I've been reading Bryan Kaplan's takes for years now.
Kaplan, a libertarian-leaning economist at George Mason University, is one of those guys you don't always agree with, but one who you can count on to make you think about any issue from an angle you likely never considered. I put Megan McArdle in a similar category—thoughtful and hyper-rational people whom you follow because they quite possibly could pop a bubble you were unaware you were in.
I figured out the correct position on the morality of abortion. https://t.co/txQ5aTtM2q
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) December 1, 2025
I have been pro-life for much longer than I have been a Christian. As a teenager, I assumed that the pro-choice arguments were self-evident, but once I actually decided to think through them, I became unconvinced. And that was back in the 1970s, when even pro-choice people were repeating the "safe, legal, and rare" mantra. Now the pro-choice position is more "KILL IT NOW BEFORE IT ESCAPES THE WOMB!"
In his essay, Caplan takes on the false claim that the only reason to oppose abortion is a religious conviction that the practice is wrong. As an atheist himself, he falls into the once-normal category of abortion skeptics who don't want to ban the practice entirely, but who believe that its availability should be radically scaled back because the practice is, in most cases, morally questionable, and the reasons for its easy availability are mostly wrong.
The essay is well worth reading, because it is not something you often or ever see.
His first point should be obvious: the claim that a developing fetus has no moral standing is pretty obviously wrong, even if you are unwilling to accept that a developing fetus is not yet a full-blown human being with an absolute right.
The radical pro-life position — “Abortion is as immoral as murdering a baby” — is easily refuted with a simple thought experiment. Namely: If you could either save one human baby from a fire, or a dozen human embryos, what are you morally obliged to do? Almost no one even claims they should choose the embryos over the baby — and virtually no one would in fact do so.
Why not? Because almost everyone recognizes that an embryo has far less moral worth than an actually-existing baby.
Yet on reflection, the radical pro-choice position — “Abortion is morally neutral” — is also easily refuted with a parallel thought experiment. Namely: If you could either save one human embryo from a fire, or just let it burn, what are you morally obliged to do? Again, only a small minority even claims they would shrug and walk away. Why not? Because a large majority recognizes that a fertilized egg has intermediate moral value. Abortion is not murder, but neither is it the same as removing a wart.
Another way to grasp the same point: The death of a child is objectively much worse than a miscarriage. But telling a couple that has experienced a miscarriage, “Sure, this is sad for you. But your embryo wasn’t sufficiently developed to have any independent moral value” isn’t merely rude. It is absurd. When a miscarriage occurs, a reasonable person recognizes the tragedy — not just for the parents, but for the fetus who will never be born.
My friend Richard Hanania is deeply dismissive of the pro-life position: “Somehow pro-lifers have convinced themselves there’s a non-religious basis to their beliefs.” But the aforementioned moral intuitions about the intermediate moral value of an embryo are hardly sectarian. I’m an atheist of the highest order, and the aforementioned moral intuitions make perfect sense to me.
By "intermediate" moral value, Caplan means something similar to distinguishing between killing an infant and killing a puppy. Obviously, the former is worse than the latter, but the latter is still morally wrong. Puppies carry less moral weight than human beings, but most of us would gladly incarcerate anybody who tortured one.
We make similar calculations all the time, even when we don't think in those terms.
What Caplan is pointing out is that once you grant any moral weight to the developing infant, the bar for justifying killing it is immediately pretty high. It can be crossed—even the vast majority of pro-lifers agree that there are some circumstances that may require a mother to endanger or even consent to the termination of her child, such as to save her own life through cancer treatments—but killing a being with moral weight requires justification beyond a simple, "Because I don't want it."
But what makes Caplan's piece especially interesting comes from what he brings to the table as an economist: a focus on data. Caplan takes on one of the most common excuses made to justify abortions of choice: that having the baby will ruin the mother's life.
It turns out, he says, that the research shows that this claim is simply wrong, according to the women who have been denied abortions due to legal restrictions.
Only a small minority of pregnancies have horrible physical consequences, and people who are contemplating an abortion rarely claim otherwise. But when contemplating an abortion, many if not most prospective parents predict horrible mental consequences for themselves. In the vernacular: “A baby would ruin my life.” If my argument so far is correct, the correct reaction to such claims is not to stonewall with: “Too bad” or “Trust women.” The correct reaction is to ask: “Is it really true that a baby would ruin your life?”
The strongest known evidence on this question is Diana Foster’s “Turnaway Study,” which uses what economists call a regression discontinuity design to estimate a long list of causal effects of abortion. Foster interviewed women in abortion clinics who were near the legal cutoff. Some turned out to be just below the cutoff — and normally ended up getting an abortion. Some turned out to be just above the cutoff — and normally ended up getting a baby.
