The Ethics of Abortion

When Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked a few weeks ago, it signaled that Roe v. Wade appears likely to be overturned in a matter of weeks. If Roe falls, questions about the right to abortion will re-enter the realm of electoral politics in a way they haven’t for 50 years. States will be solely in charge of determining whether abortion is permitted, under what conditions it should be permitted, and what the appropriate thresholds are for making those decisions. That means ordinary voters and their representatives will be forced to grapple with the moral — even metaphysical — quandaries at the heart of the abortion debate. What does it mean to belong to the human species, and when does that belonging begin? Is there a bright line at which an egg, a blastula, or a fetus attains the status of “person”? And how do we weigh the competing interests of mothers, families, and fetuses against one another? Those questions are the foundation on top of which abortion law and policy is built. Kate Greasley is a law professor at the University of Oxford in the U. K., where she studies, among other things, the legal and moral philosophy of abortion. She’s the author of “Arguments About Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law,” and co-author of “Abortion Rights: For and Against” alongside Christopher Kaczor, a philosopher who opposes abortion. While Greasley ultimately believes in the right to choose, she does a remarkably comprehensive job of carefully and fairly considering all the arguments, contradictions and nuances of this issue. We discuss why both progressives and conservatives should be open to questioning their preconceptions about abortion, what the Bible does — and doesn’t — suggest about abortion, why the status of fetal life is the central question at the heart of abortion ethics, whether life begins at conception or emerges later in fetal development, how the complex, messy moral intuitions that most of us have around questions of life and death don’t lend themselves neatly to either an abortion rights or anti-abortion camp, why late-term abortions pose particularly challenging moral questions, how the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy weighs against the fetus’s and more. Mentioned: “Can Fetuses Feel Pain?” by Stuart Derbyshire Book recommendations: Beyond Roe by David Boonin Abortion: Three Perspectives by Michael Tooley, Celia Wolf-Devine, Philip E. Devine and Alison M. Jaggar About Abortion by Carol Sanger Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  A few weeks ago, a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito leaked. In the opinion Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion is overturned. And not just overturned, stomped on, mocked. We don't know how closely the final decision will track the leaked draft. Reporting from inside the court suggests that the five-vote majority to overturn Roe still holds. And so it is likely that the constitutional right to abortion will end, and soon. The decision then will fall to states where at least 13 have trigger laws, making all or nearly all abortions illegal as soon as Roe falls. There's an argument out there that Roe removed abortion from politics. I don't really think that's the right way to think about it.

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  There's been plenty of room to restrict abortion, even with Roe, and it's been a constant and central source of political mobilization and friction. But what is true is that Roe settled the fundamental question of abortion's legality. And Roe's end will make the argument over abortion central to politics for who knows how long to come and in who knows what forms. We have done shows in the past, and we will do more in the future, about the consequences of overturning Roe, what it means for people, what it will do to politics, the cost it will impose. But I wanted to start our coverage of this new era by taking on the question beneath

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  it. Is abortion ethical? What do you have to believe to believe that it is? What do you have to believe to believe that it is not? Kate Greasley is a law professor at the University of Oxford. She's the author of Arguments About Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law, and alongside Christopher Kaczor, Abortion Rights For and Against. Greasley believes in abortion rights, but she does a remarkable job, carefully and fairly, considering all the arguments that would get you there and that also might lead you to another view. These aren't always easy or comfortable questions to think about. You have to consider cases that by their very nature are difficult. But there's no way past this debate we are having and are about to have much more directly

• 2:35Ezra Klein?

  safe through. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:44Ezra Klein?

  Kate Greasley, welcome to the show.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:48Ezra Klein?

  You make the point at the beginning of one of your books that before we start talking about the ethics of abortion, we need to do what you call some cobweb clearing. Tell me about that.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  So abortion views tend to be very tribal. So if you tell me something about a person's key demographics, probably I'm going to be able to predict with quite good accuracy where they fall down on abortion and you will be able to. Often that's because people might think that they're beholden to a particular view of the morality of abortion because it goes hand in hand with this other cluster of commitments and beliefs that they have. And since they're not about to give up those commitments and those beliefs, there's no room for maneuver on abortion there either. But the thing is, in many of these cases, they might find that on reflection, these other commitments don't lead quite so inexorably to one or other view on the morality of abortion.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So if we just think about Christianity, for example, and the Bible, I actually grew up in quite a religious household, so I'm vaguely theologically literate. Now, I don't remember anything ever in the Bible unless I missed it that is explicit about abortion. There are a lot of things about killing people and killing human beings and rules about murder. There's also a lot of ordering of killings, mass killings in the Old Testament. But the main puzzle in abortion ethics is whether or not the fetus counts as a person, which you need to, to be able to be a victim of murder and a human being in the relevant sense, so as to fall within those rules. So where you find rules prohibiting the killing of human beings, the killing of persons in

• 4:28Speaker 01

  the Bible, which are often cited as examples or evidence for why Christianity rules out abortion, the truth is, they don't actually pronounce on that prior question. But is this, is this being in the category that is relevant for this rule? Equally, for instance, if you think about the sanctity of human life, many people, you know, for their own reasons, would say they're committed to this value as a really important value. But the question in abortion is really, is this being that we're looking at in the embryo or the fetus, a human life in the relevant sense, so that it's actually caught within the value of the sanctity of human life?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  You know, is a single-celled zygote, you know, the earliest individual human organism, is that part of what the sanctity of human life protects? And being committed to the value itself doesn't necessarily tell you the answer to that question. There's just more thinking to do.

• 5:25Ezra Klein?

  Before we get to the question of when a human life is a human person, I want to talk for another minute about what these packaged deals of ideas do and don't offer. So you make the point in the book that in Exodus, there is a prescribed rule for what happens if you kill another person. There's also a rule for what happens if you harm a woman who is pregnant in a way that causes her to miscarry.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Right. So the rule is if a man strikes a woman who is pregnant and causes her to miscarry, he has to pay compensation to that woman's husband. Now, in the alternative, if a man strikes a woman and kills her, he forfeits with his life, a life for a life, an eye for an eye, et cetera, et cetera, as it goes. Now, that seems to me to make a very powerful statement about the comparative value of fetal life versus person life. The fetus's life here is a monetary value. It can be compensated for with money. But if you kill a person, if you kill the woman, that's a completely different kettle of fish. So, you know, I'm sure theologians will want to jump in and jump on me and disagree with me, and that's perfectly fine.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I'm just giving a fairly superficial reading here of certain passages that might seem to push things in a slightly different direction and give a different gloss to the question of fetal moral status.

• 6:46Ezra Klein?

