Why I Will Never Answer Your Dumb Abortion Hypotheticals
WHAT IF... we focus on things that actually happen?
Well, now abortion is back in the conversation. I swear that for all its seeming advances humanity never actually evolved past being a weird fertility cult, as evidenced by its prophet Elon Musk impregnating the entire eastern seaboard.
A few weeks ago, podcaster and Platonic Form of Virginity Tim Pool twitted this banal gotcha while the Supreme Court is gearing up to abort Roe v Wade:
large segment of the world population slapped their foreheads in unison, an event that scientists say actually slowed the rotation of the Earth by 0.007 miles per second and, ironically for Tim, actually caused approximately seventeen abortions.
But another large segment of the world, the annoyingest segment, bobbled their heads and thought yeah, hey, what happens then? I mean it could happen, right? Think about it, you were going to abort the baby but now the baby is on the outside are you still gonna abort that baby? If not, why not? What is the difference? Literally, what is the difference except now you’re looking the baby in the eye, you monster?
It’s a good question.
Is it though? Fucking is it?
The left rightly mocked the absurdity of Tim’s scenario in which a woman, eight months into her pregnancy, makes a snap decision to abort, but despite apparently being in a hurry now, is unable to make it into the death chamber in time and oopses her baby right onto the clinic floor.
But mockery is just what Pool and his beanied minions wanted, because it was then and there that they snapped shut their rusty trap of logic. The scenario is insane as written, but it opens the door, doesn’t it? Now we’ve got a real bad case of the What Ifs going on.
And I mean shouldn’t we be asking these questions before we tumble willy nilly into the wrong side of history and our civilisation crumbles under a mountain of discarded zygotes? Once we settle the question of “where life begins” once and for all, then we shall merrily take our pre-human fetuses and line ‘em up like cans on a redneck shooting gallery. And of course, being satisfied, the right will nod sagely and stand aside for you to have as many cosmetic abortions as you can fit in your schedule. Ron DeSantis will shit gumdrops. But until then it is our duty to ask important questions like this. You know, until we’re sure.
“Why won’t you engage in an honest debate with us about this?” they shriek. Why, rather than engage Tim Pool in Socratic parley, do you insist on simply mocking his perfectly spherical head?
Something about the abortion topic makes everybody think they’re a philosopher and every tweet they twit glitters with profundity and the burning potential to be scribed in every Introductory Ethics textbook on page three right next to the fucking Trolley Problem.
You think that you can lay down so many logic traps that these airheaded liberals will get bogged down, throw up their hands and scream “our logic runs dry and only feelings remain! Forgive us our hubris!” and you will laugh and reply “No! Now, untie those uteri immediately, as is our understanding of anatomy!” Well I took five semesters of philosophy and decided to make it the name of my blog, so bring it, bitch.
The reason I won’t engage these hypotheticals is because they’re what you call bad faith arguments, which is what you call bullshit when you know it’s bullshit and still say it anyway. You’re not actually asking in order to receive an answer, you’re asking in order to illustrate a point: The line we draw to mark the beginning of personhood, and thus the point at which terminating a pregnancy unambiguously involves killing somebody, is arbitrary and will always be arbitrary. Exactly how many grains of sand before you can call it a heap, et cetera, yes very clever.
All these wacky ethics puzzles land in the exact same place in the end: The only unambigous markers we can use for the beginning of personhood are conception or birth. Everything in between is a fuzzy blur of potentiality that makes us uncomfortable to think about. Trimester schmimester, it’s all pudding. So, to get checkmate, you have to eliminate one of these two possibilities until one remains. And it turns out that it’s very easy to knock out birth as a possibility because if you say that you believe personhood begins at birth then people are going to call you a crazyperson. Even though that’s what the Bible says.
So hypotheticals are almost always phrased in such a way as to make you picture a full grown mewling infant, because this is really just a war of narratives; some people are trying to destroy the narrative that abortions are about “just a clump of cells” while other people are trying to destroy the narrative that they’re cackling Baba Yagas who just love killin’ them some kids. And if you give them that, who knows how far they’ll take their bloodlust? Toddlers? Sure, why not? Why not kids as old as Tim Pool? Probably not so far as primary school because that’s old enough to die in a school shooting, which is magically okay.