You see why this study is interesting? You have two essentially similar groups of women who want abortions, at very similar stages of their pregnancy (just before the end of the first trimester, and just after). One group were allowed to get abortions because they fell under the time limit, while the others were denied abortions because they were just past it.
So what did the study show?
The book’s most notable findings:
Women who managed to get abortions had almost exactly the same self-reported well-being as the turnaways: “Shortly after being denied an abortion, women had more symptoms of anxiety and stress and lower levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction than women who received an abortion. Over time, women’s mental health and well-being generally improved, so that by six months to one year, there were no differences between groups across outcomes. To the extent that abortion causes mental health harm, the harm comes from the denial of services, not the provision… Yet once the pregnancy was announced, the baby born, and the unknown fears and expectations realized or overcome, the trajectory of mental health symptoms seems to return to what it would have been if the woman had received an abortion.”
Simply put, the self-reported life happiness of the two groups of women was essentially the same. The women who thought their babies would ruin their lives turned out to be wrong. It's true that their life goals prior to getting pregnant had to be altered, but it turned out that being a mother also made them happy.
Why are Foster’s results important? In her mind, because she refutes the claim that abortion is really bad for women. While she does indeed refute this claim, she also refutes the claim that being denied an abortion is really bad for women. At minimum, then, she undermines both the pro-life and the pro-choice positions.
But on further thought, Foster undermines the pro-choice view more. Why? While many pro-life thinkers falsely claim that abortion is really bad for women, that is almost never their primary argument. Their primary argument, rather, is that abortion is really bad for the unborn — a truism that Foster barely considers.
In contrast, “Being denied an abortion is terrible for women” is one of the top pro-choice arguments. Maybe the very top such argument. Since Foster shows that this argument is false, pro-choice thinkers have to fall back on the deontological “My body, my choice.” Which is a shaky foundation at best, because (a) few pro-choice thinkers embrace the principle of bodily integrity for prostitution, narcotics, or pharmaceutical regulation, and (b) the unborn’s bodily integrity is also on the line.
As I explained at the outset, I think that the radical pro-life and radical pro-choice views are both wrong. Pro-life overrates the value of the unborn; pro-choice underrates it. Once you accept the reasonable view that the unborn have intermediate moral value, what do Foster’s results imply?
The lesson, for most purposes, is a blunt: Don’t get an abortion. If an unwanted pregnancy will really ruin your life, you should get one. If an unwanted pregnancy is a moderate, temporary burden, however, you shouldn’t. Foster strongly confirms that the latter scenario overwhelmingly dominates in the real world. Unless your situation is extremely bleak compared to those faced by other women who want to end their pregnancies, you should keep your baby.
The argument for abortion on demand collapses once you admit that a fetus has any moral standing—that killing it has more moral weight than clipping a toenail. Especially when you add in the fact that women who were denied abortions are, on average, as happy as women who got one.
Lily Allen singing “Abortions, I’ve had a few, but then again, I can’t remember exactly how many *laughs*… I wanna say 5, 4 or 5?”
— Dr. Calum Miller (@DrCalumMiller) July 3, 2025
Interviewer: “Yeah I’ve had about 5 too”
These people aren’t poor desperate victims, they are murderers
pic.twitter.com/uMNDe5vHTN
The moral case for abortion collapses under its own weight, at least in most cases, once you acknowledge that the fetus has a moral status. If an accidental pregnancy might divert one from a path of becoming a world-class athlete or heroin chic model, such is life. Your life is not over, just diverted. Such diversions happen all the time, and life moves on. Your life is not "ruined," and the joys of motherhood will, it turns out, have compensations.
The irony of @MileyCyrus using a birthday cake to promote abortions when abortions deny babies a birthday.https://t.co/CGU2vvxt08 pic.twitter.com/lQ2frbQAQ3
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) June 4, 2019
One doesn't need to be a religious zealot to oppose abortion; in fact, today's pro-abortion advocates are practically cult members, holding that a fully formed infant bursting to exit the womb has zero moral weight, while one minute later it is infanticide to kill it. Or not, since often they want botched abortions to result in dead infants anyway.
Pro choice students at TCU - Texas Christian University sign a petition to save new born puppies from being aborted, but refuse to sign a petition to protect human babies.
— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) November 7, 2025
This is a CHRISTIAN University. pic.twitter.com/O8n84G5qW2
I think most people have a moral intuition that zygotes are not fully human, but embryos are recognizably so. The strong pro-life position is that human life begins at fertilization, but that doesn't feel right to many people. I get that, even if I am uncomfortable with where that line of thought leads.
But everybody should easily agree that pain-capable fetuses have rights. And that killing them, even with anesthesia, is wrong. But admitting that leads down politically inconvenient paths, so they push it out of their minds.
Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at Hot Air, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical left and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve.
Help us continue to point, laugh, and expose the idiocy of progressive elites. Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member