  I don't want to remove the left from implication here.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 6:51Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot of people, certainly in the United States, believe that to be liberal in modern terms, to be a Democrat, is more or less to be pro-choice. But it's always seemed more arbitrary than that, how our politics fell on this. I mean, of the Supreme Court justices who decided Roe, most of them were appointed by Republicans. Republican Party is traditionally the party of individual liberty, the party that is nervous about having government deep in your business, which I would assume includes your body. So what do you think people on the left who take their views on this for granted might assume their ideas are offered that they don't?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're right to say that the left is implicated in some of this as well. So just think about what it would mean, for instance, to be a feminist, you know, progressive, academic, at an institution like my own, and not to be a champion of reproductive rights. That would put you in quite an untenable situation. One of the reasons for that is that abortion and abortion ethics and abortion regulation is so deeply intertwined with sex equality. And that's undeniable. There is a huge amount on the line for not just individual women, but for women as a class when it comes to abortion regulations.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So I think especially people who care about sex equality, you know, as I do, and champion sex equality, are going to find it very difficult, even upfront in their thinking, to sever the question about abortion ethics and the moral permissibility of abortion. From the inevitable implications of that for sex equality and interests in bodily autonomy for women. So that's going to be really difficult. It's not impossible, and it doesn't mean either that the left and progressives and the reproductive rights view is wrong. I'm in favor of reproductive rights. But I think it can sometimes be the enemy of very clear headed and reflective thinking about precisely why people are in favor of abortion rights.

• 8:56Ezra Klein?

  So then let's try to get into some of that thinking. You argue that the core question, the question overriding everything else at the heart of the abortion debate is whether or when a fetus becomes a person. Tell me why.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly that, whether or when. So explaining why that question seems to be preeminent is is pretty simple, really. If the embryo or the fetus is a person, or at whatever point it becomes a person, and if abortion then is homicide, then a simple bodily autonomy right argument in favor of abortion is going to struggle to prevail. So it's true that we have certain rights to bodily autonomy, and these are very serious rights and interests. And of course, as I said, there is a huge amount at stake for women in abortion, not just in terms of control of their bodies, but also in terms of control of our reproduction,

• 9:56Speaker 01

  you know, of when and if a person becomes a progenitor and sex equality and all the rest of it. But with all of this taken into account, if abortion really kills a person that is equal in moral value with the same fundamental right to life that you have and I have, it's going to be very hard to see how even these extremely weighty interests are going to win out. So we do have both morally and legally, exceptions to the prohibition on killing. These prohibitions aren't absolute. So for instance, I am permitted to kill morally and legally in some extreme, say,

• 10:38Speaker 01

  self-defense scenario where someone is trying to either kill me or significantly harm me, and that's the only way I can defend myself. That would be one example. But very few abortion scenarios, if abortion really is homicide, are going to meet the very stringent requirements we would usually set up for permissible killing, if killing is really what is going on.

• 11:00Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I'll note here is that to some, that already feels like either a big or even too much of a concession. This isn't, of course, just about fetal life. It's about, as you note, women's bodily autonomy. It's about sex equality. It's about procreative control. It's about the ability to chart the path of your own life. And then sometimes, of course, it's about grievous harm that can be done to somebody in the course of a pregnancy. This has been true for pregnancies I've been very, very close to. So why does the question of fetal personhood override those other considerations for you?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It depends what considerations are specifically. So if we're talking about the right to chart your own life, to make your own decisions, to do as you will. Yeah, of course, that's important. We don't get to kill people for that. So let's say you and I are applying for the same job and it's my dream job. It's really going to completely transform my life to have this job. And if I don't get it, you know, I'll fall into poverty and destitution or what have you. So, you know, a lot is on the line. Nevertheless, I can't kill you so as to vindicate that right. Now, I think it's more relevant when you bring up grievous harm because pregnancy and childbirth can potentially be extremely harmful and extremely damaging.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Again, though, I think in order to really do the control test and ask, well, does it matter if this is a person here? We have to think about the rules of permissible killing in general. So you have to try to imagine if this were a five-year-old child, if this were a 10-year-old child, because that's what shows whether this is relevant. Would I be permitted to kill so as to spare myself that degree of harm? If we're talking about potential death, the answer might be possibly, although some people will still say. Even then, if it's self-defense, the person you're defending yourself against with lethal force needs to be some kind of an aggressor or attacker. They can't be completely innocent. They need to be unjustly imposing on you in some way. So even then, there's a bit of a

• 13:08Speaker 01

  debate. But you can see how that already massively narrows the conditions in which we could even begin to contemplate that killing might be permissible. We're only really thinking about very extreme scenarios. If the fetus is a person.

• 13:26Ezra Klein?

  And we will get to that. But before we do, I have one more of the objections that people raise to to centering personhood in this way, which is that even if you concede that a fetus is a person, which I recognize you don't, getting an abortion isn't murder, it's refusing to use one's body to sustain life, which is a very different thing and has been made in very famous papers by other philosophers. How do you think about that argument?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I think it's a great argument that I'm not convinced of, is how I think of it. The philosopher Judith Thompson is the person most known for putting this argument across. And she uses this analogy involving a famous violinist. It's quite a wacky analogy. She says, imagine that you're kidnapped in the night one day, and your kidneys are forcibly plugged into the kidneys of a famous ailing unconscious violinist who needs your own kidneys in order to survive for the next nine months. After that, they'll let you go, the people who've plugged you in, you can go on your way. And she says, well, look, this is a person, it's definitely a person. But you just don't have to accede to that. It would

• 14:32Speaker 01

  be very nice if you did, she says. But all you're really doing is refusing to go beyond the call of duty if you unplug that person from you, or if you get someone else to unplug them, because you're not obligated to keep another person alive with the use of your very body, if that's what it takes to do that, and for nine months, et cetera, et cetera. There are so many twists and turns in this argument. There are many, many objections to the argument, disanalogies. The main issue I have with it. Is that this whole way of thinking presents the abortion problem as a problem of positive obligations, which means when am I duty bound morally to go out of my way to keep another person alive?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And how out of my way do I need to go in order to keep another person alive? And we think, well, you know, it depends who the person is, but not that far, not to the point of, you know, nine months and I'm plugged into them with my, you know, kidneys and I'm stuck in hospital, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is when we think about the way in which many abortions take place, they don't really resemble this kind of clean unplugging of the violinist. So imagine, for instance, that in order to get the violinist off you, let's say you're not obligated to offer him your kidneys, let's say, but now that's the situation. And the only thing you can do to free yourself from this burden is to kill the violinist outright and then detach him from you.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Say you need to suffocate him or strangle him or stab him or poison him in order to free yourself from that burden. Then it becomes a little bit trickier to analyze what's going on as just a question about my duty to save somebody, to give up my body to save somebody. It starts to look a lot more like direct killing. And the rules and prohibitions and permissions around when I'm permitted to directly and outrightly kill a person are much stricter than the moral rules about when I'm permitted to just refuse to save and say, you know, hey, I'm sorry, but it's not my business.

