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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

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By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

By Margaret Talbot

Reflections on Abortion, Values, and the Family

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• Jean Bethke Elshtain 3  

Part of the book series: The Hastings Center Series in Ethics ((HCSE))

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We live in a society marked by moral conflict. This conflict has deep historical roots and is reflected in our institutions, practices, laws, norms, and values. The abortion debate taps strongly held, powerfully experienced moral and political imperatives. These imperatives, in turn, are linked internally to a cluster of complex concerns and images evoking what sort of people we are anyway and what we aspire to be. The abortion debate won’t “go away, ” nor should it. For we are, after all, talking about matters of life and death, freedom and obligation, rights and duties: None of us can dispute that, and none of us can be nonplussed when we face the dilemmas that the abortion question poses.

My position has emerged complicatedly, first through familial and religious influence. As a child, I was taught the importance and integrity of life and the need to protect it. I remember my sisters and me doing our best to rescue fallen birds and nurse them back to health. We laboriously mixed an earthworm paste to feed to the birds through eye droppers. We mourned the deaths of baby chicks, ducks, and calves. Life was valuable, we were taught, not for instrumental reasons but in itself. The part of “me” that remains importantly the child that I was reasons thus: If a baby chick deserves respectful “tending to, ” does not a vulnerable, wholly dependent human life? Is that not what we are talking about if we talk ordinary language and refuse to retreat behind a screen of distancing, “medicalized” abstractions (“products of conception, ” “fetal matter, ” and so on)?

There are ways in which this direct and beautifully simple moral response has been both challenged and affirmed in my adult life. It has been challenged by my recognition of the desperate circumstances and situations in which many women find and have found themselves, for it is women who bear the most direct and inescapable brunt of human procreation. I do not call to mind here the desperate teenager alone but, say, the menopausal woman in her 50s who has every reason to believe that she is past reproductive age but finds, to her astonishment, that she is not. If one is a merciful and compassionate being, then one’s mercy and compassion must go out to these women and must not limit itself to the unborn. So I cannot accept an absolute prohibition on abortion. But I do not—and cannot—see that “right” as absolute. Here, I can draw on political and theoretical imperatives that are confirmatory of a respect-for-life position.

I am also influenced in my present position by a particular sort of social theory and philosophy—interpretive, reflective, and critical—together with my political concern that the white, middle-class or upper-middle-class majority has, all too often, presumed to legislate in behalf of, or undercover of, others, claiming that these others the poor or the minorities) require reforms that they might not be in a position to “see” for themselves. I believe that people must speak for themselves, in their own language, to their most urgent concerns. This belief introduces immediate ambiguity into the abortion debate—and deepens the ambiguity of my own position. For I am in fact part of a large majority that opposes both abortion on demand and an absolute restriction on abortion. This position suggests to me that my au-tobiographical history—though confirmed by a later commitment to a certain mode of social theorizing—is not mine alone but is shared by many Americans who are irrepressibly pragmatic yet stubbornly ethical and moral in their concerns. We should acknowledge, not quash, these moral sensibilities. The abortion debate is vital, for it means that we are still concerned about the sort of people we are and the kind of lives we are living.

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Philip Abbott, The Family on Trial ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981 ), p. 138.

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Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974 ), pp. 54 – 55.

Elizabeth Rapaport and Paul Sagal, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Abortion and Ethical Theory,” in Marty Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston and Jane English, eds., Feminism and Philosophy ( Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1977 ), p. 410.

Quoted in Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality ( New York: Macmillan, 1970 ), p. 462.

Cited in Lawrence Lader, Abortion (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 156. (Italics added.)

Carol McMillen, Women, Reason and Nature ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982 ), p. 127.

Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue ( South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981 ), p. 205.

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 ), p. 30.

Harry Boyte, The Backyard Revolution ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980 ).

Stanley Hauerwas, “The Moral Value of the Family,” in A Community of Character (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981 ), p. 165.

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Elshtain, J.B. (1984). Reflections on Abortion, Values, and the Family. In: Callahan, S., Callahan, D. (eds) Abortion. The Hastings Center Series in Ethics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2753-0_3

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There Are More Than Two Sides to the Abortion Debate

Readers share their perspectives.

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Earlier this week I curated some nuanced commentary on abortion and solicited your thoughts on the same subject. What follows includes perspectives from several different sides of the debate. I hope each one informs your thinking, even if only about how some other people think.

We begin with a personal reflection.

Cheryl was 16 when New York State passed a statute legalizing abortion and 19 when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. At the time she was opposed to the change, because “it just felt wrong.” Less than a year later, her mother got pregnant and announced she was getting an abortion.

She recalled:

My parents were still married to each other, and we were financially stable. Nonetheless, my mother’s announcement immediately made me a supporter of the legal right to abortion. My mother never loved me. My father was physically abusive and both parents were emotionally and psychologically abusive on a virtually daily basis. My home life was hellish. When my mother told me about the intended abortion, my first thought was, “Thank God that they won’t be given another life to destroy.” I don’t deny that there are reasons to oppose abortion. As a feminist and a lawyer, I can now articulate several reasons for my support of legal abortion: a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy and to the equal protection of the laws are near the top of the list. (I agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg that equal protection is a better legal rationale for the right to abortion than privacy.) But my emotional reaction from 1971 still resonates with me. Most people who comment on the issue, on both sides, do not understand what it is to go through childhood unloved. It is horrific beyond my powers of description. To me, there is nothing more immoral than forcing that kind of life on any child. Anti-abortion activists often like to ask supporters of abortion rights: “Well, what if your mother had decided to abort you?” All I can say is that I have spent a great portion of my life wishing that my mother had done exactly that.

Steven had related thoughts:

I have respect for the idea that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But the most fundamental, and I believe flawed, unstated assumptions of the anti-choice are that A) they are acting on behalf of the fetus, and more importantly B) they know what the fetus would want. I would rather not have been born than to have been born to a mother who did not want me. All children should be wanted children—for the sake of all concerned. You can say that different fetuses would “want” different things—though it’s hard to say a clump of cells “wants” anything. How would we know? The argument lands, as it does generally, with the question of who should be making that decision. Who best speaks in the fetus’s interests? Who is better positioned morally or practically than the expectant mother?

Geoff self-describes as “pro-life” and guilty of some hypocrisy. He writes:

I’m pro-life because I have a hard time with the dehumanization that comes with the extremes of abortion on demand … Should it be okay to get an abortion when you find your child has Down syndrome? What of another abnormality? Or just that you didn’t want a girl? Any argument that these are legitimate reasons is disturbing. But so many of the pro-life just don’t seem to care about life unless it’s a fetus they can force a woman to carry. The hypocrisy is real. While you can argue that someone on death row made a choice that got them to that point, whereas a fetus had no say, I find it still hard to swallow that you can claim one life must be protected and the other must be taken. Life should be life. At least in the Catholic Church this is more consistent. I myself am guilty of a degree of hypocrisy. My wife and I used IVF to have our twins. There were other embryos created and not inserted. They were eventually destroyed. So did I support killing a life? Maybe? I didn’t want to donate them for someone else to give birth to—it felt wrong to think my twins may have brothers or sisters in the world they would never know about. Yet does that mean I was more willing to kill my embryos than to have them adopted? Sure seems like it. So I made a morality deal with myself and moved the goal post—the embryos were not yet in a womb and were so early in development that they couldn’t be considered fully human life. They were still potential life.

Colleen, a mother of three, describes why she ended her fourth pregnancy:

I was young when I first engaged this debate. Raised Catholic, anti-choice, and so committed to my position that I broke my parents’ hearts by giving birth during my junior year of college. At that time, my sense of my own rights in the matter was almost irrelevant. I was enslaved by my body. One husband and two babies later I heard a remarkable Jesuit theologian (I wish I could remember his name) speak on the matter and he, a Catholic priest, framed it most directly. We prioritize one life over another all the time. Most obviously, we justify the taking of life in war with all kinds of arguments that often turn out to be untrue. We also do so as we decide who merits access to health care or income support or other life-sustaining things. So the question of abortion then boils down to: Who gets to decide? Who gets to decide that the life of a human in gestation is actually more valuable than the life of the woman who serves as host—or vice versa? Who gets to decide when the load a woman is being asked to carry is more than she can bear? The state? Looking back over history, he argued that he certainly had more faith in the person most involved to make the best decision than in any formalized structure—church or state—created by men. Every form of birth control available failed me at one point or another, so when yet a 4th pregnancy threatened to interrupt the education I had finally been able to resume, I said “Enough.” And as I cried and struggled to come to that position, the question that haunted me was “Doesn’t MY life count?” And I decided it did.

Florence articulates what it would take to make her anti-abortion:

What people seem to miss is that depriving a woman of bodily autonomy is slavery. A person who does not control his/her own body is—what? A slave. At its simplest, this is the issue. I will be anti-abortion when men and women are equal in all facets of life—wages, chores, child-rearing responsibilities, registering for the draft, to name a few obvious ones. When there is birth control that is effective, where women do not bear most of the responsibility. We need to raise boys who are respectful to girls, who do not think that they are entitled to coerce a girl into having sex that she doesn’t really want or is unprepared for. We need for sex education to be provided in schools so young couples know what they are getting into when they have sex. Especially the repercussions of pregnancy. We need to raise girls who are confident and secure, who don’t believe they need a male to “complete” them. Who have enough agency to say “no” and to know why. We have to make abortion unnecessary … We have so far to go. If abortion is ruled illegal, or otherwise curtailed, we will never know if the solutions to women’s second-class status will work. We will be set back to the 50s or worse. I don’t want to go back. Women have fought from the beginning of time to own their bodies and their lives. To deprive us of all of the amazing strides forward will affect all future generations.

Similarly, Ben agrees that in our current environment, abortion is often the only way women can retain equal citizenship and participation in society, but also agrees with pro-lifers who critique the status quo, writing that he doesn’t want a world where a daughter’s equality depends on her right “to perform an act of violence on their potential descendents.” Here’s how he resolves his conflictedness:

Conservatives arguing for a more family-centered society, in which abortion is unnecessary to protect the equal rights of women, are like liberals who argue for defunding the police and relying on addiction, counselling, and other services, in that they argue for removing what offends them without clear, credible plans to replace the functions it serves. I sincerely hope we can move towards a world in which armed police are less necessary. But before we can remove the guardrails of the police, we need to make the rest of the changes so that the world works without them. Once liberal cities that have shown interest in defunding the police can prove that they can fund alternatives, and that those alternatives work, then I will throw my support behind defunding the police. Similarly, once conservative politicians demonstrate a credible commitment to an alternative vision of society in which women are supported, families are not taken for granted, and careers and short-term productivity are not the golden calves they are today, I will be willing to support further restrictions on abortion. But until I trust that they are interested in solving the underlying problem (not merely eliminating an aspect they find offensive), I will defend abortion, as terrible as it is, within reasonable legal limits.

Two readers objected to foregrounding gender equality. One emailed anonymously, writing in part:

A fetus either is or isn’t a person. The reason I’m pro-life is that I’ve never heard a coherent defense of the proposition that a fetus is not a person, and I’m not sure one can be made. I’ve read plenty of progressive commentary, and when it bothers to make an argument for abortion “rights” at all, it talks about “the importance of women’s healthcare” or something as if that were the issue.

