Why I Changed My Mind on Abortion
By Jon Hersey
I used to believe that abortion was immoral. I regarded a fetus as a human being with rights and abortion essentially as murder.
But I’ve undug my heels in the years since. In fact, I’ve come to think just the opposite: Abortion is not murder, and it morally must be legal. I even found myself driving a friend to a clinic and helping her post-surgery, as well as advising others on this fraught decision. As abortion rights have come under fire in the United States, I’ve been reflecting on the reasons for my change of mind. After all, it seems like most people’s ideas on abortion are cemented early and never change. What was different in my case?
One big factor was experience, especially dating women who couldn’t use birth control. In my naïveté, I thought that preventing pregnancy was simple. Between birth control, condoms, and periodic abstinence, you might even call it foolproof. I’ve since learned that I was wrong. Advanced as we may be, preventing pregnancy can still be rather difficult. According to a 2019 Brookings study, “Unintended pregnancies are at an all-time low in the U.S. but still represent about 45 percent of all pregnancies”—nearly half.1
For many women, traditional forms of birth control are not an option. The toll these take on their physical and mental health is too high, especially for those with chronic health issues. Weight gain and acne are common problems, but more seriously, as Dr. Nafissa Ismail of the uOttawa School of Psychology explains, “oral contraceptive use is related to significant structural changes in brain regions implicated in memory and emotional processing.”2 According to a systematic review of birth control studies, hormonal birth control may cause “interference with endogenous processes” that “could be far-reaching and affect emotional, relational, educational and vocational aspects of life.”3 Several woman I know can attest to this.
Timing when to abstain or use a condom can be dicey. Even with helpful calendar apps and automated reminders, it’s not a perfect science. For those who use it, birth control can cause substantial irregularities in menstrual cycles. And for all their pleasure-dulling consequences, condoms are not 100 percent effective. They can, and do, sometimes slip or break.4
“Well, if you don’t want to get pregnant,” some say, “don’t have sex!” You’re kidding, right? That might be something parents say to teenagers to scare them into thinking sex is off limits. But it stands no chance against natural, normal, healthy human desire. And sex is a vital part of romantic relationships and happy, fulfilling lives. Why should mature couples who don’t want a child (or another child) forgo sex? And if a woman unintentionally gets pregnant, what grounds are there for empowering others to make life-altering decisions for her?
One reason I’ve heard is that pregnant women chose actions that led to pregnancy, so they must accept the consequences. In effect: You made your bed, now lie in it. But all of us choose actions with some chance of outcomes we don’t intend. If I choose to smoke and end up with lung cancer, is it right for others to prevent me from getting chemo? Forcing people into parenthood is an awfully perverse form of punishment.
I recently had a conversation like this with a pastor. He was an intelligent man who grew up with religion, left it for a while, then, in his words, “found Christ” again after he was beaten by street thugs and left for dead. In the hours we sat talking, he had many insightful things to say, but his thoughts on abortion were ones I’d often heard before. In essence, the argument goes: A fertilized egg is God’s doing and must not be undone; God is the source of individual rights, and he grants them at conception. Although I never held these ideas explicitly, I was once sympathetic to them.
But a second key factor in my change of mind was a determination I made in high school about a year after I, too, “found Christ.” I spent a good part of my senior year reading the Bible, going to Bible study, and attending Christian rock concerts with a friend. I slowly realized that believing in God and forces beyond my comprehension, although stimulating for the imagination, was not helping me live a good life. In fact, other than connecting me with a few new friends, its effects were purely negative. I felt disconnected from my goals, apathetic, directionless, unhappy. When I discovered that meaning in life is created by vigorously pursuing rationally chosen goals, I decided no longer to accept ideas I couldn’t defend rationally.
And for as many times as I’ve heard talk of God and his being the source of rights, I’ve yet to see evidence for either (indeed, this is a key part of religion, which requires adherents to accept ideas on faith). That’s important because governments are passing laws with this idea in their sails—laws that force women into nine months of hard labor and a life course that may require them to sacrifice their goals and ambitions. If we shouldn’t let individuals force others to comply with even their most well-reasoned, scientifically supported opinions—and we shouldn’t—then why ones with no rational basis?