• 16:44Ezra Klein?

  So then let's get to the core of this argument. You say that people often conflate the idea of being a human being and being a person, a person with full moral weight and rights. What do you mean by that?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  So when we talk about human beings, one way of thinking about that is just as a pure biological category. So in that way, all embryos and fetuses are of course, human beings because they are genetically human, individual, living organisms. They're not bovine, they're not equine, they are human. But when it comes to abortion ethics and we're thinking about the right to life, what we're really interested in is moral rights and whether or not something is a person with the right to life. And what you can't do is sort of get that debate and get that puzzle out of the way just by asserting, but a fetus is a human being or an embryo is a human being.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Because what we're really trying to figure out is, well, okay, granted, but is that what confers moral status? Is just being biologically human, the thing that we really care about, the thing that gives a creature a very fundamental right to life, the kind that I have and you have. So if we reflect just for a second on the idea of personhood and what makes a person a person, I think very quickly, we can see that this is not one in the same category as human being or humanity. And we can see that very easily, just because of the fact that it's, it's very easy for us to conceive of creatures, beings that are persons, but that are not human. So,

• 18:26Speaker 01

  you know, if you ever watched Star Trek, which I don't, but I hear about it, I catch glimpses.

• 18:31Ezra Klein?

  I did, I'll, I'll.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  You did, yeah.

• 18:34Ezra Klein?

  I was a next generation fan.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  You're tricky. My Star Trek knowledge is secondhand via Big Bang Theory. But anyway, so there are intelligent aliens all over the shop in Star Trek, not the kind of amorphous blob kinds, but the kind that communicate, that are thinking, feeling, emotive, just like persons. Now, it's very obvious when we think about a creature like that, that we're thinking about a person, but they're not human. So that already shows us that these are conceptually distinct categories. And in abortion ethics, what we're interested in is the person category because that's the morally laden one.

• 19:11Ezra Klein?

  So this gets to the two ways that people typically argue that the moral weight of personhood is attained. And one is the species membership view and the other is the capabilities view. Let's start with the species membership view because something close to it is, I think, at the core of most, although not all, pro-life cases. And I think there are kind of two versions of this that people are familiar with, or actually one they're more familiar with and one they're not. I think the one we're most familiar with is religious, that human beings are uniquely divine. There is a moment when we are insulted by God. The precise nature of that moment is decided for us by different traditions or different interpretations of different traditions.

• 19:53Ezra Klein?

  But it's tricky because I don't think that's really a claim we can argue over. And in general, because of that is not a claim used for legal questions. But there's also a secular version of this made by many pro-life scholars and thinkers that is more about what makes a human being unique and worthy and of value. So do you want to try to outline the secular version of the species membership version of personhood?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Sure, well, I'll try. There are really lots of arguments, actually. I don't think there's just one version. But a really important strand in this way of thinking, I think, is this idea that all human beings are endowed with a certain essence, just in virtue of being the member of a species, the typical members of which, or the typical developed members of which, are characterized by certain kinds of capacities and certain innate forms of flourishing.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  It also, the species membership criterion, I think, gets a lot of mileage out of questions over human equality. So one thing that it can sort of pride itself over is its inclusivity. So somebody who champions that idea might say, well, this is the only way, you know, to say that all human beings, just by virtue of being human beings, are persons, is the only way to avoid making the kinds of discriminations, problematic discriminations, between the value of different sorts of human beings that we wouldn't want to make. So those are some some main strands. But just one quick thing on the idea of insolment and conception, though, as well.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  As I said, I'm not religious, but say you are someone who believed that being a person is a matter of having a soul. It doesn't follow automatically from that, that insolment coincides with conception. That, again, is is something else that that you would need to think about.

• 21:52Ezra Klein?

  I think miscarriage helps put some of these ideas here to an interesting test. So if you believe in insolment in the moment of conception, then you also believe that many, many, many, many insouled humans are dying before birth anyway. And that might raise, depending on how you think about it, some very hard questions about the kind of supreme being you believe in. But it also raises questions about what our responsibility is to prevent miscarriage, what our responsibility is to research it, to remove the conditions like famine and malaria that we know make it happen so often to people who want the children they've conceived. And so miscarriage, I think, presents an interesting problem from a different direction for a lot of these arguments.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, if blastulas, which are, you know, very, very early embryos, are persons, then you're right. That would mean that natural miscarriage is the greatest human disaster on the face of the earth, right? It would mean that disease, famine, war, Covid, right? You know, none of this has anything on that. So if somebody really believed that these are persons that are dying off, you would want to know what are their views about where we should be putting all of our resources. Surely we should plug them all into miscarriage prevention. That's just one of the strange implications of the idea that zygotes and embryos are persons from conception.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  It would also mean that the death of a single-celled zygote, so we're talking about a single-celled organism. Is every bit as bad from the kind of the point of view of the universe as the death of, say, a 10-year-old child, a 25-year-old person, a 90-year-old person. And again, that's really very difficult to get behind.

• 23:35Ezra Klein?

  And in a way, there's there's another version of this that attends to the the secular arguments. So a lot of secular arguments, and I don't think this is easily dismissed, and nor do I dismiss it, rely on what you call potentiality principles, that the futures we might or that we will have. When you take those principles very seriously, that the tragedy here is depriving someone of the future they could have. What that implies across a range of issues is that young is more valuable than old because younger people have more future ahead of them. So the loss of embryos, the loss of five-week-old miscarried

• 24:15Ezra Klein?

  or or seven-week-old aborted fetuses is worse, significantly worse than the loss of a 10-year-old, a 35-year-old, a 50-year-old, certainly than a 70-year-old. In a way that, I mean, maybe it's true, but I think defies intuition and defies the way we we end up treating these cases, even when we're near them. And and I want to say in this, having been around a lot of miscarriages, just a lot of tragedy, I don't take anything from how horrible this can be. It's just that I think if you watch human beings in these moments, our intuitions show that we treat these differently.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  That's definitely true. I mean, the the potentiality argument, again, there are different versions of it, different strands. It's an interesting one. It's immediately a logical problem with the whole idea that embryos should have fundamental human rights or do because they're potential persons, which is simply the question of why potential persons are endowed with the rights of fully-realized persons. So as one philosopher puts it, if I'm a potential president, that does not mean I get the rights of an actual president. It means the precise opposite, right? As soon as you acknowledge that something is a potential X, not an actual X, you're admitting that it lacks the conditions or the virtues

• 25:33Speaker 01

  for having the rights of X. A very interesting argument, and one I make all my students read about potentiality, is this idea about the wrongness of killing and a future of value. The best person to read on this is a philosopher called Darmar Chris, who argues that As you said, what's wrong about killing anyone, a person, me, you, is the deprivation of our future, of the future of value. It's not the pain of death, because if you kill me painlessly, it would still be every bit as wrong. And then he takes that and he moves from there to saying, well, it's the same thing, right? It's the same deprivation of the future of value, meaning everything that's distinctive about the future of a person that you take from an embryo. Hence, killing them is every bit as wrong. But as you rightly

• 26:17Speaker 01

  identify, it doesn't get us just there. It goes further, too far. Because if that were correct, if this theory were correct, it would mean that it's actually worse to kill, say, a zygote or an embryo than it is to kill, say, a seventy year old person or, you know, a twenty five year old person or even a ninety year old person, because it has so much more life left ahead of it. Now, maybe some people would want to bite that bullet and say, yeah, maybe that that's true. But I think we're going to be very resistant to saying that that's the case.