Thus a thousand different ways of wording the same bog standard gotcha: If a uterine wall isn’t literally the only thing separating a babything from its humanity, then ipso facto, personhood begins at the moment of conception and everything after that little spermy hits paydirt is protected by human rights and individual freedoms and liberty and democracy. Boom. Tim Pool drops the mike and it hopefully rolls away somewhere and he can never, ever find it again.
What these clever little puzzles are really about is throwing questions out into the void, fishing so that they may eventually trap someone into saying yes, actually, I do think an eight month pregnancy termination is acceptable in some circumstances. And then the puzzle master will run that into the ground forever as being the true position and motive of the abortion cabal. The pounce on those answers and collect them like shitty Pokemon.
Things is, of course, seeking an abortion that late is extremely rare (less than 1% in the third trimester) and as surprising as it is to believe, most people don’t actually enjoy getting an abortion at any point whether they want the kid or not. But there’s another reason to be suspicious of lines of questioning that try to equate zygotes with small children: There’s an internal consistency problem.
First of all, I pose you a question: How many healthy human embryos, do you think, die naturally in just the first few weeks of pregnancy? If you said “most of them” then you would be wrong. You would be wrong because you left out the word “overwhelmingly.” The answer is overwhelmingly most of them.
Ever seen one of those nature documentaries with the cute little baby turtles hatching on the sand and crawling toward the ocean? Remember how sad you were when the vast majority of them got eaten by some asshole seagull while the prick cameraman did nothing? That’s nature, and that’s literally what happened to you and the probably two dozen of your siblings that spawned every time your parents porked raw.
“Oh well, that’s different,” says the human tennis ball on a pipe probably, “Nobody denies that nature is unforgiving, but we’re talking about murder! Intent matters! Angry beanie noises.”
Okay but the leg you’re trying feebly to stand on here is that, from the moment of conception, what you have going forward is exactly the same as a grown human child. If you look at the statistics I linked above and see the number of embryos that just bounce comically off the uterus before development even begins (70% at a lower estimate), and you don’t feel exactly the same way as you feel about, say, a school bus crashing into a ravine, then maybe it’s not exactly the same scenario. Maybe that ravine is where your hypotheticals belong, Tim.
Thing is, the world is messy and solid black and white is difficult to come by and our legal systems are supposed to reflect that. That’s why we don’t base our entire systems of laws and ethics on fringe possibilities that may or may not come up in a hypothetical multiverse reality where everyone’s hands are hot dogs.
Like hey, what if there was a dog who had a mutant big brain and was as smart as an adult human and that smarty dog killed someone and that person was less intelligent than the dog? Do we try the dog as an adult human? Do we try it for murder or do we regard the victim as dumber than a dog and thus it wasn’t murder at all? That’s a fucking fascinating idea that you can write a book about if you like and I won’t even sue you for taking the idea, and if it happened then I’m sure there’ll be a big hullaballoo about it at the time but what we’re not going to do is legalise all murder until we get this question sorted out.
You know, ironically, not five minutes since Roe v Wade was killed, a bunch of weird fringe scenarios have actually started happening—you know, like hypotheticals that aren’t—and they’re proving a nightmare for the conservatives who celebrated this shit because while they were too busy coming up with clever gotchas they didn’t stop to think of all the little and not so little problems that spill out when you’re classifying personhood from conception. Now they’re dealing with the fact that they made this wish on a fucking monkey paw.
For one, there’s a lady in Texas who got pulled over for driving alone in a carpool lane who is arguing that, since she’s pregnant there actually was a second person in the car. Is it silly? Yeah! Is it sillier than Tim Pool’s batshittery? No.
And I’m only going to briefly mention the raped ten year old in Ohio whose pregnancy has been reclassified from a medical emergency to a Poolean thought experiment thanks to trigger laws that read an awful lot like kids should be pushin’ out babies themselves while their Christmas presents still say “from Santa.”
But this is what happens when the dog catches the car, isn’t it? A bunch of good old boy conservatives sculpting society to adhere to moral principles they themselves don’t really understand and then being all “Golly gee fucking whiz look at that.” And now they’ll probably just say some dumb gibberish about giving fetuses guns or something. I mean why not? They’re citizens, right? Shall not be infringed. Let’s talk about that one, Tim.
This was great! I have always known those anti-abortion arguments were a trap, but never read anything that articulated why so clearly. Much appreciated.