Foreclosures and Fetuses

A brief prudential argument against abortion

Studies of the Foetus in the Womb #1 — Leonardo da Vinci

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Consider the following scenario: having recently been the victims of a serious financial crime, you and your family now face the prospect of imminent house foreclosure. Your friends and relatives refuse to provide any sort of assistance. The local homeless shelters are short-staffed and under-funded, so there is a decent chance that your entire family will spend at least a few nights a week sleeping on the streets. What is more, the economic situation in your town is not good: work is scarce, and you yourself have recently been laid off. If you lose your house, it will be extremely difficult to get back on your feet.

One night, just when all seems lost, a strange man appears with a tantalizing offer: if you push his magic red button, all of your financial woes will be alleviated. The bank will forgive your debts, you’ll get to keep your house, and you’ll even get your old job back. There is just one little catch: pushing the button has a 10% chance of killing an unwanted orphan child. Their death will be instant, painless, and a direct causal result of you pushing the button. Nobody else will be harmed in any way.

It seems obvious that it would be seriously immoral to push the red button.¹ But notice:

1. The consequences of not pushing the button are vastly more serious than those faced by most people who seek abortions.²

2. The actual probability that unborn human beings are persons—and hence that abortion kills an innocent person—is far greater than 10%.³

3. The person killed in the above scenario would not be your own child. However, if the unborn are persons, then abortion does involve killing one’s own child. This plausibly makes abortion even more heinous.

4. In the above scenario, you and your family were the victims of a financial crime. However, fewer than 2% of abortions are the result of a sexual crime, like rape or incest.

5. There are a number of arguments against abortion which do not require fetal personhood.⁴ Hence, the probability that abortion constitutes a wrongful killing is going to be even higher than one would expect based purely on personhood considerations.

Therefore, given that it would be seriously immoral to push the red button, it follows that it would also be seriously immoral to procure or perform an abortion.

1. Anecdotally, I can say that not one of the people to whom I have presented this scenario has thought that it would be permissible to push the button.

2. It is safe to say that the vast, vast majority of people seeking abortions do not face homelessness for their entire family if they are unable to procure one. In addition, 96% of women who are denied abortions later say that they no longer wish they could have had one. It is highly unlikely that a similar proportion of people who were foreclosed on feel the same way about their house foreclosure, or that a similar proportion of homeless people feel the same way about their homelessness.

3. See e.g. Vukov (2017), Rodger, Blackshaw, and Miller (2021), Kaczor (2023), Playford (2023), and Miller (forthcoming).

4. See e.g. Marquis (1989, 2007), Pruss (2011), Blackshaw (2019, 2021, 2022), Hendricks (2019a, 2019b, 2023), and Blackshaw and Hendricks (2020, 2021).