Public stance.
Abortion has been one of the most widely contested political issues in the recent media landscape. Roe v. Wade was one of the most significant breakthroughs for the pro-abortion movement, only to have it overturned 49 years and 153 days later. Despite a major constitutional overhaul in favor of the pro-life movement, 62% of U.S. adults believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, with only 36% saying it should be illegal in all/most cases. [1] Public opinion remains in favor of allowing abortions to continue, as participants surveyed agree : disagree with the statement, “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” at a ratio of 54:26, and agreeing : disagreeing with the statement, “human life begins at conception, so an embryo is a person with rights” at a ratio of 35:45. [2]
In the U.S, religious arguments against abortion will always continue to exist with the presence of Christian fundamentalists, though the share of American adults who identify as Christians has dropped 15 percentage points since 2007, with the Christian share of the population leveling off at 63%. [3]
Religious arguments against abortion lie within the scope of people who actually know things about theology, me not included, but nonetheless, this remains a significant majority, despite the fact that not even all Evangelical Christians hold fundamentalist views, with the percentage of Americans who are Evangelicals ranging from 6-35% solely based on how you categorize ‘Evangelicals’. [4] The share of our population that can be considered fundamentalist is extremely difficult to determine.
Abortion will always be a partisan hotspot as long as any interpretation, even one that assumes the premise of an omnipotent being who happens to condemn it being existent, can present an argument against it, so in this article, I’m just going to go over a few of the more scientific/philosophical premises that shape the grounds of the current abortion debate. (4 to be exact, feel free to fact-check me)
Premise 1: A fetus is a human, so let’s treat it as one.
This is a very stock argument for the pro-life side. The premise that ‘life starts at conception’ is held almost universally by pro-life individuals as a reason to subjugate certain rights and values onto the fetus. Its wording alone can be contextually misinterpreted. Yes, from the moment of conception and onward, the ‘fetus’ is a living thing, while under that same framework, the sperm and egg were also two equally living things before– not capable of consciousness or moral action, but definitely alive. So yes, conception is a state of life for the soon-to-become fetus, but no, these two things were alive before conception in an equal regard.
A fetus does create an entirely new genetic sequence in the regard that it fuses two existing genomes together to perform actions fundamentally different from each of the preceding genomes on their own, meaning it’s the first footprint of ‘you’ alive. Unfortunately, this role technically can be fulfilled by any organism that has your entire genetic code. Scientists are at the point where they can practically ‘grow’ a human in a lab by creating an artificial embryo, though the embryo cannot become a human being due to mostly ethical and regulatory concerns stopping the development of science in this direction for obvious reasons. A fetus technically has much more value than that of a sperm and egg combined due to its potential to become a human being, but potential value doesn’t equate to a justification for more rights, to treat the fetus as the literal embodiment of the highest potential value it can have. A living thing’s rights do not scale in a linear trajectory, where the more value it has the more rights granted upon it.
There is also a common usage of the word ‘human’, or ‘person’ in describing an embryo or fetus, which construes context in a way that misinterprets what we define as a human person. It’s obviously a given that a fetus is a member of the human species, but that doesn’t make it a person. A fetus, by proper definition, is a human, since as long as a biological entity is a part of the homo sapiens species, it can be considered one. But a ‘person’ is defined by their interactions, it’s not a biological categorization equivalent to any living thing that has the DNA blueprint or structure of the homo sapiens species. A person is a societal categorization used to refer to any being whom we give the acknowledgement of individuality to when interacting with them, cementing it as a label shaped by political, economic, and psychological interactions. In order for someone to be considered an ‘individual’ and then a person, it must be something that can act independently or separately from another being; this autonomy is what grants it rights and moral concern as per its interactions with other autonomous beings. This isn’t the case for the fetus.
A tomato seed that I’ve just planted in the ground amongst my patch of thriving tomato plants is a member of the tomato species, but it doesn’t mean that I can start trying to harvest tomatoes from it. Obviously, the killing of any living being with inherent worth, let alone one with potential to become you, is not a ‘good’ thing, but you cannot subject it to the same rights as that of what it has the potential to become. In a minority of cases, the matter of abortion shouldn’t even be debated since choosing to be ‘pro-life’ in that case is preserving the life (let alone rights) of a non-person embryo over preserving the life of a fully-grown woman.
Premise 2: A fetus is a conscious, pain-feeling living thing.
The fetus undoubtedly gains consciousness sometime during pregnancy, but that result changes, again, depending on how we define and measure consciousness. Usually, we know that newborns exhibit a less mature but undoubtedly aware and ‘conscious’ form of consciousness. We can define basic consciousness as the ability to react to certain stimuli, to have a proactive observation of one’s surroundings, and a capacity to direct cognitive attention at will to a certain stimulus. Scientific research has shown that fetuses become conscious around 32-35 weeks into pregnancy, through behaviors shown at birth.
