Abortion

We recognize that perceptions can be swayed by how a topic is framed and by the terminology used. In this, as with everything else in this guide, our goal is to be fair and accurate.

The Overall Question

We phrased the overall question for this guide as “Should abortion be legal?” because it’s the simplest way to indicate the guide is about legality.

We favored this over “Should abortion be illegal?” because questions framed as “Should _____ be illegal?” are typically asked about actions whose moral wrongness is already widely agreed, with the debate focusing on whether that wrong justifies criminal prohibition. That framing doesn’t fit abortion because the central dispute is about whether abortion is morally wrong in the first place. By contrast, “Should _____ be legal?” is more often used when the action in question is morally contested rather than broadly agreed to be wrong.

Finally, we didn’t use “Should abortion be legal or illegal” because that implies a binary choice, whereas most positions on abortion involve conditions under which it should and shouldn’t be legal.

Labels for Supporters and Opponents

We used the labels “abortion opponents” and “abortion-rights supporters.” We didn’t use the popular terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” because they originated as persuasive framing devices—for example, the term “pro-life” implies the other side is “anti-life.”

We used “abortion-rights supporters” rather than “abortion supporters” because many people who support abortion rights believe abortion should be legal but not a preferred outcome. In contrast, “abortion opponents” typically oppose both the procedure itself and the legal right to obtain an abortion.

“Fetus” versus Other Potential Terms

When a specific developmental stage is relevant, we refer to the developing organism as an embryo or a fetus, following standard medical usage. When no stage distinction is intended, we use fetus as a general term for the developing organism during pregnancy. This broader usage is common and avoids cumbersome phrasing like “the zygote, embryo, or fetus should be protected.” Although a technical umbrella term exists—conceptus—it is obscure.

Abortion opponents sometimes use terms like unborn child, pre-born child, and baby when referring to early development. We avoided these terms because they imply that a zygote, embryo, or fetus should be regarded as equivalent to a born child—which is one of the key points of disagreement in the abortion debate.

Gender Terms

We referred to people having abortions as “pregnant women” and “women.” We did not use the term “mothers” because it implies a parental relationship, whereas many women seeking abortions do not consider themselves mothers and would reject that framing as prejudging the moral question at issue. That said, we used “life of the mother” to describe a common exception to abortion laws, because it’s the standard term.

Also, we recognize there are people who do not identify as women who can have abortions. We referred to “women” because the overwhelming majority of people seeking abortions identify as women,²² and because much of the historical and ongoing debate about abortion rights has been deeply intertwined with women’s rights. Most arguments about abortion rights and access apply regardless of gender identity.

Our preference is to cite data from neutral sources. But sometimes the best data is from advocates. For example, the Guttmacher Institute is an advocacy organization for legal abortion and also the largest data collector of abortion statistics in the United States. This position was established by its historical association with Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion-services provider.²³ Because of its comprehensiveness, Guttmacher’s data is widely used and cited by government, the media, and even by organizations that oppose abortion.²⁴

To be clear, we are referring to Guttmacher’s data: how many abortions occur, where they occur, the demographics of who gets them, the number of weeks of gestation, and so on. This is different from Guttmacher’s policy research, which often mixes facts with advocacy.

In situations where Guttmacher’s data was the best available and was not significantly contested, we used it.

Similarly:

• We cited an analysis from the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute because it was the best available on a particular aspect of the debate (prevalence of different types of exceptions), and the underlying data was not significantly contested.

• We used data from the pro-abortion-rights Center for Reproductive Rights because it was the best single source of abortion-law exceptions in Europe.

Abortion opponents sometimes argue for adoption, not abortion. We did not include this argument in the main content because it has not proven to be a realistic option. A very small percentage of unwanted pregnancies end in adoption.²⁵ The low rate of adoption isn’t due to a lack of potential adoptive families. Rather, there are several other barriers.

First, adoption does not address the physical and economic challenges of pregnancy itself. These include:

• Months of bodily disruption
• Medical costs and potential complications of pregnancy and childbirth
• Lost wages and work opportunities

Second, research shows that most women who carry a pregnancy to term develop a strong desire to parent the child themselves.²⁶ This occurs for various reasons:

• Formation of emotional bonds during pregnancy
• Concerns about the child’s future wellbeing with unknown parents
• Feeling a personal responsibility to care for the child once they’ve carried it
• Cultural and family pressures

These factors help explain why adoption, while an important option that works well for some women, is not a common alternative to abortion for most women facing unwanted pregnancies.