Christopher expanded on that last argument:

Of the many competing ethical concerns, the one that trumps them all is the status of the fetus. It is the only organism that gets destroyed by the procedure. Whether that is permissible trumps all other concerns. Otherwise important ethical claims related to a woman’s bodily autonomy, less relevant social disparities caused by the differences in men’s and women’s reproductive functions, and even less relevant differences in partisan commitments to welfare that would make abortion less appealing––all of that is secondary. The relentless strategy by the pro-choice to sidestep this question and pretend that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is the primary ethical concern is, to me, somewhere between shibboleth and mass delusion. We should spend more time, even if it’s unproductive, arguing about the status of the fetus, because that is the question, and we should spend less time indulging this assault-on-women’s-rights narrative pushed by the Left.

Jean is critical of the pro-life movement:

Long-acting reversible contraceptives, robust, science-based sex education for teens, and a stronger social safety net would all go a remarkable way toward decreasing the number of abortions sought. Yet all the emphasis seems to be on simply making abortion illegal. For many, overturning Roe v. Wade is not about reducing abortions so much as signalling that abortion is wrong. If so-called pro-lifers were as concerned about abortion as they seem to be, they would spend more time, effort, and money supporting efforts to reduce the need for abortion—not simply trying to make it illegal without addressing why women seek it out. Imagine, in other words, a world where women hardly needed to rely on abortion for their well-being and ability to thrive. Imagine a world where almost any woman who got pregnant had planned to do so, or was capable of caring for that child. What is the anti-abortion movement doing to promote that world?

Destiny has one relevant answer. She writes:

I run a pro-life feminist group and we often say that our goal is not to make abortion illegal, but rather unnecessary and unthinkable by supporting women and humanizing the unborn child so well.

Robert suggests a different focus:

Any well-reasoned discussion of abortion policy must include contraception because abortion is about unwanted children brought on by poorly reasoned choices about sex. Such choices will always be more emotional than rational. Leaving out contraception makes it an unrealistic, airy discussion of moral philosophy. In particular, we need to consider government-funded programs of long-acting reversible contraception which enable reasoned choices outside the emotional circumstances of having sexual intercourse.

Last but not least, if anyone can unite the pro-life and pro-choice movements, it’s Errol, whose thoughts would rankle majorities in both factions as well as a majority of Americans. He writes:

The decision to keep the child should not be left up solely to the woman. Yes, it is her body that the child grows in, however once that child is birthed it is now two people’s responsibility. That’s entirely unfair to the father when he desired the abortion but the mother couldn’t find it in her heart to do it. If a woman wants to abort and the man wants to keep it, she should abort. However I feel the same way if a man wants to abort. The next 18+ years of your life are on the line. I view that as a trade-off that warrants the male’s input. Abortion is a conversation that needs to be had by two people, because those two will be directly tied to the result for a majority of their life. No one else should be involved with that decision, but it should not be solely hers, either.

Thanks to all who contributed answers to this week’s question, whether or not they were among the ones published. What subjects would you like to see fellow readers address in future installments? Email [email protected].

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Psychiatric and Personal Reflections on Abortion

What do we know about the psychiatric implications of having an abortion and not having access to such services? And what are the medical ethics involved?

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Of course, I could never have had an abortion . I am a man (he/him), so I have had to try to learn—both as a psychiatrist and as a man—what that might mean entail and, now, how to comment. After all, this is a psychiatry and society column, so how could it then ignore one of our major current societal issues that seems to have so many social psychiatric considerations?

My direct personal and professional involvement with abortion, limited as it is, goes back more than 50 years ago. While I was in medical school, my wife became pregnant, a pregnancy not planned. Abortion never entered my mind and was never brought up by my wife, nor anyone else. I then had the good fortune to be the primary caregiver of our darling daughter during the day of her first year of life while I was home doing my research project.

A couple of years later, I was in my second year of psychiatric residency training, which was a year before Roe v. Wade. I saw a number of women seeking an abortion, which could be obtained if it was psychiatrically risky to continue the pregnancy, or something like that, as I cannot recall the detailed criteria. With supervision, I approved them all, although I never knew the outcome of any of these decisions. I felt helpful and believed that this was the right decision all around, but with some guilt about the potential child.

I have tried to keep up with the recent media discussions about our abortion laws and the possibility of change in some states. However, by far the most informative and moving article that I read was by Merritt Tierce in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times Magazine , “The Abortion I Didn’t Have”. In the article, Tierce discusses the reasons that she, 19 years old at the time, did not seek an abortion with her first unplanned child, as well as the ensuing repercussions for her life and that of her son. She then had a second child out of more overt choice, and then 2 abortions. Clearly, this was not a simple process for her, nor probably other women, based on her discussions of what she considered the complicated, ambivalent, and often contradictory benefits and drawbacks of her first decision.

That article led me to double-check what our professional American Psychiatric Association organizations have said about abortion. The last action that I found for the APA was in May 2018 and was titled a “ Position Statement on Abortion .” It clarified that careful research has indicated that having an abortion is generally not associated with any increase in psychiatric symptoms in the woman. However, that is a generality and there can be a range of abortion aftermath responses. The statement then goes on to its primary position that “abortion is a medical procedure, and a decision about an abortion should be between a woman and her physician.”

The longer American Psychological Association commentary on “Abortion and Mental Health” was from around the same time, June of 2018. Theirs also reviews the science, including on the child’s future, and that “Unwanted pregnancy has been associated with deficits to the subsequent child’s cognitive, emotional and social processes.”

Both of these research findings regarding the woman and the child helped assuage my earlier residency guilt. The American Psychological Association policy comes out similar to that of psychiatry, and includes their subsequent and ongoing advocacy and legal action on abortion.

Out of many controversial Supreme Court decisions over the past 50 years, this one seems distinct in its viability. Why might that be? It is literally a life and death issue. However, any changes in Roe v. Wade can be a precedent to reconsider other decisions.

For some, this abortion decision is simply a yes or no. However, for me as a psychiatrist and as a man, it is not. All of these experiences and considerations leaves me with 8 tentative—indeed very tentative—conclusions as to what I currently think may be the major mental health implications for mother and child:

• Do what is practically and psychological possible to not develop an unwanted pregnancy.
• There are invariably complex psychological reasons to have or not have an abortion, and at times of unresolved ambivalence, therapeutic discussion may be indicated.
• It is virtually impossible to compare the outcome of the abortion choice with the path not taken, so it is important to try to come to peace with the final personal decision.
• Having inadequate and difficult-to-access abortion services seems to be a sign of misogyny, and poor women will be the most affected.
• If our abortion laws are changed, they should be done very gradually and in a manner that allows some comparison with outcomes related to the prior law.
• As the Preamble and Section 7 of The Principles of Medical Ethics states about our responsibility to society, abortion is an ethical matter for us.
• Given the cracks occurring in Roe v. Wade, it seems that our professional societies’ views on abortion need updating.
• Our professional societies and ourselves need to educate the public about the mental health implications of abortion, especially in regards to children of unwanted pregnancies.

On Friday, the Supreme Court is supposed to meet to hold a preliminary vote on their decision. What will they—and we—say?

Dr Moffic   is an award-winning psychiatrist who has specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry. A prolific writer and speaker, he received the one-time designation of Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association in 2002. He is an advocate for mental health issues relate to climate instability, burnout, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism for a better world. He serves on the Editorial Board of  Psychiatric Times TM .

What do you think? Share your thoughts, comments, and feedback with [email protected].

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Research Article

Abortion attitudes, religious and moral beliefs, and pastoral care among Protestant religious leaders in Georgia

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America, The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Department of Behavioral, Social and Health Education Sciences, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Affiliations The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Graduate Division of Religion, Laney Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Resources, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Reproductive Justice Activist and Movement Chaplain, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

Affiliation All Souls Church Unitarian, Washington, D.C., United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Department of Behavioral, Social and Health Education Sciences, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, Heilbrunn Department of Population & Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

• Jessica L. Dozier, 
• Monique Hennink, 
• Elizabeth Mosley, 
• Subasri Narasimhan, 
• Johanna Pringle, 
• Lasha Clarke, 
• John Blevins, 
• Latishia James-Portis, 
• Rob Keithan, 

• Published: July 17, 2020
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971
• Reader Comments

The purpose of this study is to explore Protestant religious leaders’ attitudes towards abortion and their strategies for pastoral care in Georgia, USA. Religious leaders may play an important role in providing sexual and reproductive health pastoral care given a long history of supporting healing and health promotion.

We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Mainline and Black Protestant religious leaders on their attitudes toward abortion and how they provide pastoral care for abortion. The study was conducted in a county with relatively higher rates of abortion, lower access to sexual and reproductive health services, higher religiosity, and greater denominational diversity compared to other counties in the state. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by thematic analysis.

Religious leaders’ attitudes towards abortion fell on a spectrum from “pro-life” to “pro-choice”. However, most participants expressed attitudes in the middle of this spectrum and described more nuanced, complex, and sometimes contradictory views. Differences in abortion attitudes stemmed from varying beliefs on when life begins and circumstances in which abortion may be morally acceptable. Religious leaders described their pastoral care on abortion as “journeying with” congregants by advising them to make well-informed decisions irrespective of the religious leader’s own attitudes. However, many religious leaders described a lack of preparation and training to have these conversations. Leaders emphasized not condoning abortion, yet being willing to emotionally support women because spiritual leaders are compelled to love and provide pastoral care. Paradoxically, all leaders emphasized the importance of empathy and compassion for people who have unplanned pregnancies, yet only leaders whose attitudes were “pro-choice” or in the middle of the spectrum expressed an obligation to confront stigmatizing attitudes and behaviors towards people who experience abortion. Additionally, many leaders offer misinformation about abortion when offering pastoral care.

These findings contribute to limited empirical evidence on pastoral care for abortion. We found religious leaders hold diverse attitudes and beliefs about abortion, rooted in Christian scripture and doctrine that inform advice and recommendations to congregants. While religious leaders may have formal training on pastoral care in general or theological education on the ethical issues related to abortion, they struggle to integrate their knowledge and training across these two areas. Still, leaders could be potentially important resources for empathy, compassion, and affirmation of agency in abortion decision-making, particularly in the Southern United States.

Citation: Dozier JL, Hennink M, Mosley E, Narasimhan S, Pringle J, Clarke L, et al. (2020) Abortion attitudes, religious and moral beliefs, and pastoral care among Protestant religious leaders in Georgia. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235971. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971

Editor: Jonathan Jong, Coventry University, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: January 7, 2020; Accepted: June 26, 2020; Published: July 17, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Dozier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Our data are comprised of transcripts from qualitative interviews with Protestant religious leaders in Georgia surrounding abortion attitudes and pastoral care. These data cannot be shared publicly, as the qualitative data presents potential risks and harms beyond those agreed to by study participants in the consent process and approved by the Emory University Institutional Review Board. However, data access requests may be sent to [email protected] . In order to facilitate research transparency, we provide the study interview guide and codebook as Supporting Information files.

Funding: This study was funded by the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the SouthEast ( https://rise.emory.edu ) with support from an anonymous foundation (to KSH). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Abortion is a common experience for U.S. women of reproductive age—approximately 1 in 4 will have an abortion by age 45 [ 1 ]. In the United States, 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age were reported in 2017. While national and regional abortion rates have been declining, rates in the state of Georgia have increased in recent years [ 2 ]. The rate of abortion in Georgia was 16.9 abortions/1,000 women aged 15–44 in 2017 [ 2 ].

Despite abortion being common, most people in Georgia face systemic and socio-cultural barriers limiting access to abortion services. Attitudes that condemn abortion emerge in policy, systems, and at the community-level [ 3 ]. Manifestations of abortion stigma [ 3 – 6 ] may influence people’s ability to exercise reproductive autonomy [ 7 , 8 ]. Researchers suggest “abortion stigma confounds a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy due to worries about judgment, isolation, self-judgment, and community condemnation” [ 9 ]. In 2014, only 4% of counties had clinics that provided abortion, leaving 58% of women in Georgia without a clinic in their county. Restrictive state legislation threatens to impose additional barriers to abortion access. For example, in 2019, Georgia legislators introduced HB 481, a bill that sought to outlaw abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected [ 10 ]. This bill aimed to restrict abortion as early as 6 weeks gestation, before many people know they are pregnant [ 11 ]—one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation [ 12 ]. A federal judge granted an injunction in early October 2019, which blocked the law while it is argued in court [ 13 ].