These include the ability to recognize and store their mother’s voice, which requires short-term memory skills, and the ability to respond to movements/contact in different ways. [5] This form of awareness has stemmed from biological connections that seem to be pre-programmed, with little to no awareness of oneself and no ability to effectively draw new conclusions from external awareness– thereby not being able to change its limited, instinctive reactions to a limited range of stimuli. The actual fetus itself is almost perpetually asleep in the womb, with thalamocortical connections still largely undeveloped, restricting its level of consciousness. [6] In the U.S, 53% of abortions happen less than 9 weeks into conception, while 91% of them happen under 13 weeks into conception. [7] But when, if possible, can the fetus suffer? Suffering can be defined as a condition of pain, which itself is a condition in which neurological responses are triggered to prevent an entity from interacting with a certain stimulus, mainly triggered as a result of evolutionary adaptations that aim to distinguish harmful interactions from neutral or positive ones.
Pain is itself a conscious response; it requires the entity that receives pain impulses to direct its consciousness to, or register the pain, then to stop interacting with a certain stimulus, and usually requires the entity to memorize that experience with the goal of avoiding it in the future. You cannot suffer without experiencing pain because suffering is inherently built off of a pain response, though suffering is subjective based on how you choose to respond to that pain. At the earliest, cortical connections start to appear by week 26 of pregnancy, though for many fetuses, they start developing much later. The fetus, then, can probably feel pain around week 32 at the earliest, since cortical connections need to reach a point of development in which they allow the fetus to become slightly conscious.
So yes, during the last few weeks of pregnancy, the fetus most likely experiences some amount of pain during abortion, but at any time before that the fetus doesn’t technically suffer. An incapacity for the target of an abortion to suffer doesn’t justify abortion, and a capacity for the target of an abortion to suffer doesn’t make abortion an injustice. Using the argument that the fetus is feeling pain isn’t a very coherent defense for saying that abortion is a moral injustice– in almost all cases, the fetus isn’t developed enough to experience pain; in the cases where a woman is taking an abortion well over 8 months in it’s likely that not taking the abortion would threaten the woman’s life.
Premise 3: Induced abortion causes depression or cognitive disorders within women.
The basis of the pro-choice movement is that it gives women an option, that the pro-choice option is the one that grants women autonomy over their own bodies and is ultimately what is good for them. Of course, that principle is again contested with a semi-mainstream claim that abortion is actually terrible for women, that it kills babies while also making women depressed. There’s an obvious fallacy there– the majority of women who need abortions are trapped in contexts associated with depression: a pregnancy they never asked for, a prospect of becoming an underage mother, victims of rape and assault, etc. All of these contexts providing the grounds for depression means that the only preferable methodology in determining whether abortion actually causes depression is to compare a numerical depression indicator for women before pregnancy vs. after pregnancy to women before abortion vs. after abortion.
Rates of first psychiatric contact per 1000 person-years (x of an event per y person-years means you can expect the event to occur x amount of times after y years lived) among girls and women who had a first abortion went up from 14.6 to 15.2, while the same analysis of girls and women who had a successful childbirth went up from 3.9 to 6.7– all estimates lie within the 95% confidence interval (would be true in 95% of cases). [8] Now you can see the probability of an actual correlation between abortion and depression is extremely low, with a slightly over 4% increase, with a 19% chance that this data was also produced by random chance. The increase from pre to post-pregnancy is over 70%, with a less than 0.001% chance that this data was produced by random chance. Yet another analysis from a sample size of 442 abortion recipients shows that 72% were satisfied with their decision; 69% said they would have the abortion again; and 72% reported more benefit than harm from their abortion. [9]
An actual intended pregnancy from a previously healthy mother causes much more intense psychiatric and physical effects on the mother than an induced abortion. The net trend of pre-abortion to post-abortion mental health shows a decrease in depression and an increase in self-esteem, mainly due to the contexts in which abortion happens being associated with psychological trauma. [10] Restricting access to abortions is the one thing that does cause mental harm within women– even if the objective truth can be that they don’t ‘need’ abortions and that having an abortion is a negative for them, the perceptual effects of restricting autonomy always persist. No real mental health impacts whatsoever have been found or linked to abortions. Women who are denied these abortions also suffer from lower physical health as a result of forced pregnancy and are less economically stable– they have a higher chance of slipping into poverty after denial, are more likely to become entrapped in fiscal debt, as well as having lower odds of finding full-time work. [11]
Premise 4: Abortions cause a litany of health effects.
The main health effects ‘caused’ by abortion are supposedly infertility and/or breast cancer. Infertility is caused by the protocols used in surgical abortions, which inherently increase the chances of developing rare medical complications after surgical abortions. Both of these have shown high correlation with abortion, as regions that per capita experience more abortions also see a correlated trend in declining fertility rates, paired with the almost-intuitive understanding that abortion mechanisms contribute to such phenomena. (That was a lie.)
