Firstly, one can argue anything they want. That's not really an issue. If someone is going to make moral statements, though, they need to put forth arguments and reasons. "My religion says so" or "my moral system says so" isn't a good reason. At best it's an introduction to an explanation.

I personally feel there is some ethical problem with abortions; I can't say why exactly (though I can say it's not "moral hazard").

While this was an unpromising start to the paragraph, we quickly get some good, meatier info.

It has something to do with the fact that I do think a blastocyst has more value than a bacterial plaque.

I disagree. A blastocyst has more potential to gain moral value, but I don't see it as having value in and of itself.

The reason has something to do with the question of when the child starts having value.

This is indeed the crux of the issue, and I'll have some thoughts on that below.

"Birth" is marginally less arbitrary than "conception," but considering the success of medical science in gestating premature feti in incubators, "birth" still feels pretty arbitrary. At what stage does a human being develop rights?

Birth is much less arbitrary than conception. At birth, we have a for-serious human being, with a consciousness. At conception, we have 2 cells. So I would say if we had to choose between those 2, I'd unhesitatingly choose birth. That said, our knowledge of human development indicates that brain development that supports consciousness occurs during the 3rd trimester. In an ideal world, we'd know exactly when this happens. Since this is impossible, the first 2 trimesters should, ideally, be essentially unregulated, with regulation increasing as the third trimester progresses. Further, abortion should be federally- and state-funded just like any other medical procedure; the only people hurt be the lack of funds will be poor women seeking abortions, who will be forced to delay abortions and push them into riskier weeks for abortions.

You've convinced me. "Moral hazard" is absolutely the wrong term for what I had in mind. I think I described the notion better in my more recent posts responding to Ebonmuse and Sarah.

Again, I'm not arguing that safe abortions should not be readily accessible. I believe they should be, if for no other reason than the one you cite: that restrictions don't affect the number performed, only the safety of the ones performed. I believe I already mentioned this.

Just to sum up, I was originally arguing the following points:
A) From what I can tell, people don't really apply the moral imperative model of decision making. They use a sort of moral intuition whether they're Buddhists, Christians, or atheists and this moral intuition seems like it's internalized through one's native culture rather than systematically and logically constructed. As a result, separating "religious" mores from "secular" mores is actually pretty difficult to do, especially for the decision maker herself. If we insisted that no legal precept was in any way religiously motivated, then that would essentially disqualify any religious person from legislative positions. This seems like an absurd conclusion to me, suggesting that a more complex analysis is required than one that simply bins moral precepts into "religious" or "secular".
B) Rights are not manifest, but rather abstract cultural values, especially cultural values that seem nearly universal. However, if we wanted a set of rights that all human beings on earth would agree were correct, it would be a pretty slim list. We have the rights we have because we as a nation jointly agree to guarantee each other those rights; even then, we don't have a very good record. As a result, it is useless to talk about a right to abortions when that is exactly what is at stake.
C) I personally feel there is some ethical problem with abortions; I can't say why exactly (though I can say it's not "moral hazard"). It has something to do with the fact that I do think a blastocyst has more value than a bacterial plaque. The reason has something to do with the question of when the child starts having value. "Birth" is marginally less arbitrary than "conception," but considering the success of medical science in gestating premature feti in incubators, "birth" still feels pretty arbitrary. At what stage does a human being develop rights? On the other hand, this could very well be like the donut example I made above where while the action represents a perceived transgression, little or nothing was actually lost.

The "benefit to society" criterion is actually a really bad option here, but I don't really want to get into why right now.

These were the arguments I made immediately after saying I was going to play devil's advocate. As you can see, the end result of these arguments doesn't really argue FOR banning abortions. It just argues for the right to argue for banning abortions. It's a stretch to even call that devil's advocate.

See, I make a serious post and get ignored. You're not arguing in good faith, Dan, or else you would have addressed my numbers and arguments. I'll restate more succinctly.

Please check again. I responded to every post sequentially UNTIL yours. Perhaps it didn't occur to you that this was possible, but I was posting shortly before bed, already had a lot to say, and your post was a little long to dive into at that point. Once I was done responding to Ebonmuse, Sarah, and monkeymind, I went to bed. If you don't mind giving me just a little more time, I'll be happy to read your post and respond.

Geez.