More restrictive policies leave the most vulnerable, economically disadvantaged, and socially isolated people with few choices but to carry pregnancies they feel they are unable to support to term; however, those who carry pregnancies also face systemic barriers including limited access to perinatal care. Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the United States [ 14 ], yet access to obstetric services is limited by a declining obstetrician/gynecologist workforce, especially in rural areas [ 15 ]. Moreover, half of all counties in Georgia are without a single obstetrician/gynecologist or hospital where women can give birth or access basic services [ 16 ].

Religious leaders are pivotal in their faith communities [ 17 ] and may be influential in shaping attitudes towards sexual and reproductive health (SRH), norms, and behaviors at the individual, family and community levels [ 8 , 17 , 18 ]; however, religious doctrine and beliefs may come in direct conflict with public health recommendations regarding abortion and contraception [ 19 ]. Previous research [ 4 ] has found links between religiosity and experiences of abortion stigma and it is “often the religious voices that oppose sexual and reproductive rights that have been the most visible in the media and most influential in policy debates” [ 17 ]. In a landmark 2014 case, Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores , Inc ., the Supreme Court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 allows a for-profit company to deny its employees coverage for contraception through the employer-based health plan because of the religious objections of the Hobby Lobby owners [ 20 ]. Conversely, Mainline Protestant religious leaders have historically played a role in shaping SRH policy, specifically with advocacy efforts for increased access to contraception and abortion during the twentieth century [ 17 ].

While many religions are perceived to condemn abortion [ 21 ], religiously affiliated women do have abortions—the majority (62%) of women who obtained an abortion in 2008 and 2014 claimed a religious affiliation [ 22 ]. Of these women, 17% identified an affiliation with a Mainline Protestant denomination [ 22 ]. This percentage is higher than that found in the American population as a whole; in 2010, Mainline Protestants only represented 7.2% of the United States population [ 23 ].

Religious leaders may play an important role in providing SRH-related pastoral care and resources given that “religions have a venerable tradition supporting healing, health care, disease prevention, and health promotion [and a] commitment to the most marginalized, the most vulnerable, and the most likely to be excluded” [ 17 ]. Still, little is known about the pastoral care practices of religious leaders as they relate to abortion, especially in the southern states of the United States and there are few resources in pastoral theology that address abortion. In fact, a review of publications from Mainline Protestant publishing houses over the last two decades identified only two books published on pastoral care and abortion [ 24 , 25 ]. A keyword review of the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) database identified no peer-reviewed articles exploring abortion published in pastoral theology journals over the last twenty years. Given their potential reach and influence, there is a need to understand the religious and moral views that shape religious leaders’ attitudes toward abortion, and their pastoral care practices, particularly in Georgia, a state with high religious influence [ 26 ] and gaps in reproductive healthcare [ 15 , 16 , 27 ]. This study aims to explore Mainline and Black Protestant religious leaders’ attitudes towards abortion and how they provide pastoral care regarding abortion.

Materials and methods

Participant recruitment.

Participants were recruited from two religious traditions based on categorization developed by Steensland and colleagues [ 28 ]. Mainline Protestantism is a branch of Protestantism that consists of denominations that are generally considered theologically liberal and moderate (e.g. Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, and the United Church of Christ). Black Protestantism (also known as “the Black Church”) is theologically and structurally similar to white evangelical denominations, “but also emphasizes social justice and community activism” [ 29 ]. According to the Association of Religious Data Archives, Black Protestant denominations are generally economically liberal and socially conservative [ 29 ]. The tradition consists of seven major denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Church of God in Christ, and the Progressive National Baptist Church [ 29 ].

For this study, 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with religious leaders serving in Mainline and Black Protestant churches in a county with urban and rural areas outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The study site was selected due to its higher abortion rates, lower SRH service access, a higher religious adherence, greater denominational diversity, and an abundance of Mainline Protestant and Black Protestant churches as compared to other similar counties in Georgia. Religious leaders were eligible to participate if they were currently serving in a Mainline Protestant or Black Protestant church as a clergy member or lay leader (i.e. a non-ordained member of a Christian church [ 29 ]) for at least 6 months prior to the interview, were over 18 years old, and spoke English.

Purposive sampling was used to recruit a sample of religious leaders diverse in denomination and sociodemographic characteristics. Churches were identified using a publicly available list of churches by county published by The Association of Religious Data Archives. Names and contact information for the primary religious leader of these churches were obtained from church websites and social media. Lay leaders were recruited by social media messages and snowball sampling because their contact information was often not publicly available on church websites. Religious leaders were contacted up to five times by email, phone, and social media message using standard Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved scripts. Leaders were also approached in person and recruited at centers of commerce (e.g. local strip malls) in the county using a standard recruitment script, screened for eligibility, and interviewed at a later date in a private location.

Participant characteristics

Socio-demographic characteristics of study participants are presented in Table 1 . The majority of participants recruited were men (80%) serving in senior pastoral roles (60%). Other religious titles reported included: pastor, associate pastor, first lady, minister, regional minister, youth minister, and lay leader. The average length of time served in the participant’s current role was 8.3 years (6 months to 40+ years). Age ranged from 28 to 72 years, with a mean age of 48. Sixty-five percent of participants had a graduate degree—most commonly a Masters of Divinity. Church membership size ranged from less than 50 to over 1000 people.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.t001

Data collection

In-depth interviews were conducted between October 2018 and September 2019 using a semi-structured interview guide (See S1 Appendix ). The interview guide included questions on participants’ views about unplanned pregnancy and abortion, pastoral care on these topics, and suggestions for discussions and programming around unintended pregnancy and abortion in faith settings. Some of the questions included, “ What are your personal views on abortion ? ” and “ What advice would you give someone in your congregation considering abortion ?” Researchers probed for barriers and facilitators to providing pastoral care on these topics and specific resources and scripture religious leaders would rely on during these conversations. The interview guide was pilot-tested in four interviews with clergy members serving in Mainline and Black Protestant churches in metro-Atlanta and then refined for clarity. Iterative changes were made to the interview guide and to participant recruitment throughout the data collection period to explore new topics raised and to include participants with differing perspectives, as is usual in qualitative data collection.

Participants were consented verbally. They were read an IRB-approved consent script, invited to ask follow-up questions, and asked if they agreed to take part in the study. A short demographic survey was administered after the informed consent process. Interviews were conducted in private offices at the participant’s church, at Emory University, or another location (e.g. a private room in a coffee shop) and digitally audio-recorded. Interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and participants received a $50 gift card. The study was approved by the IRB at Emory University (IRB 00106069).

Five researchers collected the data. They were trained on qualitative research methods, the study protocol, and research ethics. All researchers were cisgender women of reproductive age: four multi-ethnic women and one white woman. They had varying religious backgrounds and level of experience within Christian churches. Throughout data collection, the researchers practiced reflexivity by journaling their own thoughts and impressions about the research topic or participant’s experiences. They also noted potential biases that may have influenced data collected. Researchers shared these reflexive notes in team debriefing sessions and discussed ways to minimize researcher influence on the data collection process. Debriefing sessions included discussions on how researcher’s social identities and preconceptions about the study issues may have influenced the data as well as strategies to minimize these influences. For example, reflexivity revealed emerging data on race and religion, whereby the team felt that matching the race of researchers and participants may provide a more enabling environment for a deeper, more nuanced data on participants views on race and abortion.

Data analysis

Thematic analysis was used to describe Mainline and Black Protestant religious leaders’ attitudes towards abortion and how they provide pastoral care regarding abortion. Interviews were transcribed verbatim by a professional transcription company and de-identified by the research team. Data were managed and organized using Dedoose version 8.0.35, a software package for qualitative data analysis [ 30 ]. Data collection, coding, and analysis occurred simultaneously to assess meaning saturation, or a “richly textured understanding” of abortion attitudes and pastoral care practices [ 31 ]. Saturation was reached at 20 interviews when a diversity of views and denominations was achieved and no new themes were observed.

Data were read in detail and memoed in order to develop a codebook (See S2 Appendix ). Codes were developed through inductive (emerging from the data) and deductive (pre-determined topics from the interview guide) strategies. An inter-coder agreement exercise was conducted prior to coding all data to ensure consistency in the coding process. Weekly team meetings were held to refine code definitions, resolve discrepancies in coding, and discuss reflexivity in data interpretation during the coding process. For example, researchers discussed how our underlying epistemologies, public health training, and differing views on scripture and doctrine, might influence interpretation of data during analysis.

Researchers explored data by codes (e.g., abortion , attitudes & beliefs , and pastoral care) , conducted structured comparisons of codes by sub-groups of participants (e.g., by sociopolitical attitudes, denomination, and gender). Patterns in the data were examined and sub-themes within codes were identified. Illustrative quotes were then selected for each sub-theme.

Results were organized around 1) abortion attitudes; 2) moral and religious beliefs; and 3) pastoral care.

Abortion attitudes

When asked about their views on abortion, most participants noted affiliation with sociopolitical attitudes regarding abortion (e.g. “pro-life” and “pro-choice”). Differences among attitudes were observed in the participant’s understanding of when life begins, an affirmation of a women’s autonomy, and expression of the circumstances in which abortion may be morally acceptable. All participants identified at least one circumstance in which abortion may be the best decision for a pregnant person. Participants who identified their views as “pro-life” offered fewer moral exceptions for abortion, explaining that the circumstances of most unplanned pregnancies are surmountable, and therefore do not need to be resolved by abortion.

Nonetheless, the majority of participants expressed statements not readily fitting into a dichotomy of attitudes, but rather intermediate between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the so-called “gray area.” Attitudes in the “gray area” were nuanced, complex, and fell along a spectrum between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” attitudes. “Gray Area” attitudes were distinguished by an understanding that people have to make decisions on their own, yet “all life is sacred” and should be protected. In addition, participants with these “gray area” attitudes expressed tentativeness about taking a strong stance of “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” noting tensions between beliefs held in both categories and a desire to hold onto religious beliefs while acknowledging legal right to abortion. Illustrative quotes of the range of common attitudes are presented in Table 2 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.t002

“Pro-life”.

There was no pattern among participants with “pro-life” attitudes by gender, tradition, denomination, or leadership role; participants included both men and women, senior pastors and a first lady and other lay leaders, and came from multiple denominations, including United Methodist Church, Congregational Methodist, National Missionary Baptist Convention, Inc., and a Non-denominational congregation. Those with “pro-life” attitudes felt abortion is “too common” and “ought to be a last resort” that is not rushed into or taken lightly given the gravity of its implications. They expressed perceptions that abortion is too often thought of as a first option and explained that they would encourage congregants to make well-informed, carefully considered decisions when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Moreover, participants with “pro-life” attitudes explained that abortion is too often discussed in a “cold and sterile” medical manner. They explained that this perspective is limited because it presents abortion only as a solution to a medical problem, but detaches moral implications of ending the “potential for life.” Participants with “pro-life” attitudes explained it is impossible to honestly discuss abortion in only medical terms; morality must also be considered and negotiated. These participants emphasized the importance of sharing religious beliefs of life and scared worth when providing pastoral care for someone considering abortion.