There are extremely negligible effects on fertility from abortions. Rare medical conditions can develop, but that’s no reason as to why abortion is a net negative or why we shouldn’t allow abortion. [12] A logical equivalent would be me telling you that we should defund the police because in some cases, individual police officers commit racial hate crimes or abuse authority over civilians. In this case, the amount of hate crimes and violence would escalate immeasurably if we dealt away with law enforcement; the logical equivalent of a stronger link between pregnancy and infertility as opposed to abortions causing infertility. 57,406 first-time mothers in Finland who gave birth between 2008 and 2010 were sampled, with 10% having a prior abortion. The first-time mothers who had a prior abortion were significantly less likely to develop infertility as opposed to those who had never undergone an abortion before. The percentage of infertility among first-time mothers was 5.14 versus 1.95 percent for those who’d undergone abortion before, with p <.0001. [13]
In fact, the risks of pregnancy and birth are systematically understated in common literature, as the view that women are only as valuable as their reproductive capacity is still prevalent in medicine and many societies. Pregnancy causes thyroid complications for one in eight women, which, over the long term, can result in hypertension, placental abruption, preterm birth, and even heart failure. [14] One in four women will develop lasting pelvic floor disorders after natural delivery, which have effects ranging from the need for complicated surgery to vaginal prolapse. [15]
There is another major concern about abortion. Pregnancy is well-documented to have decreased the rate of breast cancer in women. Abortion obviously interrupts the pregnancy and cuts it short, usually long before it actually finishes. Therefore, it would be quite intuitive to claim that abortions cause an increase in breast cancer rates relative to if the pregnancy was finished. Interrupting the pregnancy seems to not have any effect on the risks of breast cancer. Cancer ratios for 2833 women with breast cancer and 9888 matched controls that had an induced abortion preceding one study on this link found that in women with a previous induced abortion, the odds ratio for breast cancer was 0.8, meaning that breast cancer rates were slightly below average; the study already accounted for the skew introduced by external factors. [16] (No correlation)
A second study took place in England from 1968 to 1998– 28,616 breast cancer cases were analyzed to test a linkage between breast cancer and abortions. Again, the breast cancer odds ratio was on average 0.83, varying from 0.74–0.93, but still below average comparatively to the control group, with no correlation of any sort being found. Any stable correlation between the two has yet to be found. [17]
The exact same cannot be said for premature death; the rate of premature death from abortion does show a plausible, but far from cemented, partial correlation. When inclusive of all causes, a spontaneous (uninduced) abortion has a 1.10 hazard ratio for premature mortality, having a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.02 to 1.17. An actually induced abortion has a 1.12 hazard ratio, with the 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.04 to 1.22. Even worse, the ratio for cardiovascular-related mortality stemming from induced abortions is 1.27, with the 95% CI ranging from 1.09 to 1.48. A high-end cardiovascular mortality increase stemming from abortion could be almost 50%. Note that this doesn’t have anything to do with abortion technology; the spontaneous and natural aborting of the fetus also has a similar linkage to increased death rates. [18] Almost all other studies that tested for the same correlation came out negative, not being able to trace higher death rates back to any type of abortion.
The end?
That was a lot. From the 4 main premises that, if proved true/false, can individually present an argument for/against abortion, we can see that abortion simply doesn’t produce most of the negative ‘side effects’ that the pro-life movement claims it does. Any type of terminated pregnancy does, nonetheless, increase the risk of premature death, especially that relating to cardiovascular complications. Abortions, like vaccines, are a proven scientific technology that improves/saves an unfathomable number of lives every year. In an optimal world, we wouldn’t have abortions at all. In an optimal world, we wouldn’t have to have law enforcement. Abortion is simply a preventative measure that we have to learn to live with, and it’s at least the right and moral choice for some of the people who use it. You don’t have to want to get an abortion to realize that it’s beneficial to most people who seek to utilize it; 50% of all humans can’t even possibly have one.
Respecting the rights of individuals to have one doesn’t mean you have to think abortion is a positive action at all. Unless all morality is objective, then no person can claim that abortion is a universal injustice. This is why a laundry list of anti-abortion arguments and the origins of the pro-life movement come from religious roots; if an omnipotent and all-powerful being existed, then that being would be able to impose an objective standard of morality, knocking out the option of being ‘pro-choice’. That itself lies within a theological realm of debate, something I might cover in another Substack post. For now, doing a 10-second Google search can help you debunk, or add nuance to many of the more mainstream claims circulating around political spaces, namely the ones masquerading as ‘logical’, or worse yet, ‘scientific’ arguments against abortion. Abortion is, and will likely remain, an area of intense dispute. I’ve covered only a slight fraction of arguments in the abortion space. Only four main areas of clash have been only partially skimmed over– though I’m sure most average unemployed Substack users have learned a thing or two from this article.