• 26:50Ezra Klein?

  There's a thought experiment you talk about in the book that seems particularly relevant to this question. Can you talk about the embryo rescue case?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So just to say, it's not my thought experiment. Other people have talked about this long before me. So in the embryo rescue case, we posit that you are in, say, a hospital, the hospital is burning down very quickly, you've got to get out of there. And on your way out, you have a choice. You can grab and rescue and take with you either five embryos or one whole baby. Now, you pose that question to everybody and, you know, unless the person is nuts, they're going to say, of course, you take the baby. Of course, you don't take the five embryos. So what superficially that thought experiment is supposed to show is that really for anyone who says, I'll take the baby, not the embryos,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  you don't believe that an embryo life is equal in moral value to the life of a baby. Because the usual rules about saving people, if you're not personally connected to anyone, maybe you have some leniency there. But if you're not, the rule is you save the many over the few, right? You would always save five people over saving one person. But here, you very clearly would save the one baby. So the suggestion is, well, that is betraying something about our commitments, about our ideas of the comparative moral value of babies versus embryos.

• 28:14Ezra Klein?

  So one question that raises to me, and I think this is something that Marquis says in response to some of the claims that his arguments prove too much, is that maybe our moral intuitions are just wrong. I mean, we have moral intuitions, you know, looking back at our history and looking back at experiments that tell us to treat people who look like us a lot better than people who don't, that tell us the lives of our family and community members matter almost infinitely more than that of faraway strangers. To use a Peter Singer thought experiment, we will spend a tremendous amount of money buying a new pair of shoes that we will not spend to get bed nets to children in Africa, even though if we were walking by that same child drowning in a lake, we'd of course ruin our shoes to save them.

• 28:59Ezra Klein?

  So maybe the problem here is not the moral worth of the embryos. Maybe the problem here is that we've evolved to see the world in ways that are immoral.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It's entirely possible. You can't discount it, right? But yes, it's always going to be the case when confronted with these kinds of thought experiments or intuitions that one avenue of counter is just to bite the bullet and embrace the problematic judgment and say, well, we're just mistaken in thinking we should save the baby. We really should save the embryos, or we really should put all our resources into miscarriage prevention. It's just not going to happen realistically, but we really should. So yeah, that's one avenue to go down. In this particular case, though, that's not the avenue that defenders of the conception threshold do go down because they may be wrong, but they're not crazy.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  They're not going to save the embryos. So the more likely response actually in this kind of case is to try to explain the intuition in a different way, which doesn't get you the underlying claim or principle. So for instance, they might say or have said, we should save the baby. But the reason... We save the baby rather than the embryos is not because we think the baby has a stronger basic right to life, but because, for instance, it's more likely that the loss of the baby will upset more people, will cause more human misery overall because they are loved, someone is attached to them, and so on and so forth. The issue with that is that we can

• 30:33Speaker 01

  control for this, right? We can just say, okay, so make it the case that the baby is an orphan with no connections, nobody who will miss it, and let's make it the case the embryos are really, really loved. And, you know, there are parents who are seriously attached to them and will be absolutely devastated by their death. Still, of course, you would save the baby, not the embryo. So we can always amend to account for that, but that is going to be more likely the general gist of the answer.

• 31:02Ezra Klein?

  I think it might be easy to listen to some of this and think, well, these are just thought experiments. These are just implausible edge cases. But particularly in this one, I don't think that's true, because a fairly related real life question is IVF. And I think IVF is interesting because the goal of it is to bring life into this world. But to achieve that goal often means producing a significant number of embryos that will not be used, that will not be turned into actual people. And so here you have a desire to create life that is also going to mean destroying what could be lives. How does that fit under this framework?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So if you think embryos are persons, then that's true. The practice of IVF is the practice of bringing a number of full persons into existence with the knowledge that a number of them will die very, very quickly before they've ever had much of any kind of a life. Interestingly, I'm not really sure that that is such a problem for the pro-life view. So we could think of it like, you know, let's go back to Victorian England, when the child mortality rate was terribly high. Was it immoral for these people to bring children into being, knowing that there was a very good chance that they weren't

• 32:27Speaker 01

  going to make it into adulthood? And does it matter that in the case of IVF? It's not just a suspicion or a worry, but a certain knowledge that some of them won't make it without directly intending that. I think those are the problems there. But at least on the face of it, it's not clear to me that that issue is quite as devastating for the pro-life view as some other implications.

• 32:51Ezra Klein?

  I don't mean to frame it as I've come up with a devastating pro-choice argument here. It's more about the complications of it, actually, in some ways for everybody, but but one way in which I was thinking about it. And I'll say some of my thinking on this, we're having a very philosophical conversation about this, but a place I come from in all this, to my surprise, is having been made much more emotionally pro-choice by having gone through two very, very, very, very dangerous and difficult pregnancies with my partner. And I adore my children and we went through a lot to have them, not IVF, but other things. And I did not expect that on the other side of that, I would find my belief in reproductive

• 33:36Ezra Klein?

  choice much strengthened because what I've sort of felt like I saw on both ends. But that also leads for me to a frustration sometimes in the conversation, which I think the IVF issue gets at, which is that being pro-choice is often framed, certainly by the pro-life side, and I do try to use everybody's preferred terminology here, as being questions of life versus death. And often I think these questions are actually of life versus life, a commitment to life versus a commitment to life, a commitment to duties and responsibilities versus a commitment to other potential duties and responsibilities, not just as a desire to go to raves and take MDMA. So I mean, a different example that is obviously not

• 34:17Ezra Klein?

  philosophically or tangibly the same, but in America, about half of abortions are had by people who already have children. So if you think of parents of three kids, one of whom has severe developmental disabilities, they're struggling financially, you know, one of their other children is having a lot of trouble in school, and they choose to end an unplanned, unexpected pregnancy because caring for the children they have is everything they can manage. And to do less by those children would be gutting for them and maybe very bad for the children. I mean, this is a case, again, in a real way, not just a thought experiment way, where they are weighing the life and lives they are already responsible for on the scale and coming to this decision.