Legal restrictions on abortion do not affect its incidence. For example, the abortion rate is 29 in Africa, where abortion is illegal in many circumstances in most countries, and it is 28 in Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds. The lowest rates in the world are in Western [12 per 1,000 women aged 15–44] and Northern Europe [17 per 1,000], where abortion is accessible with few restrictions.

It's higher in Canada and the U.S.; the only real difference between regions is the following:

Where abortion is legal and permitted on broad grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is illegal in many circumstances, it is often unsafe. For example, in South Africa, the incidence of infection resulting from abortion decreased by 52% after the abortion law was liberalized in 1996.

Also, the unintended pregnancy rate is 40% worldwide, no difference between developing world and developed. Of course, the developed world has much less pregnancies overall (relative to population), so we've actually reduced our pregnancy rate a lot more than the developing world.

ETA: all data from the Guttmacher Institute, again

Your argument is that abortion creates a moral hazard for women; that is, the availability of abortion increases the likelihood of a woman engaging in unsafe sex because that availability removes the risk of having to give birth to a child due to unsafe sex. However, this ignores the sliding scale of medical risk, from essentially 0 for condoms/pills/etc, to morning-after, to abortion in the first 8 weeks, to later abortions, and finally to birth. There is also a correlative rise in cost. If widespread and easily-available abortions did in fact increase the rate of unprotected sex, we would see higher unexpected pregnancy rates in countries with less restrictions on abortions, and vice versa. While I do not have these data in front of me at the moment, I recall that the opposite is true; countries with less abortion restrictions have lower unexpected pregnancy rates, etc. Sure, this doesn't prove causation, but you need to at least show a correlation to make your moral hazard argument.

I think you're reading a little too much into a couple attempts at using thought experiments to make sense of why I feel like there might actually be a moral problem with abortions.

All, I think I've been relatively civil other than being blunt about the fact that I didn't think the original post was very funny. I think I've actually been remarkably civil under the circumstances. I feel like I've been misrepresented and in some cases unfairly castigated throughout the course of this discussion. The original arguments I made weren't terribly sweeping and I think I made it pretty clear from the beginning that if I ever wrote any letters about abortions to my congressman, that the letter would be advocating for them to be legal. I explicitly said I was playing devil's advocate.

And I definitely do not feel like I've gotten the benefit of the doubt.

It's a little like saying, "Gee, I think that religious fellow might have something there," on Pharyngula. Try it some time. I really get the sense that maybe some of us progressive types aren't as tolerant of dissenting opinions as they claim to be. I really like the site, but if I'm going to me maligned and misrepresented as above any time I happen to disagree with posters, I guess maybe I should take my clicks elsewhere.

I AM NOT SAYING THAT THE FOLLOWING IS A DIRECT ANALOG FOR PREGNANCY.

Susie buys a dozen donuts for the office. Sally's favorite is jelly. Sam knows this and doesn't really like jelly, but when he gets up to the donuts, he grabs the only jelly, squeezes all the jelly out into a napkin, takes one bite and then throws the rest in the trash.

I don't think anyone would go around calling Sam a bad or evil person just for doing this one mostly insignificant thing, but doesn't it offend your sense of fair play just a bit? Sam seems like he's wronging Sally, but Sally's not really out anything and anyway, the consequences are minor enough that it's hard to see how any kind of moral imperative would apply.

Maybe that's closer to how I feel about abortion. It violates some sense of responsibility for me, but maybe, as Sarah asserts, the loss of the blastocyst is just too minor for there to need to be any consequences.

Dan,

In comment #15, you said, "Ideally, for me, abortions would be illegal", and claimed that there are "real secular reasons for disallowing abortions". I don't see how these comments can possibly be interpreted other than as advocacy of banning abortion, your subsequent remarks notwithstanding.

Actually, I'm a little angry you would take these out of context to argue that I am "advocating banning abortions." For the first, the full quote was "Ideally, for me, abortions would be illegal and there would be a more ethical way of dealing with unwanted pregnancies." That is to say, in an ideal sunshine-and-rainbows sci-fi world where unlimited resources are available to solve all the world's problems, unexpected or otherwise unwanted pregnancies could be brought to term and then given a happy and safe home with little disruption to the biological mother's life. Not "in my dream-world jack-booted dystopian fantasy, abortion is never allowed!" I was saying that ideally, abortion would not be the best option.