Both sides of the abortion debate sometimes invoke mental health in their arguments. For example:

• Abortion opponents say women who have abortions suffer anxiety about the decision and then later, potentially over a long period of time, they experience depression and regret over the decision to abort what could have been their child.

• Abortion rights supporters say a woman with an unwanted pregnancy is looking at many months of disruption to her life and, if keeping the child, many years of challenges for which she does not feel ready. Of course this prospect creates mental health problems. The reason so many women choose abortion is because it stops the cause of those problems, the unwanted pregnancy.

Depending on your moral intuitions about the acceptability or unacceptability of abortion, one or the other of these arguments will likely seem more common-sense to you. And individual women’s stories reveal deeply personal, often painful experiences on both sides—from those who describe lasting anguish after abortion to those who express profound relief, and many complex emotions in between.²⁷

The core problem is differentiating between the mental-health effects of having an unwanted pregnancy versus the effects of having an abortion to end that pregnancy.

There are studies claiming to show abortion causes significant mental-health problems, and studies claiming the opposite. It’s even possible to reach those opposite conclusions from the same data because isolating the effect of abortion from unwanted pregnancy requires assumptions in analysis that could turn the result either way.

In our review of the research, we do not believe the case has been clearly made for a large or consistent mental-health effect attributable specifically to abortion. The best review, in terms of comprehensiveness and a credibly neutral source, was done by the United Kingdom’s National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health in 2011. It concluded, “The rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.”²⁸

As a result, we did not include the mental-health angle in the main guide content.

Some have suggested that legalized abortion has resulted in lower poverty and crime. The concept is, after abortion was legalized in the 1970s, there were fewer unwanted births, particularly among women in or near poverty, and this avoided making poverty worse than it would otherwise have been.

In a similar vein, an academic paper popularized by the bestselling book Freakonomics suggested that the rise in abortions in the 1970s was meaningfully associated with a national drop in crime in the 1990s.²⁹ The claim was that fewer children born into high-risk situations would mean fewer criminals about twenty years later, when that generation reached the ages at which crime is most common.

We did not include abortion’s effect on poverty and crime in the main section because, in practice, few advocates use it as justification for legalized abortion. As well, it’s not clear how real or big abortion’s effect on poverty or crime is.³⁰ Although the hypothesis is plausible, measuring it is methodologically difficult, relies on complex statistical modeling, and is sensitive to assumptions about causation, confounding factors, and counterfactuals—leading different researchers to reach different conclusions.

Abortion opponents sometimes argue that anti-abortion laws are “government overreach” or “authoritarian” because they control women’s behavior and have the potential to pry into doctors’ relationships with patients or invade other aspects of life that are normally seen as private.

We did not include this in the main section because it is in the shadow of the Conflicting Rights factor:

• If you accept that a fetus is a human life with a right to protection, then the state’s actions—even invasive ones—are justifiable to protect life. Just as we allow the state to use surveillance and police power to prevent the killing of born persons, those who believe the fetus is a person believe the state is simply policing crime.

• If you do not believe the fetus has the status of a person, then there’s no crime, and any state intervention is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy and other rights.

In other words, whether abortion laws represent legitimate law enforcement or unjustified state intrusion depends almost entirely on how you answer the underlying question of fetal rights.

Abortion opponents sometimes argue that moral uncertainty requires taking the safest position to avoid grave wrongs. They note that history shows societies have often committed what we see today as grave wrongs such as allowing infanticide or slavery.³¹ In this time of moral division and uncertainty about abortion, they say, we should err on the side of protection, as those earlier societies should have.

Behind this argument is the premise that moral recognition of personhood has historically expanded—for example, to include newborn infants and enslaved people who were once denied full moral and legal status. The argument suggests that the moral circle may plausibly expand again to include the unborn. If so, permitting abortion today would place us in a position analogous to those who defended slavery or infanticide in earlier eras. The point of the argument is not certainty but caution: We should not risk being on the wrong side of history.