Participants with “pro-life” attitudes acknowledged abortion as a legal option but explained they would only counsel women to consider this recourse in cases of risk to maternal life or in some cases of sexual assault. Some participants were less decided about the moral acceptability of abortion in cases of rape, stating tensions between the belief that something good might come out of the pregnancy and concerns for the mental health of the mother. One Mainline Protestant pastor raised concerns about abortion in cases of rape and expressed that it may be morally acceptable only when the woman has no shared “responsibility for [the pregnancy],” such as a woman being under the influence of alcohol versus being “attacked by an evil person.” The same participant explained that abortion is not a morally acceptable option for fetal anomaly because such anomalies are the result of “the sinful nature that we’re born into (due to original sin of Adam and Eve)”, and because God does not make mistakes, therefore all pregnancies should be carried to term.

Attitudes in the intermediate, “Gray Area”.

Participants from several denominations such as United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, African Methodist Episcopal expressed attitudes intermediate between “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” These participants were tentative about making strong statements about what the ideal resolution of unplanned pregnancies should be and explained that they were not “qualified” to make such determinations for others. Several participants expressed the importance of individual autonomy to make abortion decisions and careful consideration of the context of an unplanned pregnancy in deciding on the ideal resolution of the pregnancy; however, most of the participants with attitudes in the “gray area” expressed that they would prefer abortions are less common. Participants cited tension between belief in the sanctity of life and respect for individual autonomy. One participant described this tension:

“'So I don't believe that it's my right as a human being to tell a woman what they're going to do with their body because a woman and a child are literally inexorably linked as far as being in utero and in womb . And so I have no right to say to someone who's carrying a child that you can or cannot do this or that or the other because that child is your body and you have the right to see your body . But at the same time , there is also the potential for a life being carried inside of that body . And the part of me that values the sacredness of all life says , ‘Oh , but look at the potential there . Look what good that future human being could do in the world . ’ So I sort of stand at a very strange gray area and crossroads with abortion . ” (Senior Pastor, Mainline Protestant)

Some participants in the “Gray Area” cited that abortion may be the best decision for some people if having an abortion would alleviate potential suffering or in cases in which a mother is not able to care for herself or for a child. Another senior pastor explained his view on abortion,

“My personal views on abortion is that I believe that in some cases , abortion could be the best option for that individual , if they come to that conclusion , such as poorly–development of a fetus that does not have , medically speaking , the chance for–productive or normal life outside of the womb . Okay ? People make those decisions on their own . One of the more sensitive issues is having a healthy child , but if that child is the result of rape or incest , I don't believe that God cannot forgive anyone for any decision that possibly could be against his will . His will , of course , is that we have life , but I also hold to this belief that every , every , every–conceivable sin is forgivable by God , except for blasphemy …” (Senior Pastor, Black Protestant)

“Pro-choice”.

There was no identifiable pattern by gender, tradition, denomination, or leadership role among participants who identified themselves as “pro-choice.” These participants discussed tensions between the need for abortion and the need for women to exercise bodily autonomy. They felt pregnancy-related decision making should rest with a pregnant person and God, but they would try to guide people considering abortion to the best outcome for the mother and the baby. They emphasized that their pastoral care would consist of much listening and understanding. A senior pastor at an Episcopal church who identified as “pro-choice” explained that he could not make decisions about abortion for people because to do so would be “treading on a violation of the relationship between [them] and God.”

Most participants with “pro-choice” attitudes expressed that abortion is a psychologically difficult decision that they wished people did not have to go through but underscored that it may be the best option for some people. These participants explained that abortion might be the best decision if there is a risk to the life of the mother, in cases of rape or incest, and in cases of fetal anomaly. Conversely, some participants expressed that abortion should not be used as a primary means of birth control or contraception. A senior pastor at an Episcopal church expressed that abortion should not be allowed for sex-selection, although he did not believe this was a common occurrence. Several other participants acknowledged abortion as a legal option but emphasized the importance of supporting women and providing children the care they need so there are better alternatives to abortion.

Religious and moral beliefs across the abortion attitude spectrum

All life has sacred worth..

All participants expressed that their abortion attitudes are influenced by the understanding and interpretation of Christian scripture and doctrine (See Table 3 ). The majority of participants identified beliefs about sanctity and sacredness of all life as central to their views on abortion. They explained that people are created in God’s image, therefore human life has sacred worth which should be protected. The majority of participants stated views that public and pastoral care conversations about abortion should include recognition of the sacredness of life because Christian believers walk that experience (i.e. it is fundamental to Christian beliefs).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.t003

Many participants across the attitude spectrum expressed the perception that abortion is ending life; however, participants had mixed views about when life begins and starts to bear the image of God. Participants with a “pro-life” attitude toward abortion described the beginning of life at early stages in fetal development, with some reporting life begins at conception, and others explaining that life begins when there is a fetal heartbeat. Participants expressing intermediate attitudes in the “gray area” did not have a consensus about when life begins, or, in other words, whether an abortion would end a life that was created in God’s image. One senior pastor with abortion attitudes in the “gray area” stated that he rejects the notion that “a fetus is just a grouping of cells.” Another senior pastor who also expressed attitudes falling in the intermediate “gray area” stated that he was not qualified to state when life begins but was confident it was not conception. He expressed uncertainty about when a fertilized egg starts “bearing the image of God,” but expressed that it was sometime between conception and birth. One participant with a “pro-choice” attitude toward abortion expressed beliefs about the beginning of life that were unique among other participants. She discussed views about life beginning when God’s spirits are brought into “our earthly journey” through the process of birth. She explained that any spirits that are not birthed go back to God and wait for the next chance at life, even as flesh dies during an abortion. She expressed this happens because God is loving:

“If God is a God of love , why would God punitively respond to that entity of life that has no choice ? I think God is bigger than that …” (Regional Minister, Mainline Protestant)

Redemption.

Many participants across the attitude spectrum expressed that there is a process of healing, redemption, or becoming “whole” that women must undergo following an abortion to resolve adverse psychological and spiritual effects. Most participants describe these effects, such as emotional guilt, regret, and spiritual effects, such as questioning whether God would forgive them. They expressed that these effects are often lasting and lifelong for those who cannot or will not “do the work [of] resolving their own minds.” Across abortion attitudes, participants expressed that adverse psychological effects are especially salient for women who never end up having children or learn later that they are infertile. In addition, some participants from both Mainline and Black Protestant churches expressed that there may be guilt, condemnation, criticism, and judgment from members of their congregation towards people who have an abortion. These participants expressed that stigmatizing responses from members of the congregation would continue to distress women after an abortion until they sought spiritual and emotional healing. Several participants explained the process of redemption and healing after having an abortion involves women reckoning with ending a life, recognizing they are covered by God’s grace and God does not condemn them, even if they may condemn themselves for their decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Pastoral care

Across the abortion attitude spectrum..

Many participants had little or no experience providing pastoral care related to abortion in their careers. They attributed their inexperience to perceptions that unplanned pregnancy and abortion not being major concerns in their churches and congregant perceptions that the church is not a safe place for conversations due to stigma. In addition, some men perceived women congregants would not come to them for pastoral care surrounding these issues or would prefer to go to women religious leaders. In such cases where leaders had little or no experience, they responded to hypothetical situations in which they would provide pastoral care to congregants considering abortion and often discussed these issues in the context of unmarried adolescents experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. Many participants expressed uncertainty about their qualifications to provide this type of pastoral care or lead faith-based health programs that included discussions of unintended pregnancy and abortion.

Across the spectrum of attitudes, participants expressed the importance of supporting a person facing an unplanned pregnancy and “journeying with” them in their decision-making, yet expressed a clear preference for continuing an unplanned pregnancy to term and utilizing adoption of the baby as a strategy (See Table 4 ). Paradoxically, all participants expressed their desire to counsel women away from abortion, or not “encourage” abortion as a solution to an unplanned pregnancy given beliefs about all life being sacred and needing protection. Several participants discussed the obligation to preserve God’s creation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.t004

Similarly, many participants across the attitude spectrum emphasized the importance of expressing love when proving pastoral care for someone considering abortion, even if their theology led them to be morally opposed to abortion. All participants emphasized that they, the congregation, and God love a woman with an unplanned pregnancy that is considering abortion. Participants explained a loving response was a part of their duty as spiritual leaders. Participants with “pro-choice” attitudes and those falling in the “gray area” explained that part of their pastoral care would be to encourage their congregations to love and support someone considering abortion or who has had an abortion.

Several participants expressed that abortion will not separate women from the love of God, or the love of the participant, even if the decision to abort is not pleasing to God. Some participants equated abortion to sin such as divorce but explained that every sin, except blasphemy, is forgivable by God. These participants believed therefore, it was not their job to judge someone who has an abortion, even if they believe that abortion is ending a life. Some participants across the attitude spectrum expressed that God’s view of the sanctity of life is not punitive; therefore it is not appropriate for religious leaders to condemn women who have abortions to Hell or require them to publicly confess this sin. Additionally, many participants explained that people who have abortions are covered by God’s grace and forgiveness, religious beliefs that they would convey in their pastoral care.

Many participants across the spectrum of attitudes expressed the importance of not condemning a person because of abortion, citing scripture punitively, or passing judgment. A participant from an Episcopal church who identified as “pro-choice” said,

“…I also think it’s letting them know that they’re loved . I go back to that , with–that’s–love will win . I know it’s become sort of a moniker and nobody takes it seriously , but– …It will . So how do we love ? How do we love that woman who didn’t plan , and that baby that’s going to result from it ? Or the woman that planned , and still she got pregnant . It’s not what do we with them . It’s how do we love them , and make sure they know they’re loved ? That’s the part I see my role as . ” (Male Senior Pastor, Mainline Protestant)

When asked about how they would provide pastoral care for abortion, participants with “pro-life” and “gray area” attitudes cited examples of instrumental support they would provide as part of their pastoral care for unplanned pregnancies and emphasized providing support for continuing a pregnancy.

Participants with “pro-life” attitudes shared a belief that regardless of the intendedness of pregnancy, there are no “accidental children” because “God does not make mistakes.” They explained that they would draw upon this belief when providing pastoral care and would advise congregants considering abortion to first consider what God is calling them to do and consider the potential of their unborn child. Additionally, several participants with “pro-life” attitudes expressed that they would encourage people to first see an ultrasound or hear a fetal heartbeat before deciding on abortion. They cited examples of knowing people and hearing stories of young women who were seeking an abortion until they saw an ultrasound or heard a fetal heartbeat. While most participants across the attitude spectrum expressed they would encourage pregnant women to seek healthcare services, namely prenatal care, without being prompted, participants with “pro-life” attitudes discussed close ties to Crisis Pregnancy Centers and local pro-life advocacy groups they would call upon as resources. One senior pastor from a United Methodist Church explained his process in providing pastoral care to a young woman and making an appointment for her at a Crisis Pregnancy Center:

“She didn't want to acknowledge that she was pregnant, so I set up with a crisis pregnancy center a time for her to go in for an ultrasound, start receiving prenatal care, and then she didn't show up … she didn't show up for the ultrasound, and all that. I was put in the awkward position of having to be a little bit aggressive with them, ‘Look, this is your life, and the child's life are at stake if you don't receive any prenatal care.’ … That was kind of a strange situation that I felt at some times like maybe I was overstepping my bounds by being pushy, but they weren't even talking to their parents about it. … That involved not just counseling but a lot of, I don't know what you would say, arm-twisting like, ‘You need to go get checked out, ’… It was a strange role, one of those they don't train you for in seminary, that's for sure. ” (Male Senior Pastor, Mainline Protestant)

Attitudes in the intermediate “gray area”

Participants with attitudes falling in the “gray area” explained they would encourage women to slow down and take stock of their available resources before making a decision about an unplanned pregnancy. These participants explained they would encourage congregants to consider if they had adequate child care, family support, and finances to parent a child. Some leaders expressed they would encourage women to careful gather all available information about options when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. These participants believed the congregation would likely encourage a fellow congregant with an unplanned pregnancy to keep the baby. Many suggested that they would counsel women considering abortion to not make a “rash” decision based on pressure from the congregation. In many of these cases, the participants expressed tension between beliefs shared in a pastoral care setting and beliefs of the congregation. These participants shared that they would encourage women to consider both options—to have an abortion or not have an abortion. Religious leaders with attitudes in the “gray area” expressed that they would advise a woman not to go through with an abortion unless there are where no other options. These leaders often emphasized contraceptive use as a primary method to prevent a pregnancy.