• 35:00Ezra Klein?

  I always feel the framing of this really tries to ignore those cases, which are not edge cases, which are, I think, actually quite modal.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  You're right. People do make these gut-wrenching determinations about, you know, where their energy in their life is going to be plugged in when they already have dependents. Here's one issue. We can only frame things in that way if we already believe, or once we already believe, that the embryo or the fetus isn't a person and that abortion, therefore, isn't a homicide. Because, again, do the controlled case. So imagine it's a five-year-old child that somebody already has. And they say, well, you know, you've done a lot of soul-searching, finances are tight, and we only have so much love to give and energy,

• 35:48Speaker 01

  and we have other responsibilities. And it's also emotional to just give the child up. That's emotionally costly. So we've decided to have the child killed. If we really thought it was a person, that would be the analogy of what's going on. I agree with everything you say. I think the fact that those considerations have this hold on you is just evidence of the fact that, of course, you don't believe that what we're dealing with here in an embryo or a fetus is morally equivalent to a born child, a grown child, what have you.

• 36:25Ezra Klein?

  I think that's true. Morally equivalent, though, is a very interesting term here. And I know I'm getting off of our clean structure of going to the capabilities view, but I want to, I want to stay here for a minute. Let me go back to the case of miscarriage for a minute. I've known people who've miscarried, you know, I mean, I know many people who've miscarried before they even knew, right? That's a very common situation. I've known people who've miscarried at eight or nine or 10 weeks. And that's really a deep sorrow. Most people I know don't tell their friends and family they're pregnant until 12 or 14 weeks, just because miscarriage is so common before then that they don't want to have to go through talking about it. And so it's a sorrow, but people, you know, they, they try again, they move on. I've known people who've miscarried at four months, at five

• 37:09Ezra Klein?

  months, and even later. And that's a tragedy. It's very, very, very hard. And then I've known people who've lost children. And that is life defining. It changes everything. Nothing is ever the same. And I think two things are true that I think of when you talk about moral equivalence, which is, one, I think that if you watch how we treat those situations, there is not moral equivalence between them. And I would be really struck by somebody who said there was. And on the other hand, you know, and this is maybe a point for some of the intuitions of people who are opposed or not comfortable with abortion. I'm not sure I think of personhood and non-personhood, and I know you don't either, as exactly a binary. There's something evolving there. There's something changing.

• 37:53Ezra Klein?

  It's not that there's no loss at 10 weeks. It's completely meaningless, but it is not what it is at 10 years. And so there's something here where you're, we're on a scale, a spectrum, that I think is very complicated to even talk about, but is very, very obvious in the way we treat these different cases as actual people who deal with them all the time in our lives.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, and I too have known people who have miscarried early, which, you know, as you said, is incredibly common, and people who have lost children at older stages, and people who have born babies that were stillborn. And of course, while you would never chastise a person for being absolutely devastated over an early miscarriage, if that person suggested that what they had suffered was the equivalent of what someone had suffered when they have a stillborn baby, or when their child dies, you would think that that was inappropriate, or you would think that there is something that perhaps they had missed there.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  When we do our theorizing around this, I think what we have to do, the stance we have to take, is to think about how we explain these intuitions. What would make it true? Because this is so common, right? Even for people on both sides of the divide, the abortion divide, who are extremely divided. This judgment that what is happening and the value of life very, very early is utterly different from late fetuses, neonates, and et cetera, et cetera, is a very universal judgment. So I think we have to take that fairly seriously and try and think seriously about, well, why would that be the case?

• 39:53Ezra Klein?

  So then let's talk about the other view here, which I think sort of fits some of these intuitions better, but puts us in the realm of fuzzy answers, which is the capabilities view. What is the capabilities view of personhood?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  So essentially, this is the idea that personhood is constituted by one or usually more, a cluster of characteristics or traits that define paradigmatic, developed human beings. So these would be things like, depending on your view, and people have different views, but cognitive capacities like self-awareness, rationality and intelligence, conscious desires, communication ability and language, our whole emotional spectrum. And the basic idea is that, you know, if we think human beings as a species are especially valuable, are uniquely valuable

• 40:53Speaker 01

  in the animal world, then we need to explain why that would be the case. And to explain that without just showing an arbitrary preference for our own species, like just because it's us, I think very obviously, the kinds of features we would default to would be these sorts of things. We would say, well, because we are like this. And these capacities tend to be the basis or the precondition for certain interests as well. You know, I'm extremely conscious. I have this particular kind of emotional spectrum that makes me invested in what happens to me in a unique way. So one view that I'm attracted to in this vein is the philosopher Mary Ann Warren suggested

• 41:37Speaker 01

  that personhood is a cluster concept. So what that means is that there's no one single necessary and sufficient condition for being a person. There are just a number of salient features of characteristics that constitute personhood. And you need to have enough of them in order to be a person. And if you have absolutely none of them, then you can't possibly be. And they're the sort of characteristics I was referencing.

• 42:05Ezra Klein?

  So there's a lot to unpack in this, but let me start with, I think, one of the implications that it seems to hold that is a little repugnant. So I'm a vegan, I'm somebody who cares a lot about animal rights. And it's, I think, undeniable that an adult male pig has quite a lot more capabilities than my much adored seven month old. And if you told me, again, I don't eat meat, I haven't for over 10 years, if you told me that an adult male pig has a moral weight of my seven month old because of that pig's capabilities, I would think there was something wrong with you. So why do I think that?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  So one way of coming at that would be to say, well, if the pig has these kinds of capabilities, then it's a person, but so is your infant. So what you're really asking is, why would my seven month old, if it doesn't have, or she, he, sorry, it's not it, if she or they don't have these capabilities, why would we still count them as persons? That is very difficult. And there are different ways of answering this, but there's no easy answer, there's no perfect answer. So some philosophers might actually bite the bullet and say, well, actually, you know, very young infants, neonates, are not persons with a

• 43:30Speaker 01

  strong right to life, but yet we have reasons to treat them as if they were. And some of those reasons might be because it's brutalizing for us to behave towards such young infants who are nearly persons, right, who are developing into persons so fast, as if they were inconsequential. And infants are wanted, etc., etc. These answers aren't particularly satisfying. So I think we have to think a little bit more about thresholds of personhood. I think there are also reasons why.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  We should relate and we morally need to relate to beings that have so much of our own human embodiment, so much of our form, in a way that is morally sensitive and shows them a huge amount of respect, even if we don't think they fully yet have the interests that are paradigmatic of persons.

• 44:25Ezra Klein?