The second quote, observing that there might be "secular reasons for banning abortions," could in no way be construed as advocating banning abortions, except by either a nincompoop or someone with an axe to grind. Which are you?

No, pregnancy is not a disease, but when did that become the criterion? As you'll recall, we were talking about moral hazards, and you said that people who make unwise choices should suffer the "real consequences" of those decisions. I asked what the "real consequences" of unsafe sex were, and you said pregnancy and STDs. I was just taking you at your word.

And then I admitted that treating diseases also constitutes a moral hazard, but that it's a different sort of moral hazard from the one I meant. Perhaps I wasn't clear. I think the fact that pregnancy is not the same as disease IS actually relevant to the moral calculus here.

Actually, I don't think they are. Both involve a foreign form of life taking up residence in the woman's body and using her resources to nourish itself without her consent, in ways that potentially pose serious danger to her well-being. The reason I'm in favor of treating STDs and other diseases is the same reason I'm pro-choice: because I believe people should exercise autonomy over their own bodies.

Whoah, whoah, whoah, a fetus is hardly a foreign form of life. The reason we enjoy sex in the first place is nature's way of cajoling us into pregnancies. When a woman gets an STD, that represents a violation of trust -- her partner should have been taking care of his health, should have been tested, should have informed her. When a woman gets pregnant, there is no breach of trust (except, of course, in cases where the men is purposefully replacing birth control or piercing prophylactics -- that's clearly abuse and such men should be held fully accountable by law) because it was a mutual failure -- and yes, I do believe the man has the obligation to inquire about/provide birth control where appropriate.

It's laudable for you to say you would take responsibility for caring for any child you brought into the world. But it doesn't follow that this should be a moral obligation on everyone else as well. To name just one obvious problem, what if the issue isn't the woman's unwillingness, but financial (or physical or emotional) inability to care for a child properly? Is it fair to say that that child must come into existence, and suffer the deficiencies of an unprepared or dysfunctional parent, just to teach that parent an abstract lesson about the consequences of poorly thought-out decisions? Your approach seems to treat children as means rather than ends.

Yes, Ebonmuse, the inability to care for the child properly is obviously the issue. That is one of the reasons I wouldn't advocate for banning abortions. However, I think that the best course of action would be to:
1) educate people on how to avoid unwanted pregnancies
2) fund social services sufficiently to help make adoption an even better option than it already is
3) adopt instead of having your own kids
4) make contraception easily available

Law of diminishing returns being what it is, that probably won't handle every case that ever crops up. So yeah, let's make sure abortions are still safe and legal after that. But there's no reason not to try to minimize the number of abortions needed, right?

But, Dan, your entire argument hinges on the idea that creating a "life" and then destroying it is unethical.

Why?

You try to tie this to a cost spreading analysis. But, I fail to see the connection.

Why is creating a life and then destroying it unethical? I don't know why exactly I think it's unethical. It offends my moral intuition. I will have to do a little bit of thinking before I can get much deeper than that. I'm not sure I know what you mean by "cost spreading analysis," and that using the term "moral hazard" may not have gotten quite the idea across that I had in mind.

What if I think it is entirely ethical to get pregnant and then have an abortion or use an abortifacient instead of using contraception? (Maybe it's even cheaper and easier and safer in some circumstances to rely on an abortifacient -- for argument's sake -- I don't know this to be the case, but I can imagine it to be true)

From what I understand, abortifacients are typically taken shortly after coitus to prevent implantation of any fertilized eggs? So flesh out the scenario a little: did you use other prophylactics to try to prevent pregnancy and the first place? And then use an abortifacient the next day or so because you weren't sure it worked? I don't think I'd really have a problem with that at all.

Who is sharing the cost with me of my "irresponsible" pregnancy?

Well, hopefully the putative father.

Why is it unethical to use over the counter abortifacients as contraception?

Yeah, OK, go ahead. It gives me an ick feeling, but like I said, I'm not out to ban anything.

Who else is sharing the cost with me that resulted in my being incentivized to behave this way?

Not sure what you mean. Again, hopefully the father, and then maybe your family, though I understand that won't work for everybody. Friends. Community services are better in some states than others, I suppose.

The fire insurance analogy doesn't fly.