Many participants who expressed “pro-choice” attitudes explained how they would provide support to a congregant seeking pastoral following an abortion. They expressed the process of helping a woman to reckon with ending a life and considering how God might view their action. They expressed women would need and want redemption, which would be available if sought. Others expressed they would attempt to use scripture to the best of their ability to encourage women seeking pastoral care, but would be careful not to “dictate what the bible says in terms of abortion” because little is written and free choice is allowed.

This study provides insight into the complex intersection of sociopolitical attitudes about abortion, religious and moral beliefs, and pastoral care among Mainline and Black Protestant religious leaders in Georgia. This analysis is part of a larger intervention development study to understand existing attitudes, norms, and values, in order to inform a faith-centered program on sexual and reproductive health that promotes compassionate attitudes and norms in Protestant religious contexts. While abortion attitudes fell on a spectrum ranging from “pro-life” to “pro-choice,” the majority of participants expressed attitudes intermediate, or in a “gray area,” between these views. Differences in abortion attitudes stemmed from varying beliefs on when life begins and circumstances in which abortion may be morally acceptable. Participants stressed that they would support women in pregnancy decision-making and advise them to make well-informed decisions irrespective of their own attitudes; yet, many described their lack of preparation and training to have these conversations.

Results showed numerous similarities and differences among Protestant religious leaders’ attitudes, beliefs, and pastoral care practices. For example, all participants agreed that they would participate in providing pastoral care for abortion at the initiation of congregants’ advice seeking. Other key similarities in pastoral care across the spectrum of abortion attitudes include recognition of the importance of the sanctity of life, emphasis on using scripture to encourage (i.e., not using scripture in a punitive manner), and acknowledgment that spiritual leaders are called to love and care for people unconditionally. In addition, many participants across denominations highlighted the psychological effects of abortion and a need for spiritual healing after abortion. Still, participants differed in their descriptions of their belief about when life begins, acknowledgement of moral agency to make pregnancy- and abortion-related decisions, and the circumstances in which abortion may be morally acceptable. For example, participants with “pro-choice” attitudes and participants with abortion attitudes in the “gray area” emphasized a preference against abortion but recognized a pregnant person’s moral agency to make decisions for their bodies and lives, whereas participants with “pro-life” attitudes did not express the same recognition.

These results demonstrate that Protestant religious leaders may provide pastoral care differently according to their abortion attitudes, thus varying their advice and recommendations; however, several misperceptions regarding abortion underlie religious leaders’ attitudes, beliefs, and pastoral care practices and run counter to existing scientific evidence. For example, many pastors described the adverse psychological effects of having an abortion including spiritual questioning, guilt, and lifelong emotional struggle and pain. In contrast, thirty years of research—including studies that measured mental and emotional distress before pregnancy—suggest legal induced abortion does not pose significant mental health risks for women [ 32 – 34 ]; however, evidence suggests being denied an abortion may result in negative psychological effects on women [ 35 ]. In addition, some religious leaders with “pro-choice” and “gray area” attitudes stated they would advise against the use of abortion as contraception despite clinical guidelines clearly distinguishing between contraception as a form of primary pregnancy prevention while abortion is a form of pregnancy termination [ 36 ]. Further, despite religious leaders beliefs that women use abortion “conveniently” or as a primary pregnancy prevention method in the United States, people have abortions for diverse and interrelated reasons (e.g., 73% cited inability to afford a child and 74% cited having a baby would interfere with work, education, or ability to care for dependents) [ 37 ] and over half of U.S. abortion patients were using a contraceptive method when they became pregnant [ 38 ].

Participants who identified a “pro-life” attitude towards abortion cited informational support that encouraged women to continue their pregnancies and carefully consider the potential of the unborn child. Many of these participants expressed that their pastoral care would include instrumental support in the form of making referrals to Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) and pro-life advocacy organizations. Those with a “pro-life” attitude explained that CPCs were reliable sources of information and would help women to get prenatal care. They explained that women could go to a CPC to see an ultrasound or hear a fetal heartbeat. Some participants with a “pro-life” attitude explained that they would advise women to seek services at a CPC before deciding to have an abortion. Protestant religious leaders may view CPCs as reliable healthcare services because of their emphasis on religious ideology; however, evidence suggests women seeking care at these clinics “do not receive comprehensive, accurate, evidence-based clinical information about all available options” [ 39 ].

Only participants with “gray area” or “pro-choice” attitudes expressed a duty to confront stigmatizing attitudes and behaviors towards women who experience abortion. These participants discussed obligations to encourage empathy and dispel stigmatizing attitudes and treatment within their congregations. While these participants were the only religious leaders who expressed these views, all participants emphasized the importance of empathy, love, and compassion for others. Thus, Protestant religious leaders may be key players in confronting abortion stigma in Mainline and Black Protestant churches and should be involved at the onset of efforts to destigmatize abortion and “shift the cultural conversation from one of judgment to one of empathy, compassion, and affirmation of people’s moral agency” [ 17 ]. These findings hold promise for informing the development of multi-level faith-based interventions and secular and faith-based partnerships to reduce abortion stigma.

Many religious leaders cited that they had not had formal training on providing pastoral care for any sexual and reproductive issue, let alone abortion. Pastoral care training and interventions should be developed that emphasize Christian beliefs and value the sanctity of life and integrate public health recommendations. Key intervention components should: include information on evidence-based healthcare services and local supports, address beliefs about both the psychological and the spiritual effects of abortion, dispel misinformation, and integrate strategies to reduce abortion stigma. Some religious scholars are already considering faith-based, reproductive justice, and moral arguments for supporting abortion [ 19 , 40 – 44 ]. Existing moral arguments for legal abortion and this qualitative evidence could be used to inform intervention development.

These findings should be interpreted in context of the limitations and strengths of the study. Our diverse sample of Mainline and Black Protestant churches represent an array of perspectives on abortion and pastoral care, but cannot (and were never intended to) be generalized to all religious denominations (e.g., Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, and non-Christian groups were purposefully excluded). Additionally, only few women were recruited in this study, which somewhat reflects the gender makeup of senior leadership positions in Protestant religious institutions which are male dominated. It is possible that women lay leaders are providing pastoral care to congregants as well and may have different insights on the provision of pastoral care for abortion. Future research should seek to specifically recruit Mainline and Black Protestant women religious leaders. Investigation of how these findings compare to abortion attitudes and pastoral care practices among other religious traditions in Georgia, the Southeast region, and other states is warranted. It is possible the participants included in this study represent a group with more liberal views on abortion given the fairly liberal stances of their denominations compared to other religious traditions. It is a strength of this study, however, that many diverse political and socio-political attitudes were observed among participants from the same denominations.

The insights provided by this study help provide an understanding of how Mainline and Black Protestant religious leaders in Georgia provide pastoral care to congregants regarding decision-making for unintended pregnancies, including abortion decisions. Protestant religious leaders may play an important role in providing social support, and facilitating access to information and healthcare services. Finally, these findings help to understand complex religious and cultural perspectives on abortion and how these attitudes influence pastoral care. This is an important step towards creating partnerships between public health and Protestant religious organizations that improve reproductive health outcomes, reduce abortion stigma, and respect the intrinsic value of religious traditions on their own terms. Future research on the larger intervention development project will take another step by collecting congregant’s perspectives on pastoral care for unintended pregnancies and abortion, and investigate the barriers and facilitators to receiving support from their religious communities.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. interview guide..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.s001

S2 Appendix. Codebook.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235971.s002

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kelli Komro for her contributions to the study conceptualization, design and leadership. A special thank you to the EnFaith project advisory committee, including Rev. Kim Jackson, Rebecca Todd Peters, M.Div, PhD, Cherisse Scott (SisterReach), and Charity Woods (Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice), who provided advice on data collection and research strategies. Thanks to Rebecca Todd Peters for sharing her bibliography on pastoral theological books from which sources for the introduction are drawn. The authors also wish to thank Indya Harrison, Mary Kan and Anastasia Jackson who helped with participant recruitment and interviews.

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Crafting a Personal Philosophy Statement

This essay is about crafting a personal philosophy statement, emphasizing self-reflection, clarity, and authenticity. It highlights the importance of understanding one’s core beliefs and values, presenting them clearly and honestly. The essay discusses how a philosophy statement serves as a compass, guiding personal and professional actions and decisions. It stresses the need for simplicity in expression, avoiding jargon, and the significance of authenticity through personal anecdotes. Additionally, it underscores the evolving nature of a philosophy statement, encouraging periodic revisions to keep it relevant. Ultimately, it illustrates how such statements can influence and enhance both personal growth and professional practice.

How it works

Creating a personal philosophy statement is a profound exercise in self-reflection and articulation of one’s core beliefs and values. It is not merely a document but a vivid representation of an individual’s guiding principles and ethical framework. This statement serves as a compass, providing direction and clarity in both personal and professional realms. As we delve into the art of crafting a philosophy statement, it becomes evident that this endeavor is a unique blend of introspection, clarity, and authenticity.

At the heart of a philosophy statement lies a deep understanding of one’s self. It requires an exploration of personal beliefs, experiences, and values that shape our worldview. This process is akin to peeling an onion, layer by layer, revealing the essence of what truly matters to us. It is essential to approach this task with an open mind and a willingness to confront our most fundamental convictions. This introspection is not always comfortable, but it is a necessary step in developing a philosophy that is genuine and reflective of our true selves.

When writing a personal philosophy statement, clarity and simplicity are paramount. The goal is to articulate complex beliefs in a manner that is both accessible and impactful. This does not mean simplifying the ideas themselves but rather presenting them in a clear and concise way. A well-crafted philosophy statement avoids jargon and overly complex language, opting instead for straightforward, honest expression. This clarity ensures that the statement resonates with both the writer and the reader, fostering a deeper connection and understanding.

Authenticity is another critical component of an effective philosophy statement. It is easy to fall into the trap of writing what we think others want to hear, especially in professional contexts. However, a philosophy statement should be a true reflection of our beliefs, not a tailored narrative designed to impress. Authenticity shines through when we write from the heart, sharing personal anecdotes and real-life examples that illustrate our principles. This personal touch not only adds depth to the statement but also makes it more relatable and impactful.

A personal philosophy statement is not static; it evolves as we grow and experience life. Our beliefs and values may shift over time, influenced by new insights, challenges, and achievements. Therefore, it is beneficial to revisit and revise the statement periodically, ensuring it remains aligned with our current perspective. This ongoing process of reflection and revision keeps the philosophy statement relevant and dynamic, much like our own personal development.

The impact of a well-crafted philosophy statement extends beyond personal reflection; it can significantly influence our professional life as well. For educators, for example, a teaching philosophy statement can guide their approach to instruction, classroom management, and student engagement. It provides a foundation for decision-making and helps maintain consistency in practice. In the corporate world, a leadership philosophy statement can inspire and motivate teams, fostering a positive and productive work environment. By clearly communicating our core values and expectations, we can build trust and credibility with those we lead or work alongside.