But not all who think that embryos and/or fetuses have rights believe that they come from God or are granted at conception. When I opposed abortion, I didn’t believe that. I just thought: That’s a tiny baby, and we shouldn’t kill babies. The third big factor in my change of mind was realizing that there are important differences between embryos, fetuses, and babies, and these differences bear on the question of rights.
Rights pertain to how people may treat one another. They establish a baseline of permissible conduct between individuals. But when we’re talking about a pregnant woman, we’re not talking about two individuals, each with rights, one of whom just happens to reside within the other. A basic requirement of being an individual—and having individual rights—is actually being individuated. Embryos and fetuses are not. Except for very late-stage fetuses (which are virtually never aborted except in cases of major risk to the woman), they can’t be individuated without dying. They are individuated at birth, and that’s when they gain individual rights, which are held in trust by their guardians until they transition into adulthood and can think and act independently.
This doesn’t mean that embryos and fetuses are without value. But their value depends on the woman involved, her specific context—her age and health risks, financial stability, current commitments, career goals, life plans, and the guy with whom she conceived. One of my close family members is happily married and desperately wants a child, but she’s had a hard time getting pregnant. To her, a viable pregnancy would be a dream come true. Not so for some of the other women I know. One recently had an abortion after realizing that the boyfriend who got her pregnant was a nutcase with whom she wanted to cut all ties. Another just launched a company and isn’t ready. Another simply doesn’t want to be a mother. These women are individuals with their own lives and their own bodies, which they alone have the right to control.
So why are these rights under attack in America today? Religious conservatives have long sought to impose their antiabortion views on all Americans, but our nation’s longstanding and due respect for the separation of church and state made that difficult. Alas, conservatives have turned to dismantling abortion rights by employing the strategies of their longtime adversaries: “Progressives.”
By “Progressive,” I mean the American political movement of the early 20th century, which aimed to “progress” beyond the legal limitations placed on government by the founders. Progressives pointed out that some of America’s founders believed rights come from God. They also pointed out that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined the case for God-granted rights. As Progressive spokesman John Dewey put it in 1935, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”5
Casting about for a new explanation of rights, one that would legitimize new government power to enforce their moral views on everything from prohibition to antitrust, Progressives picked up the highly regressive idea that rights are essentially privileges granted by government. We have whatever rights “society” grants us, meaning in practice that politicians and bureaucrats get to decide the scope and content of “rights.” If “society” decides it’s in the “public interest” to outlaw alcohol consumption, for instance, then you, as a member of that society, no longer have the right to consume alcohol. We elect the politicians, the politicians and their appointees determine what serves the “general welfare,” and our rights (read: privileges) are amended accordingly.
Reading the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, I saw this “Progressive” tenet strewn throughout the “conservative” Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In Roe, the majority argued that there is no “public interest” related to first-trimester abortions for the state to regulate.6 The arguments overturning it declared, in effect: Don’t be so sure; there may be a “public interest”—and the clamoring of antiabortion activists suggests to some that there is—and so we should leave it to the states to determine.
But this is not how rights work. Perhaps most important for my change of mind on abortion was grasping what rights actually are. For me, that came while reading Atlas Shrugged, the philosophic novel by Ayn Rand, and later, her essay “Man’s Rights.” In Rand’s view, understanding what man is—the “rational animal,” as Aristotle put it—informs how people ought to act, including among one another in society. Humans, she pointed out, are the only species that live primarily by the use of reason. People must think and act on their thinking in order to create the values on which their lives depend. The principle of individual rights recognizes man’s nature as a rational being and protects his ability to live as one—that is, in accord with his own judgment—even among others who might wish to force him to act contrary to it.
Rights are not privileges subject to majority vote, to be determined by the loudest or most politically well-connected, who claim their views represent the “public interest.” Every person has a right to his or her own life, regardless of others’ desires to subvert those rights. We gain rights not by the wand of a divine creator, nor by public permission, but at birth by virtue of our nature as rational beings who must live according to our judgment. Embryos and fetuses are not individuals, and they don’t have individual rights.
That, anyway, is what I came to think after years of reflecting on these issues. You, of course, don’t have to agree. That’s one benefit of living in a civil society that still substantially protects individual rights: People can disagree and go their separate ways. It’s a shame that some want to strip women of this right on such a vital issue, and that they are succeeding. Perhaps, if more people are willing to follow evidence and reason wherever they lead—even changing their minds when the facts warrant it—we can restore protections for those rights and ground them in better reasoning than has historically been the case.