentially, if an entity possesses said internal process at all, they are a person and warrant moral consideration in proportion to the utility they stand to lose. This model is inherently simpler than other models for personhood, because in order to maintain the foundational moral intuitions described above, these other standards would have this foundational standard for moral consideration, and then an additional standard or standards for an entity to clear the bar of “personhood.” But if this criterion is sufficient to establish personhood, we have a simpler, more elegant model. To prove this model infeasible, an opponent would need to show that granting moral consideration from the point of conception violates some additional, almost universally shared moral intuition.
Abortion vs. Contraception
I bring this up to distinguish between abortion and contraception. An unborn child will keep growing and develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed (if their bodily functions are impeded through starvation or losing oxygen or hormonal deficiency). The zygote is already growing and will become a newborn unless this process of growth is impeded, much like a newborn is in the process of growing into later stages of development. Hence, an unborn child meets this standard for personhood, while a gamete does not.
But sperm will not develop into a person unless combined with an egg (if bodily functions are added). Growth into a later stage of human development requires it to become an entirely new organism with entirely new bodily functions. Conception is categorically different from pregnancy in that an entire gamete is being added to merge with, rather than nutrients which prevent nutritional deficiency, or direct harm, in an existing organism. Again, this is not a comprehensive description of pregnancy, but this should establish that abortion causes direct harm that contraception does not cause.
Further Support from Mathematical Limit
The burden of a disease is often measured in quality-adjusted life years. In simplified terms, this means that generally doctors are trying to maximize years of life saved rather than the number of lives saved. If we are distributing scarce resources and a treatment would save Patient A twenty years of additional life, all things being equal, then their access to the treatment is more pressing than for Patient B, for whom it would only save one day of additional life.
This means that if we select a life expectancy of, say, 70 years, the amount of harm from the death of a patient would be relevant to their age and how long they have left to live. The death of a 50 year old expected to live to 70 otherwise would represent twice as much harm as the death of a 60 year old expected to live to 70 otherwise. (Per rational decision theory, a half chance of losing 20 years of life is equivalent to losing 10 years of life.) We might skew things a bit to account for quality of life, but in general terms, the point stands.
For entities with a similar life expectancy, all things being equal, this trend is basically linear, with moral consideration , increasing as past sentience decreases and future expected lifespan increases. A one-year old with 69 years remaining would have the most to lose and warrant more moral consideration than someone with one day left to live. As the age of the entity approaches zero, the expected life years approach 70, representing a significant, high amount of moral consideration.
Presuming we are seeking the simplest standard for personhood that matches these observations, a model that grants an unborn child significant moral consideration is simpler and more elegant than one granting it no moral consideration. Granting the unborn entity no moral consideration would seem to imply that the linear trend breaks and somehow drops to zero when past sentience hits zero, but this seems rather arbitrary. As age decreases, past sentience has been continually decreasing, yet moral consideration has been going up. If we grant a five year old more moral consideration than someone expected to die tomorrow, but no moral consideration to a fetus, then this is a bit like me having $1 and saying “I’m better than the guy with $0 because I have $1. But I’m just as good as the guy with $10,000, because after one cent, money doesn’t matter.” Once we’ve attributed moral consideration to a continuous variable, it doesn’t make sense to set an arbitrary cutoff, particularly one that goes in the reverse direction of the trend. It only makes sense to have a hard cutoff with a non-continuous variable, such as “ability to be harmed” as outlined earlier (i.e. a zygote has an internal bodily process leading to sentience while a gamete has no such internal process). Even if we were granting equal moral consideration to the five year old and someone expected to die the next day, a hard cutoff based on lack of past sentience would still be arbitrary, as it has been continually decreasing with age yet not causing a reduction in moral consideration.
P2: If an unborn child is a person, abortion is morally impermissible in the majority of cases
Direct harms vs. Indirect harms
It is sometimes argued that abortion is simply “letting someone die” in early stages of pregnancy when the unborn child depends on the mother. However, refusal of bodily support can still equate to direct killing in some circumstances. To understand why, consider the following scenario:
A woman carries a child deep into a forest on a camping trip. For whatever reason, she leaves the child there, where it is eaten by wild beasts. Clearly, this is immoral.
I argue that abortion is morally comparable to this. Despite the fact that carrying the child into the forest puts the child in a state of physical dependency, carrying the child into the forest alone is not a direct harm. Parents bring their children to all sorts of places, but harm does not occur until the child is abandoned. This isn’t just “failing to save” or even “failing to save after accidentally causing harm,” but directly harming via abandonment. Similarly, when a woman aborts a child she conceived, removing bodily support is a direct harm to the child.