Crafting a personal philosophy statement is a deeply rewarding endeavor that demands honesty, clarity, and self-awareness. It is an opportunity to articulate what we stand for and why, providing a touchstone for our actions and decisions. Whether for personal reflection or professional guidance, a philosophy statement serves as a powerful tool for self-expression and growth. Embrace the process with an open heart and mind, and let your unique voice shine through in your words.

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Non-Trump Republicans are reminded that the party isn’t really theirs

You can be a Republican and not like Trump, but you are not welcome to share that opinion.

For eight years, Larry Hogan was a Republican governor of a heavily blue state. This is a unique role in American politics, one of the last remaining places where the partisan bifurcation that defines national politics fails to draw sharp boundaries. Hogan won election and reelection in Maryland even as the state voted for Democrats for president and the Senate by wide margins.

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Hogan’s announcement that he would seek the Senate seat held by retiring Sen. Ben Cardin (D) offered a unique opportunity for his party. With the Senate evenly divided between the parties, any gain of a seat is hugely important — and here was a chance to potentially lock up a blue seat for at least six years. One would justifiably assume that the national Republican Party was thrilled about Hogan’s candidacy.

Perhaps it was, until Hogan did the one thing you’re not allowed to do as a Republican: criticize Donald Trump, even obliquely.

Hogan had criticized Trump before, writing an essay for this newspaper in which he faulted Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. That was way back in 2020, though. When he offered new — milder! — apostasy last week, the backlash was sharp.

You will recall the recent news that Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, part of an effort to cover up a hush money payment made to an adult-film actress before the 2016 election. In the estimation of most Americans , including most Democrats and independents, this was the right verdict for the jury in Manhattan to draw. Meaning that it was almost certainly the collective view of Marylanders that Trump should have been found guilty.

As news broke that the jury had reached a verdict, Hogan offered thoughts that were a case study in careful politicking: not celebrating the prospect of Trump’s guilt but rejecting the sort of hyperventilating excoriations coming from Trump and his allies.

“At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” his message on social media read in part. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”

Trumpworld was furious . That included Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“I don’t support what he just said there,” Lara Trump said when presented with Hogan’s comments. “I think it’s ridiculous.”

She added that Hogan “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point and, quite frankly, anybody in America, if that’s the way you feel. That’s very upsetting to hear that.”

Lara Trump is not just a Trump, of course. She is also the co-chair of the Republican Party, the group committed to ensuring that Hogan wins. When CNN host Kasie Hunt pressed her on whether Hogan’s comments meant he wouldn’t receive that support, Lara Trump hedged: “I will get back to you on all the specifics monetarily.”

Lara Trump has not held her position for long. She comes to the party by way of being a verbose advocate for her father-in-law. She is not practiced in walking the line between fervent defense of Trump and protecting the institutional needs of the party. But then, it’s not clear that her mandate at the party is to worry much about non-Trump candidates.

“My number one goal is making sure that Donald Trump is the 47th president,” she told the Associated Press last month. If that means prioritizing Trump’s argument that the New York verdict was a repulsive abuse of power over Hogan’s tailored effort to appeal to Maryland voters? Well, too bad for Larry Hogan.

It’s very much a reflection of how the GOP more broadly has reacted to Donald Trump’s ongoing centrality to Republican politics. There remain Republicans who are skeptical of Trump, voting against him in the presidential primaries and telling pollsters either that they won’t vote for him in November or that they are wary of doing so.

In recent Fox News polling, a quarter of Republicans who indicated that they planned to vote for Trump in November said they were doing so mostly in opposition to President Biden — suggesting that their support for Trump is not rooted in the sort of fervency that their party’s co-chair demands. No worries, though: Three-quarters of Republicans said their vote was centered on Trump.

In the wake of the verdict, YouGov conducted polling for CBS that included a question about the need for Republicans to remain loyal to Trump. Four in five Republicans said it was at least somewhat important for them to do so, including more than two-thirds who said it was very important. Far fewer said it was not important.

In Maryland, Hogan enjoys high favorability ratings overall and from members of his party, according to Washington Post-University of Maryland polling released in March. In that poll, he led the eventual Democratic nominee Angela Alsobrooks by double digits, partly on the strength of his overwhelming support from Republicans.

But did you hear that his response to the New York verdict wasn't a full-throated rejection of the possibility that the trial was fair? Maybe he isn't a real Republican after all.

Trump has long defined “Republican” as meaning “Trump loyal”; it’s why he deploys the term “RINO” or Republican-in-name-only as a descriptor for his critics so frequently. By clearing the path for his daughter-in-law to serve as co-chair of the party, Trump helped cement that view as an institutional one for the GOP. By extension, he helped make non-Trump Republicans more obviously unwelcome in the party — even if they potentially represented the seat needed for the party to gain control of the Senate.

Lara Trump’s criticism was an odd comment for a party chair to make. It was a very typical comment for a Trump loyalist to make. And in the revamped Republican Party, Trump, not the party, is the institution that is first in line for protection and advocacy.

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Key dates and events: From January to June, voters in all states and U.S. territories will pick their party’s nominee for president ahead of the summer conventions. Here are key dates and events on the 2024 election calendar .

Abortion and the election: Voters in about a dozen states could decide the fate of abortion rights with constitutional amendments on the ballot in a pivotal election year. Biden supports legal access to abortion , and he has encouraged Congress to pass a law that would codify abortion rights nationwide. After months of mixed signals about his position, Trump said the issue should be left to states . Here’s how Biden’s and Trump’s abortion stances have shifted over the years.

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• Asian Bioeth Rev
• v.14(1); 2022 Jan

The Moral Significance of Abortion Inconsistency Arguments

William simkulet.

1 Park University, Parkville, MO USA

2 Dodge City Community College, Dodge City, KS USA

Most opponents of abortion (OA) believe fetuses matter . Critics argue that OA act inconsistently with regards to fetal life, seeking to restrict access to induced abortion, but largely ignoring spontaneous abortion and the creation of surplus embryos by IVF. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger call such arguments inconsistency arguments and contend they do not matter. They present three objections to these arguments — the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objection. Previously, I argued these objections fail and threaten to undermine ethical inquiry. Colgrove et al. have recently replied, but here, I argue their reply fails as well and raises a new criticism of the other actions’ objection. This essay sets out to show, as well as any philosophical argument can, that inconsistency arguments are morally significant.

Introduction

Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger ( 2020 ) set out to show that inconsistency arguments “do not matter”; by inconsistency argument , they mean to pick out a variety (Fleck 1979 ; Murphy 1985 ; Ord 2008 ; Lovering 2013 , 2014 , 2017 , 2020 ; Berg 2017 ; Simkulet 2016 , 2017 , 2019a , b , c , 2020 ; Bovens 2006 ; Schlumpf 2019 ) of disparate criticisms identifying apparent inconsistencies in how opponents of abortion (OA) treat fetuses. Unfortunately, this term is misleading, as practically all philosophical arguments involve identifying some form of inconsistency, confusion, or misunderstanding.

Critics of the prolife anti-abortion position argue that OA hold inconsistent moral beliefs; they claim to believe that fetuses are persons from conception, but they neglect the welfare of fetuses who are spontaneously aborted by natural causes, and overlook the well-being of the surplus frozen human embryos created for IVF. Perhaps the strangest argument that Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) label as an inconsistency argument comes from Sister Joan Chittister (Schlumpf 2019 ), who chastises those who call themselves “pro-life” for neglecting the welfare of born persons. Proponents of inconsistency arguments argue that OA hold inconsistent moral beliefs, arguing that upon revision, they will conclude that they either (i) need to do more, or (ii) need not oppose abortion.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that such arguments “do not matter.” This paper interprets this as the claim that inconsistency arguments are morally irrelevant for any (widely held) OA view. This paper will show that such arguments are morally relevant to the most widely held OA position.

Another way to read Colgrove et al. is as claiming they “do not matter” because they cannot show that OA need to adopt (ii) over (i). They say, “Inconsistency arguments simply are not equipped to undermine OAs’ views; at most, they reveal what OAs should do (or believe).” (Colgrove et al. 2020 ) This is uncharitable. First, while some inconsistency theorists (Ord 2008 ; Berg 2017 ) might believe that OA do not really believe fetuses are persons from conception, these arguments identify apparent inconsistency, but need not take a stance on how OA ought to resolve this inconsistency. Second, even if OA choose (i) and conclude they ought to do more to prevent spontaneous abortion (education, research, increased access to healthcare (Simkulet 2017 , 2020 ), and perhaps a major shift in social priorities (Ord 2008 ; Berg 2017 ), and more for surplus IVF embryos (adoption, and gestation (Lovering 2020 ; Blackshaw and Colgrove 2020 ; Blackshaw 2021 ), this matters . Colgrove et al. jest that if OA embrace option (i) it would “make the world a (much) worse place (from the critic’s perspective)”; but fail to note that it would make the world a much better place from the perspective of OA!

Complicating matters, there seems to be disagreement among Colgrove, Blackshaw, and Rodger regarding what opposition to abortion requires. Notably, Bruce Blackshaw ( 2021 , 166) contends that Christians ought to act as neighbors, and offers a robust, clear account of what this requires:

Treating frozen embryos as neighbors requires securing them a life like ours through adoption and gestation, and as well as opposing abortion, Christians must work toward this goal for the vast numbers of frozen embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

Blackshaw and Rodger ( 2019 ) attempt to justify OA disinterest in spontaneous abortion, claiming that most cases of spontaneous abortion are not currently preventable; but Blackshaw ( 2021 ) notes that “if we regard all human life as equally valuable, we have at least some obligation toward helping reduce deaths from spontaneous abortion where possible”.

This paper argues that inconsistency arguments matter. It is divided into three main sections. The first draws a distinction between restrictivist and moralist views on abortion, arguing only restrictivist views are OA. The second sets out to defend my earlier criticism (Simkulet 2021 ) of the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections from Blackshaw et al.’s ( 2021 ) recent response. The third offers a new argument against the other actions objection; I argue that if this objection were to succeed, it would undermine restrictivist opposition to abortion.

Opposition to Abortion

On miscarriage.

Before his collaboration (Colgrove et al. 2020 ) with Blackshaw and Rodger, Colgrove ( 2019 ) raised a different criticism of Berg’s ( 2017 ) inconsistency argument. Berg argues that because miscarriage is so common, if we believe fetuses matter , we ought to devote more medical resources to protecting them. Colgrove replies that “miscarriage is not a cause of death,” but rather “it is an outcome.” Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) accuse me of the same error.

This is rather uncharitable, but it also misses two key points common in inconsistency arguments. First, if OA believe that fetuses matter, one would expect them to be concerned with both spontaneous and induced abortion, as both are tragic. Second, even if spontaneous abortion has many disparate causes, there may be a common solution. For example, Aspirin can treat a wide variety of conditions, from scraped knee to eye strain to migraine. Many proposals inconsistency theorists discuss (for example, education, gene therapy, and ectogenesis technology) would prevent spontaneous abortion by many different causes.  In short, even if miscarriage is not a single cause of death, there is good reason to think a single solution might address many different cases, saving many fetal lives.

On Opposition to Abortion

To play on Colgrove, note that opposition to abortion is not a moral theory, it is an action or stance one can take toward abortion. There are many reasons why one might oppose abortion; one might merely find the word “abortion” to be distasteful, might oppose abortion on teleological grounds, argue that it is outside the scope of medicine, or that it violates the Hippocratic Oath.