One complication is that there is another historical trend pointing in a different direction: the expansion of women’s rights. This includes greater legal equality, protection from abuse, and control over whether and when to have children. From this perspective, restricting abortion risks repeating past injustices in which women’s lives and choices were treated as secondary.

These two historical trends conflict when applied to abortion. Resolving the tension requires judging the relative moral weight of fetal life and women’s autonomy—the same core conflict addressed in the Conflicting Rights section. For this reason, we note the “Historical Analogies and Moral Caution” argument here but do not include it in the main section.

In the United States, public opinion has favored abortion being legal in all or most cases for the past several decades, by varying amounts. For example, Pew Research has tracked the topic since 1995. During that time, the gap was as low as three percentage points in 2009 and as high as 27 points in 2024.³²

In polls that ask about legality by stage of pregnancy, support drops as pregnancy progresses. For example, a 2023 poll found 73% supporting legal abortion at six weeks, 51% at fifteen weeks, and 27% at twenty-four weeks (around the time of fetal viability).³³ Such results suggest that public opinion is more conditional and gradual than a single yes-or-no measure implies.

Abortion-rights advocates often highlight public support for their cause, but the majority view on a complex moral and policy issue should not be a decisive factor in forming your own position. There are multiple reasons why:

• Independent judgment. Individual and collective wisdom comes from people making their own evaluations rather than simply following what others are saying. When we follow what’s popular because it’s popular, our views become echoes without understanding.

• Historical error. History has shown that majorities can be wrong. Many widely accepted beliefs in the past were later widely recognized as unjust or misguided. Such changing of the collective mind cannot happen unless people are evaluating, and sometimes re-evaluating, the issues for themselves.

• Selective reliance. Few advocates who argue based on majority support would change their position if public opinion changed. This suggests that even they recognize popularity should not be a deciding factor.

Of course, these principles apply regardless of which side currently has public opinion in its favor.

Abortion rights supporters sometimes note that most western countries have legal abortion, although gestation limits vary. The implied argument is that these countries are the United States’ peers, and we should follow their lead.

Factually, here is the situation:

• Most European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have legal abortion with gestational limits.
• Legality in the United States and Mexico varies by state or region.
• Most countries in Africa, Asia, and South America ban abortion or permit it by exception.³⁴
• The trend over the past fifty years has been toward countries expanding abortion legality, primarily in industrialized countries.³⁵

Comparing different countries’ approaches can provide useful context. But abortion policy reflects deep cultural, legal, and political differences. What fits one country may not translate meaningfully to another. For example, most European countries have a gestational limit around 12 weeks.³⁶ This would be seen as relatively restrictive in the United States, but most European countries cover abortion under national health insurance, integrate it into routine healthcare rather than specialized clinics, and have medical exceptions after the gestational limit.³⁷ So direct comparisons are hard to make.

Ultimately, countries—and in the United States, individual states—must come to their own conclusions rather than simply follow others. For this reason, we did not include international comparisons in the main section.

Abortion opponents sometimes portray abortion as part of a larger continuum with infanticide, arguing that any attempt to draw a sharp boundary will be arbitrary. For example:

Alice: You’d agree killing a one-year-old is gravely wrong, correct?

Bob: Yes, of course.

Alice: And killing a one-week old?

Bob: Yes.

Alice: A one-day-old?

Bob: That also would be gravely wrong.

Alice: Then what about aborting a healthy fetus one day before it would be born?

Bob: That also seems gravely wrong.

Alice: One week before birth?

Bob: That also seems wrong.

Alice: So where does it stop being wrong—and how do you justify that point rather than a day earlier or later?

This line of reasoning has strong intuitive force against later-stage abortions, where the fetus closely resembles a newborn. However, we did not include it in the main section because it is much weaker with respect to the vast majority of abortions, which occur early in pregnancy. If one traces the continuum back to very early stages—when the embryo is a small cluster of cells—the intuition that it is morally comparable to killing a child is far less widely shared.

This leaves the question of whether it’s possible to draw a line, and if so, where—a question addressed in the Drawing a Line section.

Finally, philosophers sometimes question whether birth itself marks a non-arbitrary moral boundary,³⁸ but in law and public morality it is overwhelmingly treated as decisive, so we do not explore those debates here.