Modus Ponens
The forest analogy establishes P1, and P2 is true under usual circumstances, as the vast majority of abortions arise from consensual sex. P1 follows even if the pregnancy is not the intended consequence of sex—the woman from our earlier analogy might have gotten lost in the forest by accident, yet bringing the child there is still a result of her actions. Hence, abandoning the child would still be a direct killing.
Insufficient Justifications
Hence, the question that matters is whether a justification exists in the case of abortion for directly killing one’s child. For the ends to justify the means, the good achieved from an action would have to at least outweigh the bad. But being killed as a child prevents one from experiencing their entire life, while pregnancy burdens someone for only nine months. Therefore, the former is a greater harm, and the ends cannot justify the means—it would be akin to killing ten people to save a single person.
Pro attempts to establish that abortion is morally impermissible via three clever arguments: (1) an appeal to Solomonoff’s theory of inductive inference claiming that defining personhood as "any internal biological process that would grant utility down the road" is the simplest model matching our moral intuitions; (2) a mathematical limit argument using Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) to argue that moral status increases linearly as age approaches zero; and (3) a "Forest Abandonment" analogy equating pregnancy termination to abandoning a child in the woods. Upon rigorous philosophical inspection, each of these three pillars collapses into contradiction.
Pro proposes that we define a person as "any entity that possesses an internal biological process that would grant it utility down the road," claiming this is the simplest model matching our moral intuitions, and challenges any opponent to show that granting full moral status from conception violates universally shared moral intuitions. Philosophy professors Leonard Glantz, Michael Sandel (Embryo Ethics, NEJM, 2004), and Nathan Nobis have provided decisive counterexamples showing that Pro’s criterion violates overwhelming human moral intuitions:
Pro argues that because a 1-year-old has 69 expected life years remaining and a 50-year-old has 20, moral harm increases linearly as age approaches zero, so dropping moral consideration to zero prior to sentience is "arbitrary." This commits two fatal errors:
Finally, Pro compares abortion to a woman carrying a child deep into a forest and abandoning it to be eaten by wild beasts. As David Boonin (2003, pp. 167–188) demonstrates, this analogy is structurally broken:
In [41], the counter-argument attempts to dismantle the foundational logic of [2h] by presenting three dramatic objections: Michael Sandel's fertility clinic fire, Toby Ord's data on natural embryo loss, and a rejection of the forest abandonment analogy. While these thought experiments are popular in bioethics debates, they fail to demonstrate that the unborn child lacks moral value.
Addressing the Fertility Clinic Fire
The fertility clinic fire scenario—asking whether you would save a five-year-old child or a tray of 1,000 frozen embryos—is often treated as a silver bullet against fetal personhood. But it confuses moral triage and emotional affinity with an entity's intrinsic right to life.
Suppose you are in a burning hospital and you have the choice between saving your own five-year-old daughter or saving three strangers who are elderly or unconscious. Nearly every loving parent would instinctively save their own daughter. Does that prove that the three strangers have zero human rights or that their lives are worthless? Of course not. It simply proves that human beings prioritize identifiable, conscious individuals with whom we have immediate relational empathy over distant, abstract, or fragile lives in crisis situations.
Furthermore, frozen embryos in an IVF clinic face uncertain implantation viability and have an unknown long-term survival probability, whereas the crying child is an immediate, fully realized individual. Making a tragic rescue choice under extreme panic tells us about human psychology and emergency triage, not whether it is morally permissible to deliberately destroy healthy developing children in normal pregnancies.
The Natural Wastage Fallacy
The objection from natural embryo loss (the fact that many fertilized eggs fail to implant due to chromosomal abnormalities) fares no better. The fact that many human beings die of natural causes at early stages of biological development does not diminish the moral wrong of deliberately killing those who are healthy.
For most of human history, infant mortality was catastrophic: in prehistoric and medieval times, over 50% of born children died before reaching age five from cholera, dysentery, and infections. Did the widespread reality of natural infant death mean that infants weren't human beings or that parents were morally permitted to suffocate their toddlers? Obviously not. High natural mortality from genetic errors is a medical tragedy to be researched, not a moral license to intentionally terminate a human life.
Why the Core Point of [2h] Stands
Strip away the peripheral thought experiments and look at the underlying reality: a human zygote is an unbroken, living biological substance that directs its own continuous development into a fetus, a newborn, an adolescent, and an adult. There is no magical metaphysical leap that occurs at 24 weeks or at birth. You were once an embryo; you were never a sperm or an egg alone.
The forest analogy holds because in both cases, an adult's voluntary actions place a developing human into a condition of total dependency, and then actively remove the necessary life support, knowing it will result in death. Because taking innocent human life cannot be justified merely to avoid nine months of temporary hardship, abortion in the majority of cases remains morally impermissible.