However, most opposition to abortion rests on a single belief. Judith Jarvis Thomson ( 1972 ) says, “Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.” Don Marquis ( 1989 ) says “Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the ethics of abortion… believe that whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end.”

In short, most opposition to abortion turns on the belief that a fetus matters from conception (or soon afterwards (Marquis 2007 , 2013 ); that the fetus is morally comparable to an adult human person. This view is usually abbreviated as the view that fetuses are persons, broadly construed to mean one of many disparate theories about moral status; that human fetuses are human organisms (Mulder 2013 ), rational substances (Lee and George 2005 ; Beckwith 2007 ; George and Tollefsen 2008 ; Friberg-Fernros 2015 ), have a possible future it would be wrong to deprive them of Marquis 1989 ; Stone 1987 ), etc.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) seek to show that inconsistency arguments are morally irrelevant for any (widely held) anti-abortion view, and there seems to be widespread consensus the most widely held anti-abortion view claims fetuses are persons, broadly construed, from conception (PAC). This paper defends the position that inconsistency arguments are morally relevant to the PAC view.

Restrictivism and Moralism

It will be practical to distinguish between two groups of anti-abortion positions — Restrictivism  (Davis 1984 ; Carroll and Crutchfield Forthcoming ), the view that we should adopt social policies that restrict a woman’s access to induced abortion, and Moralism , the view that abortion is merely immoral, but that we do not need adopt Restrictivist social policies.

It is not hard to see why PAC theorists might embrace restrictivism. On this view, fetuses are comparable to adult human persons, and society has adopted policies aimed at protecting the rights of adult human persons, so it is prima facie plausible that we should adopt similar social policies regarding fetuses. However, Thomson ( 1972 ) demonstrates that it is not enough to show that fetuses merely have a right to life by way of the violinist case:

Violinist: The Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and attaches your circulatory system to a famous, innocent, unconscious violinist suffering from a kidney ailment that will kill him unless he remains connected to your kidneys for nine months. (Adapted)

The violinist obviously has a right to life, but Thomson argues that the right to life does not give him the right to use your body; it is morally permissible for you to disconnect yourself from the violinist. Thomson says it would be a “great kindness” to stay attached to the violinist but that you do not have to accede to this.

Disconnecting the violinist from your body is comparable to disconnecting a patient from life support to let him die. Restrictivists might argue that induced abortion is not a matter of letting die; but of killing; but this will not do, as one can terminate a pregnancy without killing the fetus by severing the umbilical cord or removing the uterus, “merely” letting the fetus die. If this distinction mattered, restrictivists would not be anti-abortion, they would merely oppose how most abortions are currently performed.

Thomson shows it is not enough for restrictivists to believe fetuses are persons with a right to life, they must also believe something more , that (a) the fetus’s right to life is a positive right to assistance, or (b) the gestational mother somehow comes to have a special obligation to provide assistance to the fetus. She argues that this special obligation cannot be explained by merely risking the chance of pregnancy, as this would imply any woman who leaves the house without a hysterectomy has consented to pregnancy, even by rape. Furthermore, David Boonin ( 2002 ) argues that even if one consents to provide aid, one can withdraw consent.

Bone Marrow: Your neighbor is diagnosed with a condition that will kill him unless he receives monthly bone marrow transplants over the course of nine months from a match. You are a match and you agree to donate. However, it soon becomes clear that these surgeries ask more than you are willing to give, and you refuse to go in for the second surgery. (Adapted)

These thought experiments demonstrate that restrictivists must do more than argue fetuses are persons, they must argue that the fetus has a positive right to assistance.

However, one can believe abortion is immoral without believing we ought to adopt restrictivist social policies. There are many prima facie immoral things that it would be inappropriate to restrict by law. For example, I think most of us would agree that it is prima facie immoral to waste scarce resources, but that individuals might have a right to do so in some cases. One might hold that it is wrong to waste food without holding that throwing away leftovers should be illegal. Similarly, one might hold that adultery outside of an open marriage is immoral, but that adopting social policies that restrict such behavior would be undesirable, in part, because they are difficult to enforce, and in part because it might incentivize other immoral behavior, such as murdering one’s spouse to keep one’s adultery secret.

Moralism is the view that abortion is often, all things considered, immoral, but does not require that we adopt social policies that restrict woman’s access to abortion. There are many reasons why moralists might reject restrictivism independent of Thomson and Boonin-style concerns.

For example, restrictivist views have a hard time making exceptions for rape cases, despite the fact that many restrictivists believe such exceptions should be made. Rape victims are often reluctant to report rape and reluctant to take medical exams. Convictions in rape cases are difficult to obtain, especially within the short window in which inducing abortion would be medically preferable. As such, restrictivists face a dilemma – (a) if they require proof of rape, then few rape victims are allowed to abort; while (b) if they do not require proof of rape, they encourage women to merely say they were raped (whether true or not), failing to prevent most induced abortions and encouraging deception.

Restrictivists face a similar challenge with regards to self-defense, as all pregnancies are medically risky. The prospect of drawing a nonarbitrary line with regards to legally obligatory medical risk is dubious, but even if such a task could be achieved, those physicians sympathetic to abortion might overestimate risk and those opposing abortion might underestimate or ignore risk. Furthermore, medical risk of abortion increases with malnutrition and other medical emergencies, so those seeking abortion on medical grounds are incentivized to harm themselves to pass this threshold.

In light of these, and other, difficulties, many people who believe abortion are immoral reject restrictivism and adopt moralism. Notably, moralists need not hold that fetuses have a positive right to assistance, like restrictivists. I have contended (Simkulet 2021 ) that most OA believe fetuses have a positive right to assistance — that most OA are restrictivists. Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) claim that I miss “the target,” as one can be an OA without being committed to the belief that fetuses have a positive right to assistance.

Perhaps Colgrove et al. wish OA to pick out both restrictivist and moralist positions, but this will not do. Although moralists believe induced abortion is immoral, they are prochoice, while Colgrove et al. identify OA as prolife. Perhaps Colgrove et al. mean to say restrictivism does not require the belief that fetuses have a positive right to assistance, but this would merely introduce greater inconsistency regarding medical and legal ethics, as illustrated by Thomson ( 1972 ) and Boonin ( 2002 ).

Do Inconsistency Arguments Matter?

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) raise three objections to inconsistency arguments — the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections. I contend (Simkulet 2021 ) these objections threaten to undermine moral analysis completely; opposing parties could always claim to have other beliefs, other actions, or interpret criticism as an ad hominem attack impinging their character.

This section is divided into four subsections. The first looks at two inconsistency arguments. The next three subsections briefly summarize Colgrove et al.’s objections, and my criticisms (Simkulet 2021 ) of these arguments.

Inconsistency Arguments

OA often point to high numbers of induced abortion as a call to action. Upwards of 60% (Boklage 1990 ; Léridon 1977 ) of human pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, prompting critics to ask why OA do not see spontaneous abortion as a call to action. Toby Ord ( 2008 ) compares spontaneous abortion to a scourge that kills over half of humanity. Berg ( 2017 ) compares it to Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. Faced with these overwhelming numbers, inconsistency theorists conclude that if fetuses matter, then the problem of spontaneous abortion calls for a massive shift in our social and political priorities. I have noted (Simkulet 2021 ) that we recently underwent such a shift to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Henrik Friberg-Fernros ( 2015 , 2019 , 2018 ) challenges this position, contending that while fetal death is always tragic, not all fetal deaths are equally tragic; that killing is worse than letting die, and even that fetal lives are worth less than adult human lives because they lack time relative interests (Friberg-Fernros 2019 )! However, inconsistency arguments do not assume that all fetal deaths are equally tragic, merely that if fetuses matter, their deaths are tragic.

OA face a dilemma — either they (i) need to do more to prevent fetal death, or (ii) should withdraw opposition to induced abortion. Some proponents think OA should choose (ii) — that the argument demonstrates they do not really believe fetuses are persons. However, others propose a wide variety of methods by which OA might reasonably seek to confront the problem of fetal death, from increased education and better access to healthcare, to technologies like ectogenesis and gene therapy that those on both sides of the abortion debate could reasonably support (Simkulet 2020 ).

While many inconsistency arguments focus on unaddressed fetal loss, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) also categorize Chittister's tweet (Schlumpf 2019 ) as an inconsistency argument. She asks whether it makes sense to call OA “pro-life” merely because they oppose abortion, noting all OA seem to be concerned with is ensuring the child is born, not fed, educated, or housed; asserting “That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.”

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that Chittister is using the term “pro-birth” pejoratively, but this is rather uncharitable. The term “pro-life” carries with it a positive emotive context, and when OA present their view as “pro-life,” they may mislead their audience about their position. In contrast, the term “pro-birth” seems to capture the one unifying feature of OA.

Even if Chittister is angry or disappointed that OA misrepresent their position, neglect their moral obligations, or the like… so what? That is how moral judgements work. If you think Φing is wrong, and you see someone Φing, it makes sense to be angry or disappointed. Colgrove et al. speak as though this, and accusations of pro-life hypocrisy are ad hominem attacks on OA; not so. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when one attacks person rather than their argument or view. Inconsistency arguments do not do this; they identify apparent inconsistency within the OA view, and call for change, as Chittister does when she concludes, “We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

Other Beliefs Objection and Response

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) raise three objections to inconsistency arguments. In the first, they contend that inconsistency arguments do not matter because there is a diversity of beliefs among OA, suggesting that no one inconsistency argument undermine them all; “This diversity makes broad accusations of inconsistency problematic.” Following this, one might argue that when an OA is confronted with apparent inconsistency within one view, they can jump ship to another OA view. But moral analysis is not a shell game. If inconsistency arguments identify a problem within even one OA position, they matter; and if they threaten the most widely held OA position, it seems they matter quite a bit.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) suggest that OA may have other beliefs which explain away apparent inconsistency and justify their inaction with regards to spontaneous abortion; for example they ask us to consider someone who both opposes induced abortion and opposes universal healthcare; noting these beliefs would justify rejecting the conclusion that we should adopt universal health care to help address the problem of induced and spontaneous abortion (and suffering and death due to lack of medical care, more broadly). To this, I reply (Simkulet 2021 ):

It is not enough to show that some [OA] have some beliefs that are prima facie at odds with some [inconsistency theorist] proposals; they must show that the current level of apparent indifference that many [OA] show is justified by their other beliefs; and it is not clear what set of other beliefs would be both internally consistent and justify the conclusion that while persons [matter], this right requires very little in the way of sacrifice from anyone but gestational mothers.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) contend that I argue “this [apparent] indifference must be justified by their other beliefs…” continuing “there is an obvious belief that justifies [OA]’s actions and priorities —… [OA] believe that induced abortion is a more important priority than these other issues.” However, this misses the point. As we have seen above, inconsistency theorists do not claim that OA need to treat the problem of spontaneous abortion as equally important to the problem of induced abortion, but rather they must consistently recognize both are tragic.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) continue “induced abortion is the leading preventable cause of death of human beings, as spontaneous abortions are largely unpreventable.” However, they seem to understand “preventable” in an opportunistically narrow way — as preventable with our current technology — to disregard the problem of spontaneous abortion. Amy Berg ( 2017 ) challenges this opportunistically narrow caveat:

But imagine throwing up our hands about a horrible disease… Imagine saying that we should let AIDS, or cancer, or heart disease take its course, rather than expending more effort researching how we might prevent that disease or treat people who contract it. That’s not what we do.

Berg ( 2017 ) notes that just because spontaneous abortion is medically intractable now does not mean it will be in the future, comparing to the AIDs epidemic, “In just a couple of decades, AIDS went from a mysterious underground disease, to a devastating and fatal epidemic, to a relatively manageable chronic condition.”