If you did enjoy this article, just click the heart icon. It comes at almost no cost to you, but it also means the world to me. If you don’t have a job, (just like me) I’d appreciate it if you’d just spam the link to this article somewhere with people who might enjoy my writing. My goal is just to post consistently and make great articles :) (hard since high school stuff)
Notes
Sources I used in this article are easily accessible through footnotes, but I feel the need to cite them. This article did take some research since I’m still a newbie at this.
[1] Diamant, J., Mohamed, B., & Leppert, R. (2024, March 25). What the data says about abortion in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/
[2] Pew Research Center. (2024, May 13). Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years after Dobbs. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/13/broad-public-support-for-legal-abortion-persists-2-years-after-dobbs/
[3] Pew Research Center. (2025, February 26). Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off
[4] Kurtzleben, D. (2015, December 19). Are You An Evangelical? Are You Sure? NPR. https://www.npr.org/2015/12/19/458058251/are-you-an-evangelical-are-you-sure
[5] Wolf, C. (2025, June 25). When Do Babies Become Conscious? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-do-babies-become-conscious/
[6] Lagercrantz, H., & Changeux, J.-P. (2009). The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life. Pediatric Research, 65(3), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1203/pdr.0b013e3181973b0d
[7] Kortsmit, K. (2023). Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2021. MMWR. Surveillance Summaries, 72(9). https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss7209a1
[8] Munk-Olsen, T., Laursen, T. M., Pedersen, C. B., Lidegaard, Ø., & Mortensen, P. B. (2011). Induced First-Trimester Abortion and Risk of Mental Disorder. New England Journal of Medicine, 364(4), 332–339. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa0905882
[9] Major, B., Cozzarelli, C., Cooper, M. L., Zubek, J., Richards, C., Wilhite, M., & Gramzow, R. H. (2000). Psychological Responses of Women After First-Trimester Abortion. Archives of General Psychiatry, 57(8), 777. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.57.8.777
[10] Abrams, Z. (2022, June 23). The Facts about Abortion and Mental Health. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/09/news-facts-abortion-mental-health
[11] Foster, D. G., Biggs, M. A., Ralph, L., Gerdts, C., Roberts, S., & Glymour, M. M. (2022). Socioeconomic Outcomes of Women Who Receive and Women Who Are Denied Wanted Abortions in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 108(3), 407–413. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2017.304247
[12] Larish, A. (2017). Abortion: Does It Affect Subsequent Pregnancies? Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/getting-pregnant/expert-answers/abortion/faq-20058551
[13] National Academies Press. (2018, March 16). Long-Term Health Effects. Nih.gov; National Academies Press (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507237/
[14] Barnes, S. B., Ramanarayanan, D., & Amin, N. (n.d.). The Unseen Side of Pregnancy: Non-Communicable Diseases and Maternal Health. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/TheUnseenSideofPregnancy.pdf
[15] John O.L. DeLancey, Masteling, M., Pipitone, F., LaCross, J., Mastrovito, S., & Ashton‐Miller, J. A. (2024). Pelvic floor injury during vaginal birth is life-altering and preventable: what can we do about it? American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 230(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2023.11.1253
[16] Brewster, D. H. (2005). Risk of breast cancer after miscarriage or induced abortion: a Scottish record linkage case-control study. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 59(4), 283–287. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2004.026393
[17] Goldacre, M. J. (2001). Abortion and breast cancer: a case-control record linkage study. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 55(5), 336–337. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.55.5.336
[18] Yin, S., Yang, Y., Wang, Q., Guo, W., He, Q., Yuan, L., & Si, K. (2024). Association between Abortion and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Premature Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study from the UK Biobank. Health Data Science, 4. https://doi.org/10.34133/hds.0147
[1-18] My Brain.
Tuff. Almost as tough as running fem fw.
I am not a philosopher. Thinking too deeply causes me some harm, somehow. I would like to point out something about your conclusion to the first premise. You seem to contradict yourself when you dismiss the value of a fetus, as merely a potential person, and then claim rights are not accorded on a linear trajectory accruing with mounting value. There is a way to resolve this contradiction. That way would be found in a legal definition of a person that includes corporations. In that definition, a person’s worth would be measured in how effectively it exercised its rights in interacting with others. There are so called,” Dummy Corporations”, that are often rooted out in legal proceedings because they can claim no rights from their non-interactions; their only claim is from their existence, which, given their inaction casts their provenance into the illegitimate. A biological human does not found his right to personhood on later actions that then prove the legitimacy of his provenance. A corporation is a special case that is best left on the short bus.