  Is this somewhere where potentiality also comes into play or could? Because I think that is what a lot of people, frankly, myself included, kind of intuitively think, that there's some mixture of capabilities and potentiality and relational, that it's no one thing, but but here too, it's sort of an emergent property. But the fact that my pig will always be a pig, I mean, not my pig, their pig, and my infant will not be is is meaningful, in a way that I think frankly, pro-life people would say is harder for some of my pro-choice intuitions.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's and it's right that you should respond to that. I mean, you know, what kind of a parent would you be if you didn't? At the same time, I think there's also something meaningful that we ought to respond to just in the developed human form itself. And, you know, this will go back to to late abortion as well, obviously. But if you take the example, not of an infant now, but of an older human being in some kind of a comatose state, let's say, a permanent vegetative state, we might say, well, this isn't really a person with interests anymore. And, you know, they have no idea what's going on, they're not coming out of this, there is a real sense in which they have lost their personhood.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  And yet, we have very good reasons, I think, to show a huge amount of moral respect and dignity, just towards the kind of casing that they have, which is reflective of our own casing. We are typical persons and they have our own form. And they are creatures who have suffered a misfortune in not being persons, you know, in in being in this state at the moment. So there would be something kind of quite morally perverse, I think, about simply saying, well, they've lost this, they've lost that. It doesn't matter that they are fully developed human beings who look like me and look like you. That just has no pull on us whatsoever.

• 46:23Ezra Klein?

  I'm trying to think about this argument because it feels strange that what I am responding to in my seven month old is their casing. It seems to suggest that the comatose person is very much like a dead person, a recently dead person. And we do try to show respect to dead bodies, but but that doesn't feel right to me. Like, I don't think a person in a coma is like a dead person, despite the fact that they may look quite similar. I'm curious how you how you think about that.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I don't think they're exactly like a dead person, but insofar as, you know, let's stipulate they're not coming out of it. They are someone who has been a conscious person. And even if we think they've lost all the personhood traits now, I think we simply have reasons to reasons of humanity to us, you know, that bear on how we treat each other to not deal callously with the human form. So when you talk about your infant, you're right. I think it is different. There is more going on there. It's not just the fact that she resembles, you know, babies. She's close to being a baby. She looks like human form. She's also your daughter, and you are her parent, and you're becoming her parent. So it would be very strange to treat her as if she doesn't have interests. And

• 47:31Speaker 01

  of course, she does have interests, right? She has every living being has interests of their own. It's just that not all beings have these kind of cluster of properties.

• 47:41Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I think this gets to, that you spend a lot of time working through in the way the capabilities view differs from the species membership view, is it's something very unsatisfying here, is that there isn't really a clear cutoff. And anyone you could choose, you can come up with counterexamples and 23 weeks. I mean, well, why not 24? Or this threshold, why not that threshold? Or what about this edge case? And I think one of the appeals of just saying, "Life begins when we know there's been conception," is, well, it's clear. We can act upon it as opposed to, you know, somebody has to make the decision of about, you know,

• 48:25Ezra Klein?

  23 weeks versus 19 or 31 weeks versus, or a five-year-old or a comatose person or whatever. Talk to me a bit about how you see that collision between what's offered by clarity and clear thresholds? And, you know, what it then demands of us to try to meet?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  So there are lots of different problems going on there. When we worry about infants and people with radical cognitive disabilities, we're really thinking about and rightly worrying about our conditions for personhood and saying, well, what does that mean about these cases? Right? Are these counterexamples? Then there is another set of questions. And there's another set of questions about line drawing. And where do you draw the line? And what about small differences, small increments? So that's the kind of worry that I think people are espousing when they say things like, well, if you're going to make it 24 weeks, why not 24 weeks in a day? Or why not, you know, 23 weeks and six days? Then they can narrow it down to minutes from there. And then they can narrow it down to seconds.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  And hence, the conception threshold ends up looking very appealing because on the face of it, it seems like it doesn't suffer from those kinds of problems. So a couple of things on this. The first thing is when people say those kind of things, when they launch those kind of worries, I'm immediately interested in what idea of personhood, you know, what kind of property they think this is, that it would commit them to asking that question and to thinking that there is a determinate answer as to whether there is a person there yet between 26 weeks and 26 weeks in one day? So if you thought that personhood is this kind of ethereal property, right?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  You know, kind of floating somewhere that comes to inhabit human bodies in an instant, then it would make sense to ask that question and to be really vexed about, well, has it happened yet? Is it there yet? But if you thought instead that all personhood is is a moral category based on certain features that are preconditions for interests that we perceive. And you think it doesn't have a sharp beginning. You think there is no, as I call like an existential pop, like bam, it just happens. Then you might not worry quite so much about that kind of a threshold issue.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Because you wouldn't believe that in any case, personhood comes about quite so instantaneously. Hence, you wouldn't be driven to say, well, wait a minute, you know, we're putting it there. Is that the moment or was the moment, did the moment happy, happen already, you know, when was it? So first of all, you've got to ask what kind of deeper commitments about the whole idea of what personhood is. Does that worry commit a person to you? Secondly, if you're really worried about that kind of threshold problem. This arbitrariness between very, very close points. The conception threshold doesn't get you off the hook. Because conception is also a process.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Conception does not happen instantaneously in a moment. You can break conception down like every other biological process and everything else in the world. You can break it down into almost infinitely divisible finer moments. And then continue to ask, but wait a minute, which one is it? So the sperm approaches the ovum, not yet, when it first touches the ovum. When it penetrates the ovum, is it this second, is it that second? So you can perform these kind of, you know, objections, launch those objections to the conception thresholds in exactly the same way. And if somebody says, well, okay, it doesn't really matter because what we do know is this whole process happens very quickly.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And then by the end, we know that someone has been conceived. Well, we can say the same thing. About developmental markers of personhood or thresholds that anyone might want to use. Birth is made up of lots of increments, but once someone's born, there is a point at which it's happened and we know it. So it shouldn't be a worry unless you believe a very particular view of the kind of thing personhood is. And if it is a worry, it's the same worry for everybody. The conception threshold is in the same boat.

• 52:43Ezra Klein?

  So let me suggest two things on that. One is I think you're very much right. And I believe, and I don't really believe this to be controversial, that most of the arguments here, trying to set this threshold on the pro-life side, not all, but most, are a secular justification, shadow boxing for religious view. And that is not to say, I mean, there are pro-life atheists. I'm not suggesting anything completely universal here, but I don't think it's accidental that the majority on the Supreme Court that looks likely to strike down Roe is made of committed Catholics primarily, that your co-author, your interlocutor in your book is a committed Catholic thinker.

• 53:26Ezra Klein?