Some abortion-rights supporters argue that if the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, public resources should focus less on restricting abortion and more on preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place. This includes expanding access to contraception and improving sex education. The implied claim is that these approaches can reduce abortion more effectively than legal restrictions, especially given evidence that abortion bans do not stop most abortions from occurring.

This perspective faces two problems:

• It’s not clear how much the abortion rate can be reduced by greater investment in prevention alone.³⁹ While improved access to contraception may reduce unintended pregnancy and abortion to some extent, existing evidence suggests the size of this effect is modest rather than transformative.

• The argument assumes prevention is an alternative to abortion restrictions, but the policy could also be implemented alongside abortion bans. If the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, this combination would be expected to perform better than either approach alone. But abortion-rights supporters would reject the combination, suggesting their primary concern is not only reducing the number of abortions but also preserving access to abortion itself—which returns the focus to the core moral and legal factors in the debate, making this a secondary consideration.

Because of these complications, we left this angle out of the main content.

Sometimes, the point at which a fetus can feel pain is raised as a moral red line—that abortion should not be permitted after that point. Although this has intuitive appeal on the surface, it has multiple problems:

• Limited Scope. Although some abortion opponents claim fetal pain can exist as early as 12 weeks, neutral assessments put the likeliest threshold far later, well after 20 weeks,⁴⁰ when 99% of abortions have already occurred.⁴¹ Even at 12 weeks, the large majority of abortions have already happened, so fetal pain cannot by itself resolve most disagreements about abortion.

• Relative Moral Weight. Logically, it’s not clear how much moral weight fetal pain carries compared to what’s causing the pain: the act of ending the fetus’ life. For most people, the moral permissibility of ending fetal life is the central issue, regardless of whether pain is involved.

• Practical Impact. Even if laws required anesthesia or other measures intended to prevent fetal pain, this would be unlikely to change anyone’s view about whether abortion should be legal.

For these reasons, we did not include fetal pain in the main content.

Abortion opponents sometimes criticize states with unrestricted abortion as allowing women to abort their healthy fetuses well after viability. They point to the existence of a small number of abortion providers nationwide that will perform post-viability abortions,⁴² some without requiring medical justification.⁴³ However, the data about post-viability abortions does not clearly distinguish medical and non-medical reasons.

Defenders of later-term abortion providers say that they exist to deal with rare, complex circumstances—often medically required—and that essentially no one casually decides to abort a healthy, post-viable fetus. However, available evidence suggests that at least some post-viability abortions occur for reasons other than acute medical necessity.⁴⁴ For example, a woman might discover she is pregnant unusually late, when abortion pills are no longer an option; she then takes many weeks to raise the money to pay for an in-clinic abortion, which might have the added costs and logistics of traveling out of state.

We did not cover these scenarios in the main content because they do not affect the question of abortion legality in 99%+ of cases. But if you are contemplating the Unrestricted Abortion Rights viewpoint, you need to balance its allowing a small but non-zero number of non-medical, post-viability abortions to occur versus its goal of ensuring that abortion laws do not endanger women by delaying or denying care in medically urgent situations.⁴⁵

Religious arguments about abortion are deeply meaningful to many people. Religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, have been among the most prominent voices in the anti-abortion movement. And if this guide was about whether you personally should get an abortion, your personal religious beliefs would be key.

But this guide is about a question of public policy: Should abortion be legal? In the U.S. legal system, laws must be justifiable on non-religious grounds.⁴⁶ They need to apply to people of all faiths or none. Also, as a practical matter, it is difficult to reason together in a pluralistic society when participants appeal to religious authority that others do not share. This is why even the Catholic Church regularly includes public policy arguments about abortion in secular terms.⁴⁷

Accordingly, the arguments presented in this guide are not based on any particular religious view.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a fertility treatment that helps women get pregnant. It often results in the creation of extra human embryos, which may end up being destroyed.⁴⁸ For abortion opponents who believe human life should be protected from conception, IVF appears to raise moral concerns similar to those posed by abortion. In both cases, early human life is being created and then not brought to term.

If you are inclined to oppose legal abortion, but are also inclined to support availability of IVF treatments, it is worth considering how to reconcile these positions. Here are some options:

• Oppose IVF. This is the most straightforward way to maintain consistency with an anti-abortion position. But it means denying treatment to those struggling with infertility.