If a company provides fire insurance (abortion) then the house owner (woman) will be more likely to smoke in bed (fuck in bed without a condom) resulting in a house burned to the ground and dead inhabitants (an unwanted pregnancy).

You see the problem.

How does an unwanted pregnancy equate with fire damage?

It doesn't.

Awesome. I used fire insurance to illustrate the concept of moral hazard. See below.

It only equates if you think that destroying a blastocyst or a fetus is destroying something of value -- the destruction of which is somehow a detriment to society.

I think -- in most cases that this act of destruction will be a benefit to society.

Maybe we should be incentivizing women to have abortions. I certainly think so.

Whatever. I do think feti have value. Ask a woman who's been trying to get pregnant for a while and finally done it whether her fetus have value. I think people should take reproduction pretty seriously; maybe I'm just arbitrarily old fashioned in that way. I think that goes double for guys because they're not stuck gestating the things. I also think people should take sex more seriously than they do, but again, old before my time. I guess that's what I was trying to say with the moral hazard thing, that abortion to me represents human beings failing to live up to the responsibilities of human reproduction. Or something.

Using abortifacients as a supplement to normal prophylactics doesn't really bother me, but abortion as birth control does. Is that unreasonable?

Ok, I will attempt to limit the snark and sarcasm here. Dunno when I'll actually finish this, might take me a while...

First, some statistics to buttress our discussion (all data is from Guttmacher Institute and refers to the U.S. unless otherwise stated; I have paraphrased where it was possible, and quoted where it was already succinct).

The average age of a woman obtaining an abortion is 25. 17% of abortions are obtained by teenagers.

60% of abortions are obtained by women who already have one or more children.

70% of women report a religious affiliation with a Christian denomination, approximately the proportion of Christians in the country as a whole.

The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty (112 vs. 29 per 1,000 women)

The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use.

Forty-six percent of women who have abortions had not used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. Of these women, 33% had perceived themselves to be at low risk for pregnancy, 32% had had concerns about contraceptive methods, 26% had had unexpected sex and 1% had been forced to have sex.

Chart on when in the pregnancy a woman has an abortion.

Fifty-eight percent of abortion patients say they would have liked to have had their abortion earlier. Nearly 60% of women who experienced a delay in obtaining an abortion cite the time it took to make arrangements and raise money.

Teens are more likely than older women to delay having an abortion until after 15 weeks of pregnancy, when the medical risks associated with abortion are significantly higher.

1 in 1 million abortions before the 9th week result in death, versus 1 in 11000 after the 20th week; 1 in every 9000 live births results in the death of the mother (via Wikipedia's article on Maternal death)

So let's talk about moral hazards. First, a moral hazard (via Wikipedia) is "a special case of information asymmetry, a situation in which one party in a transaction has more information than another. The party that is insulated from risk generally has more information about its actions and intentions than the party paying for the negative consequences of the risk". When talking about abortion, what party suffers? Does anyone suffer?

No. Abortion does, in fact, reduce the financial and medical risks of carrying to term and giving birth to a child, but it is riskier (medically and financially) than the morning-after pill, which is riskier than pre-sex contraception (pill, condom, etc), so the notion that widespread availability of abortion would result in an increase in unsafe sex lacks evidence and doesn't pass a cost-benefit analysis of the relative risks. Further, the case could be made that pro-life institutions and policies create moral hazards, since they themselves are immune to the risk of a woman carrying her pregnancy to term, but they encourage women to do so and, further, lie about or conceal the relative risks of taking this action.

Well it's time for me to go eat, have protected sex with my girlfriend, and go to a college basketball game. Hmm, wouldn't a man having sex with a woman be a moral hazard, since he is immune to the risk of getting pregnant?

Your approach seems to treat children as means rather than ends.

Exactly what I meant to express by "morality of childbearing - you're doing it wrong".

And I agree, gotta love those analogies. Obviously abortion is more like ipecac than a mint flavored antacid, and more like a fire extinguisher than a fire insurance policy.

Some really out of the box social engineering would be to incentivize all young males to have vasectomies when they become sexually active, and provide free reversals when they are in a position to conceive responsibly. Vasectomy reversal success rates are improving all the time, and as insurance you could always bank some sperm deposits. What about it Dan L. - you up for it?