  There's, I think, a lot of work to create a secular scaffolding around fundamentally religious view, which is not, by the way, and I want to say this very clearly, illegitimate. It's what trying to argue in law forces you to do. You're allowed to have religious views, like that's part of religious freedom. But I think it makes these arguments kind of difficult because they're not really what they claim to be about. But the second thing I'll say is that the problem seems to me to still recur then. I mean, let's say on the pro-choice side too, which is let's say that you agree that, you know, full personhood, we're just going to somewhat arbitrarily set the line at birth. And there are reasons to do that. But before then, it doesn't mean you think that it's not a person.

• 54:08Ezra Klein?

  In some way, it'd be very hard to define that what we're saying is that at 10 weeks, it has one one thousandth the moral weight of a person. At 15, at 20, it's, you know, one five hundredth or one fiftieth or one twenty-fifth or one fifth or, you know, at 39 weeks, it's, you know, point nine, right? And I don't think anybody wants to try to pin numbers on this in the same way that the bioethics work to create, how much do we value a year of life is very uncomfortable work. But one of the things I thought about sometimes reading these arguments is that saying there's no existential pop of personhood.

• 54:47Ezra Klein?

  Only gets you so far too, because I think it kind of implies that on the other side is non-personhood, when I think the intuition is actually on the other side is some kind of shaded personhood, right? There's some level of moral weight, but I don't believe, you know, the moral weight is very much at, say, 10 weeks, but I do believe it's reasonably high at 35. And at that point, you know, it'd really be the life of the mother that would be the countervailing weight. I'm curious if that rings true to you, and then how you think about what we're actually saying if we say it's not a person until X.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  So if you think that personhood is not, yeah, as we said, an existential pop, but a moral status that fades into existence, it follows from that that personhood status is something that happens gradually. Now, it does get more complicated, because if you think the traits that make up personhood, which gradually fade into existence, those kinds of capabilities we were talking about earlier, self-awareness, conscious desires, rationality, communication ability, et cetera, et cetera. One slight difficulty with the suggestion that you make, which says, well, you know, it's 1,000th, and then it's, you

• 55:56Speaker 01

  know, 100th, and then it's a 30th, and more and more, is that actually, if we look very early on in pregnancy, we don't even have a minimum degree of those kinds of capabilities. You know, an embryo isn't 10% rational, you know, or 10% communicative. It's none of those things whatsoever. So I actually think that may be a drawback of the capabilities view, or it may kind of prompt us to think a bit more about what exactly it is in utero that is developing, to which we attribute some kind of moral significance and some kind of moral status.

• 56:52Ezra Klein?

  Can you talk a bit about the paradox of the heap?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yes. This goes back to the question about sharp beginnings and whether or not personhood is a sharp boundary and arbitrariness around boundaries. So the paradox of the heap, let's say, I start drawing grains of sand together, one by one, into a pile. And by the time, at some point, when I get to the millionth grain or something like that, I will have a heap, there will be a heap there eventually. So you know that what has happened is I've gone from no heap to a heap. So if I then asked you, okay, so we've had this transformation. With which grain did it occur? Pinpoint for me precisely with which grain?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  You're not going to be able to give a rational answer to that because whichever one you choose, if you choose the millionth one, I'll simply say, well, explain to me why it's not the millionth and one. And you won't be able to have an answer. So there is no non-arbitrarily distinguishable point at which the heap comes into existence. Now, the paradox is nevertheless, there is a heap, right? It seems like there's no point we can identify when it's come into existence, but it has happened. So it's a kind of an analogy for the kind of worry, a sort of threshold and arbitrariness worries that people are really talking about sometimes when they say, but why this moment and not that moment? We believe that there are real things and real categories that come into existence

• 58:21Speaker 01

  vaguely. And just because we can't pinpoint a sharp boundary with which that happens doesn't mean that the transformation hasn't occurred.

• 58:30Ezra Klein?

  I actually think this is a very profound issue because so much in life, and particularly so much in law, carries this problem of the heap. In your book, Christopher Kaczor, who you're debating with in that book, makes an extended argument on his side that on matters of basic justice, you need

• 58:52Ezra Klein?

  A deep form of clarity and specificity that if we were talking about voting rights, we wouldn't just say, well, to be allowed to vote, you need some combination of constitutive characteristics like cognition and age and so on, and we'll kind of figure that out on the fly. But as somebody who covers voting rights, that's exactly what we've done. I mean, we make it very hard for many people to vote. But even putting that aside, we've said, you know, in most cases, you can vote at 18. And well, why not 17 years and 364 days? Or why not 17 years and 363 days? And why should there not be votes for children? Because what's being done actually really, really affects them.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  But if I can interject, imagine if somebody said, because you can't tell me, why not at, you know, 17 years and three months or something like that, babies should vote. Imagine that that was the structure of somebody's argument.

• 59:50Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Right? Because that's what that's what sometimes we witness. So it has to be conception. Well, wait, no, how do we get there? That's not reasonable. There are still reasonable and unreasonable answers.

• 1:00:02Ezra Klein?

  It's something that I think is an asymmetry in this debate. There are people, and I know them, and I respect this position, and I very much, I want to say, I very much respect the pro-life position. But I respect the position, there's very little, it's morally complicated here. It's not really my position. And I think something that's hard for most people in this debate, a lot of people hold the strong version of the pro-life position. At least it's all easy. On the other side of conception, it's all murder. You just shouldn't do it. We don't need to think about anything except maybe, maybe, maybe rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Maybe, but not always. And I think for most people, we're kind of caught in the heat problem, unfortunately. This is hard.

• 1:00:45Ezra Klein?

  Lines will have to be drawn that are not perfect, that do not fit every case. I mean, and I'll use the harder case here. I find late term abortion bans repellent, not because I'm comfortable with late term abortion, but because late term abortions are almost always the most unbelievably difficult cases, such that the law's brute force is a pretty bad way to think about it. Now, you know, there are things you could do that are on the margin of that, but most cases of late term abortion are tragic. It's very, very rare that somebody walks in at 37 weeks and says, you know, I've changed my mind. And I'd be comfortable saying you can't just change your mind at 37 weeks.

• 1:01:25Ezra Klein?