• View IVF as acceptable due to its different intent from abortion. With IVF, embryos are created to help people bring new life into the world, and any loss of embryos is not the primary intent. With abortion, the primary intent is to end a pregnancy. Some argue this difference in intention makes IVF more ethically acceptable. But this view is not consistent with a central anti-abortion argument that embryos are innocent lives that should not be sacrificed regardless of the circumstances. That said, other abortion exceptions, such as for pregnancies due to rape or incest, follow a similar principle that circumstances do matter.

• Support minimal-stimulation IVF, which uses lower doses of fertility medications to create fewer extra embryos. The downside is lower success rates and higher costs, as patients may need to undergo multiple treatment cycles.

• Support embryo storage. This involves freezing extra embryos for future pregnancies, usually by the same parents. It allows patients to avoid creating new embryos for each pregnancy attempt, making fuller use of the embryos initially created. However, it incurs additional storage costs, and patients may not use all their frozen embryos for various reasons.

The last three options are not exclusive. They can be combined, presumably in a law that would restrict traditional IVF but allow variants that avoid or minimize embryo loss. But because the law would not provide absolute protection for human life from conception, it could be seen by some abortion opponents as morally wrong and opening the door for further compromises on key principles.

So, while IVF is not a central focus in abortion debates, it can be a useful test case for abortion opponents’ underlying beliefs about the moral status of early human life.

Abortion opponents sometimes pose the question, “Would you want to have been aborted?” The question is meant to highlight an apparent inconsistency: Many people who support abortion rights are glad they were born, but they support allowing abortions that would have prevented others from being born.

Many abortion-rights supporters respond that this question rests on a mistaken assumption. It assumes that “you” already existed as a person at the time an abortion would have occurred. But that assumption is precisely what is disputed in the abortion debate.

One way to see this is to consider choices we generally do not view as morally wrong. Parents are not considered immoral for choosing not to have children, or for having a child at one time but not another—even though those choices determine which children exist, or whether any do at all. In those cases, there is no specific person who is harmed by not coming into existence.

If you combine this idea with a belief that an early stage fetus is not a person, then aborting that fetus is more like choosing not to conceive than like killing someone. There is no person who is made worse off by the decision. By contrast, if one believes that abortion at any stage involves killing a person, then the question naturally has force: Most people would not want to have been killed.

So, “Would You Want to Have Been Aborted?” is mostly a restatement of the underlying question in the Conflicting Rights section, about when (if ever) a fetus warrants legal protection.

Supporters of abortion rights sometimes invoke the idea that abortion is healthcare; opponents often disagree.

On one hand, abortion can reasonably be classified as healthcare because it is a medical service provided to address a woman’s medical needs. This is true whether she receives an in-clinic procedure or takes prescribed medications under medical supervision.

On the other hand, abortion is unusual among healthcare services in its effect of ending the life of a fetus—there is no parallel with ordinary medical care. Also, unlike most medical procedures or prescriptions, abortion are often provided through specialized clinics rather than general hospitals or primary-care settings. Many healthcare organizations and individual doctors choose not to provide abortion services.

So, the implied argument of “abortion is healthcare”—that it is like other familiar and uncontroversial forms of healthcare and therefore is good—does not stand on its own. It only works if you already assume abortion is morally acceptable, which is the very question at the center of the abortion debate.

Because of this flawed reasoning, we’ve noted the argument here but left it out of the main content.

Some abortion opponents strongly believe abortion is murder while abortion-rights supporters reject the claim.

In the main part of the guide, we allowed the anti-abortion arguments to use “killing” to describe abortion because it is factually accurate to say that abortion kills a human life (a fetus being a human life but not necessarily yet a person). “Murder” did not pass that test, for a few reasons:

• Murder means illegally and intentionally killing another person. So “abortion is murder” assumes the fetus being aborted is a person. This treats fetal personhood as a settled matter, when it is actually one of the central points of disagreement in the abortion debate.

• Even in U.S. states where abortion is illegal, laws do not treat it like murder. Women are not held responsible, and while doctors might be punished for performing abortions, they face different penalties than they would for murder.

So, while the phrase “abortion is murder” may express the depth of some anti-abortion convictions, it is neither factually accurate nor, if taken as an argument, representative of how even anti-abortion state laws treat abortion.