I recently claimed that an educated guess is about as good as we can do for the abortion issue. We don't know what gives a creature rights or dignity, so nailing precisely when the unborn obtain these qualities is really hard. And while this position doesn't give you that full feeling of knowing exactly what you believe, in the end it's better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
This is all well and good for our theoretical beliefs, but what about practically? What should we do when we have to make a decision both morally and legally?
The answer is to do what we always do in these situations, tread carefully.
Ethically, you want to have an abortion as early as possible. Waiting any longer than necessary puts you in escalating moral danger of murdering an innocent child.
It isn't clear when is too late to have an abortion, but I would put take any mid-late term abortions off the table completely. The stakes on the issue are too high. And then for any early term abortions I would seriously consider if it's really necessary, and think about alternatives also.
That's what the usual rules of morality entail in situations like this. What about laws?
Criminal laws always give the accused the benefit of the doubt. We don't throw a murder in jail if we think he probably killed someone. We need very high confidence. I think that's because if there's a massive moral cliff ahead of you (like killing a baby or prosecuting an innocent) the normal obligation is to, again, tread carefully. I think that's what we should do here.
Since we don't have very high confidence until late in the pregnancy, that's the only time it's morally acceptable to legally prosecute it. Any earlier and we're doing something clearly awful to a woman or doctor in response to something that only might be bad.
I make these two cuts pretty neatly for convenience. After 3 months abortion is immoral and after 6 it should be illegal. But if I were considering an abortion myself, I would look more deeply at prenatal development and make a messier judgement.
Despite having a high degree of uncertainty on when life begins, one can zone into far more specific stances on what to do practically. This would also close up the canyon that lies between pro-life people and pro-choice people. If we were debating whether abortions should be illegal at 5 months or 7 months, we'd just get along a lot better because the degree of overlap in beliefs is much larger than what we have today.