  But because people worry about the case, they make these laws that impose tragedies on people, impose true tragedies when they're already undergoing something tragic. And it's just hard. Like, I'm a policy person, I'm a political person. The hardest questions never have very clean answers, but this feels to me like very much one of those. We're always trying at some point to say, well, now we've got a heap. Or, you know, now we're at some different level and maybe we exert a little bit more scrutiny. But the law is crude and people's actual conditions are manifold.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Right, so maybe let's talk about the law first then. Say we've got to the point where maybe we think, well, the truth about personhood is that it begins vaguely. There is no precise point that is the magic moment, but at some point, an early human being has become a person. You're right, the law can't work that way. The law can't just say, well, you know, it's complicated, it's vague, but at some point, the law has to be clear and bivalent as much as it is practicable to be so. We might also think that there's a real moral and political necessity for stipulating a threshold, an entry point to personhood, beyond which we no longer make any granular distinctions

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  about how much of a person anyone is, based on these capabilities. That is absolutely essential to maintaining the kind of moral community that we want, to being able to treat each other with dignity. And you might also think it's part of the whole concept of personhood itself, that within a range, once a creature qualifies as personhood, they are automatically as much a person as anyone else. I'm sympathetic to the view that that's just part of what this category is. So let's say there's no intrinsic Existential dramatic change at birth, it isn't a magic moment, but I don't believe

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  there is such a thing. Anyway, we may nevertheless think that birth could be a good place to stipulate that threshold, given that we need a threshold like that, it is part of the concept of a person, that there is an absolute entry point beyond which it's indisputable. And there are a number of virtues that go in favour of birth. So firstly, birth is highly visible. Nobody can mistake the fact that birth has happened. It has a universal social salience, it always has had in every single culture, the fact of birth is something that is significant. Secondly, it's actually a very cataclysmic biological event in the

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  life of an early human, even if it's not this magic moment which we don't believe exists, it's still massively significant. It comes with huge physiological changes because there's this new person coming out into the world in which it needs to breathe, it makes noise all of a sudden, it's subjected to an absolute onslaught of stimuli. I mean, you know, it's traumatic, birth is traumatic for these reasons. And one psychologist has argued that these developments, the coming into the world and being exposed to this absolute mass of stimuli, are actually the building blocks for conscious thought to then develop, because we need content, we need stimuli, in order to have conscious thoughts

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  about things. And third, you might think that part of being a person, at least one of those kind of cluster properties, or something pertinent to personhood, is being in a context in which you can exercise your agency in the world, you know, learn to actually do things and relate to other human beings in a way that's unmediated by another person's body. And so if you thought that were also one of those kind of cluster traits of personhood, it doesn't mean you think that's what makes somebody a person. But if we're just looking for, well, what are good reasons to put a bright line here? And to not question it after this point, those could be some good reasons.

• 1:05:25Ezra Klein?

  I do find it very challenging to think about this piece because, I mean, my first child was born at thirty four weeks, my second at thirty seven. Naturally, both of them would have been born later. But because they're born earlier, it feels very natural to say, well, we had a heap long before that. And there was some moral weight to that heap, to the fetus. And at the same time, I mean, to our conversation a moment ago about late term abortion and the conditions in which they happen. I don't know that it feels right to me to say that birth is like the only moment which a person has rights. But on the other hand, I mean, if we're going to make the category of personhood so potent.

• 1:06:07Ezra Klein?

  And we've talked about this and why it might be that way, in fact, that we will wipe out the personhood of the pregnant person. Right, that we will impose on them something we would never impose under other circumstances. You know, nine months of forced labor with a dangerous, potentially very dangerous surgery, or one of the most painful experiences known to humankind at the end of it. Plus a completely changed life thereafter. I mean, nothing else is like that. We haven't not talked too much because of the way this conversation is framed around personhood about the person of the mother usually. But it matters, right? It matters profoundly. It's actually, it's very much at the core of how I think about this.

• 1:06:50Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I think you're right to say that that implies that I downweight the personhood of the fetus implicitly. But birth feels hard for that reason. On the one hand, it violates intuitions. And on the other hand, you know, maybe just what you're saying is that we don't trust the law here. We trust the parents to make reasonable decisions and maybe with some strictures. But but in general, we think that, you know, they will be able to manage your situation better than we can understand it from afar.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot there. Let me, let me think. So in law, we need a bright line that is an entry point into personhood, that is within the reasonable range of answers and is non-negotiable past that point. So say we have that, that absolutely doesn't mean that whatever we have before that point before birth is utterly morally inconsiderable. And I think that's clearly not the case. I think we need to take seriously, especially people who are proponents of reproductive choice, as I am, we have to take seriously the almost universal intuition that late abortion involves the destruction of something

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  that is of some value, quite a lot of value, and try to figure out why we think that's true. Then I think your question is, well, what does that mean in terms of regulation? That's more difficult. And I think you make a really great point when you say, essentially what I hear you saying is, well, you know, late abortion is a very extreme thing to do, which it is. Imagine how desperate somebody must be, or how weighty their reasons must be before they turn to that at such a late stage. How does that consideration factor in? Well, if we've decided that what is what we have there in late pregnancy is something

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  of value, but not a full person, not a complete person, and then we join that with the probability that whoever is seeking out abortion at that point must be in pretty dire straits. You could suggest that that, that may be a reason to think that self-censoring and self-regulation of abortion at that point could be the better way to go, the more sensible.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Way to just keep the law off this, knowing that there's a reason why these kind of abortions are comparatively rare, because everybody recognizes that, yes, this is something of significant value. Now, again, we couldn't say that if we were dealing with a creature that we really thought were a person, like, we just wouldn't be able to say that in all but, I think, you know, the most extreme abortion scenarios, where the women's interests and women's rights come in, and I know, you know, I'm going to be absolutely piled on by people for not talking about it enough, it's not because I don't believe in it, right? It's because it's so obvious that that's not where the debate is, because of course all of these things go without saying, women have serious interest in being able to access abortion.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  But if what we're looking at is not a full person, is something of some moral status, some moral considerability may be increasingly throughout pregnancy, but not quite a personhood status, then what that means about the relative weights of the interests that the pregnant person will have in aborting is going to follow from that. So, so then all those interests come back into contention in a really significant way.

• 1:10:19Ezra Klein?

  This is, of course, a vast issue, and there's no way for us to to cover all of it, and and no way for us to answer how any of us feel about all of it. But is there anything major you think that we've missed? Any major counterarguments that you think about a lot, or that you feel have force that we haven't considered, or just anything you want to touch on before we close?

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  I would just kind of exhort people listening to please not take my very haphazard renditions of arguments and I and broad brush explanations of ideas as the as the bon ton, as the state of the art, just go and read things for yourself.

• 1:10:54Ezra Klein?

  What are three things you'd recommend people read? What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Okay, firstly, Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should Be Legal Even If The Fetus Is A Person by David Boonin. I actually disagree with his thesis, but I think it's an excellent book, and that anybody interested in this topic should read. Next, abortion three perspectives by Michael Thule, Celia Wolf Devine, Philip Divine and Alison Jagger. And lastly, about abortion by Carol Sanger.

• 1:11:25Ezra Klein?

  And Kate Greasley, your books on this are abortion rights for and against, which is a dialogue with Chris Kaser, which I got a lot out of, and arguments about abortion. And I recommend people pick up both for real, really deeply clear thinking here. Thank you very much.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:11:51Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rojai Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Roland Hugh and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Samulski.