Perhaps more troublingly, Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) say, “If OAs sincerely believe these claims, then they are acting consistently with their beliefs, and the Other Beliefs Objection succeeds.” Above I have argued that even if one sees one form of abortion as a greater priority than another, this does not justify apparent indifference OAs show with regards to spontaneous abortion.

The real challenge here is “sincerity,” most people have inconsistent beliefs of one form or another and do not realize it; but it is possible that one can realize that they hold two sincere beliefs while also sincerely believing those beliefs to be inconsistent. Consider the problem of evil; one might sincerely believe that God exists, that evil exists, and that God would not allow evil to exist. This belief set is inconsistent, but does not necessarily yield conflicting implications for how we ought to live our lives.

But what if an OA sincerely believes the following?

• All human death is morally tragic.
• Not all human death is morally tragic.
• Propositions (a) and (b) are apparently a contradiction.

It is easy to imagine a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates helps an OA to express position (a) and proposition (b), prompting them to reconsider their position; what’s less easy to imagine is what would happen if an OA freely admits proposition (c), but refuses to reconsider. Moral agency requires some degree of reason-responsiveness, and at least with regards to the topic at hand, it is not clear such an OA would be able to function as a moral agent without rejecting one of these three propositions.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) end their reply as follows “If critics of [OA] want to change the subject – to examining whether the things [OA] believe are true or false, rather than fixating on [OA’s] alleged inconstancy — then [our] essay has succeeded.” Here, they again miss the point of inconsistency arguments, as these arguments do set out to examine whether the things [OA] believe are true or false; if the principle of non-contradiction is true, and OA hold contradictory beliefs, then at least one of their beliefs are false !

Why do they miss this point? I cannot be sure, but at times Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) talk as though inconsistency theorists are uniformly prochoice and hope to convince OA to abandon restrictivism; however, inconsistency arguments might just as easily lead one to believe they ought to do more to prevent spontaneous abortion, address surplus frozen human embryos, and the like. Some inconsistency theorists believe both would lead to less restrictivist opposition to abortion, but this is irrelevant.

What matters is that inconsistency arguments share the same form as the Socratic method, highlighting apparent inconsistency and prompting introspection. Perhaps Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) would also conclude that the Socratic method does not matter , but I hope not.

Other Actions Objection and Response

Colgrove et al.’s second criticism of inconsistency arguments is that they are too specific with their recommendations, suggesting OA can address problems raised by these arguments with different actions than those proposed by inconsistency theorists. For example, rather than adopt and gestate frozen human Embryos, as Lovering ( 2020 ) (and Blackshaw 2021 !) advocate, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) suggest OA might fight “to change public perception of the status of embryos,” or lobby to change IVF laws.

There are three problems here. First, although inconsistency theorists propose a variety of recommendations, these recommendations are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather representative of the kinds of changes an OA would need to adopt to resolve their apparent inconsistency. Remember, inconsistency theorists argue that OA face a dilemma — either (i) do more, or (ii) abandon their opposition to abortion; to say that an OA can perform other actions to address the problem just is to embrace the first horn of the dilemma.

Second, I have pointed out (Simkulet 2021 ) that the other actions Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) propose are not necessarily mutually exclusive; one might both lobby to change IVF laws and adopt and gestate frozen human embryos. The fact that one lobbies to change IVF laws may reduce the number of surplus embryos created and frozen in the future; but it fails to address the needs of currently existing frozen human embryos, highlighting a third problem, that many of Colgrove et al.’s “other actions” are simply not enough. I illustrate (Simkulet 2021 ) this with a case inspired by James Rachels ( 1979 ):

Jack 2 finds himself in a room with a starving child, surplus sandwich in hand. He receives a call… The caller asks, “Will you donate your sandwich?” and he replies, “I’ll do you one better; I’m going to fight to change the public perception of the status of such starving children and raise awareness!” He proceeds to tweet about the starving child, sets up a donation page to help spread awareness, and posts pictures and videos of the child’s deteriorating state. Jack 2 , an expert in such things, narrates as the child slowly dies.

Jack 2 ’s claim to act to raise awareness pokes fun at Colgrove et al.’s ( 2020 ) proposal to protect frozen embryos by fighting to change public perception. Despite his tweeting, it is clear Jack 2 fails morally — he lets a child starve to death when he could have easily saved that child’s life.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) argue that this case is disanalogous to OA (in)action, arguing that OA “live in a world where there are many important issues clamoring for their attention,” and suggest the following case is more analogous:

Jack 100 finds himself in a room with 100 needy children and only enough resources to save 1 child, which he does.

There are three substantive problems with this response. First, the case of Jack 2 is not meant to be analogous to OA inaction (despite poking fun at it); it is meant to demonstrate that merely having other actions is not sufficient to show that inconsistency arguments fail.

Second, the case of Jack 100 begs the question by assuming Jack is saving as many people as possible. However, as Lovering ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw ( 2021 ) seem to show, this simply is not how OA act. Inconsistency theorists argue that OA neglect to address the problems of spontaneous abortion, surplus frozen embryos, and even starving born children. Rather than save all they can, inconsistency theorists contend that OA act like Jack 2 , they do something , but fail to do everything they can.

Third, inconsistency theorists contend that most OA legislation and philosophical literature neglect to discuss the problems of spontaneous abortion, surplus frozen embryos, or starving born children. As such, perhaps the following case would be more analogous:

Jack 300 finds himself in a room with 300 needy children, and he says, “I see 100 needy children, but woe is me I can only save 1,” and so he saves 1 child.

It seems Jack 300 is unreliable; he says he sees 100 needy children in the room, but there are 300 needy children in the room. If we cannot trust Jack 300 to get an accurate headcount, it seems unreasonable to take his word that he is doing all he can.

With the Jack 100 case Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) seem to abandon the other actions objection, instead arguing that OA, like Jack 100 , do the “most good” they can. In short, Blackshaw et al. seem to treat the other actions’ objection as a surrogate for an argument from effective altruism, the view that we should try to do the most good we can. Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) claim that there are many different beliefs about what it means to do the “most good”, and suggest that objectively measuring options might be difficult, as though to claim that it does not matter what other actions OA take as long as they are trying to do the “most good.”

But this will not do. Effective altruism asks us to use reason and empirical evidence to maximize the amount of good we do, and inconsistency arguments seem to show that OA fail to do just this. Like Jack 2 , OA seem to ignore the easily preventable deaths of some with an unearned confidence that their current course of action is sufficient. If OA strive for effective altruism, they should be at least open to the prospect of embracing the first horn of the inconsistency theorist’s dilemma — that maybe should do more. Suppose Jill 100 finds herself in the locked room with Jack 100 , and promises to show Jack 100 how he can save 3 needy children, rather than just 1, with the resources at hand; if Jack 100 seeks to be an effective altruist, should he not at least listen, time permitting?

Effective altruism requires that we guide our choices by reason and evidence; it is not enough to have a sincere belief that one is doing all that one can, the evidence has to back this up. If inconsistency theorists can show that OA are not doing all they can, then they have been succeeding in showing that OA fall short of effective altruism.

Of course, this is exactly what proponents of inconsistency theorists purport to show. Take the aforementioned inconsistency theorist Lovering ( 2020 ) who, like OA restrictivist Blackshaw ( 2021 ), argues that OA should do more than merely fight to change public perception or lobby to change IVF laws, in many cases they ought to also adopt and gestate actually existing frozen human embryos. Of course, not every OA can gestate frozen human embryos — without effective ectogenesis technology and universal healthcare this burden seems to fall on wealthy, female OA alone. However, few OA argue that adopting and gestating these embryos are obligatory for those with the means to do so, and this omission at least appears to be inconsistent with their assertion that all fetuses matter from conception, let alone the position that OA are acting as effective altruists.

Furthermore, Blackshaw ( 2021 ) does not merely side with Lovering regarding OA’s obligations regarding frozen human embryos; he says:

[I]f we regard all human life as equally valuable, we have at least some obligation toward helping reduce deaths from spontaneous abortion where possible. The parable of the Good Samaritan reinforces the notion that Christians do have some responsibility toward this neglected group of human beings, who are also our neighbors.

Here Blackshaw ( 2021 ) contends that these groups — frozen human embryos and those fetuses who die from spontaneous abortion — matter , and that at least some OA — those inconsistency arguments seek to criticize — neglect them. In short, Blackshaw’s ( 2021 ) view seems at odd with the view he expresses in Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ). This is not meant as a criticism of Blackshaw; philosophers revise their views over time, articles are often published long after their initial submission, and many articles are written for blind review which could disincentivize the author from discussing their previous works.

Note, however, that Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) set out to argue that inconsistency arguments do not matter for any OA view and in doing so they bite off far more than they can chew. It is easy to contend that all OA have other possible actions – contra Frankfurt ( 1969 ), many philosophers believe alternate possibilities are required for moral agency and responsibility; but it is quite a different matter to argue that all OA are acting as effective altruists, or even that all OA merely sincerely believe they are acting as effective altruists, especially when confronted with criticism from inconsistency theorists. Blackshaw ( 2021 ) contends inconsistency arguments demonstrate that some OA neglect this group, and this alone seems sufficient to show inconsistency arguments are morally significant.

Hypocrisy Objection and Response

In their third objection, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that inconsistency arguments aim to show that OA are hypocrites, rather than demonstrate inconsistency. I note (Simkulet 2021 ) that Colgrove et al. equivocate between hypocrisy and inconsistency, and that they characterize hypocrisy as a moral failing. Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) say:

[OA] are often described as ’inconsistent’ (hypocrites) in terms of their beliefs, actions and/or priorities…These objections notwithstanding, perhaps some OAs do act in ways that can be shown to be inconsistent with their beliefs. If so, then they are hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a serious charge regarding the character of OAs, but it has nothing to say regarding the validity and consistency of their beliefs—and OAs’ beliefs are surely what critics should primarily be targeting.

In short, it seems that Colgrove et al. mischaracterize inconsistency arguments as ad hominem fallacies; but as we have already seen there is a difference. Inconsistency arguments are simply not aimed at showing OA are hypocrites; only that they have inconsistent beliefs.

In their reply to my previous work (Simkulet 2021 ), Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) say something bizarre “Simkulet offers no empirical evidence regarding [OA’s] supposed lack of interest in relevant issues.” But inconsistency theorists do this ; Lovering ( 2020 ) goes to great lengths to discuss OA who do go out of their way to address these concerns and provides evidence such altruism is rare . Still, it is difficult to take this call for empirical evidence seriously, as neither Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) nor Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) provide such evidence on behalf of OA.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) also challenge my claim (Simkulet 2021 ) that legislation seeking to reduce the creation of surplus IVF embryos would be relatively easy to pass:

Not so. Italy, for example, passed a law in 2004 prohibiting the freezing of embryos, and requiring that all embryos be implanted. (Riezzo et al. 2016 ) The law was swiftly condemned, eventually overturned and, in one case, actions prescribed by the law were declared by the UN to have constituted a ‘human rights violation.’ (Scaffidi 2019 ) Thus, relevant laws would likely face international resistance. So, a central problem Simkulet puts forth as having an ‘easy’ solution does not.

There are two big problems here. First, I propose (Simkulet 2021 ) passing legislation to limit the creation of surplus embryos, not to force all created embryos to be implanted. The difference is obvious, my restrictivist proposal would limit the number of embryos created at a time, so it might take multiple tries before a successful embryo is created.

In contrast, the Italian law seems to place no limits on how many embryos can be created, rather it sets out to force women to undergo invasive, risky medical procedures. IVF has a relatively low chance of success; but imagine more attempts at fertilization succeed than expected; this law would compel physicians to perform, and women to undergo, dangerous medical procedures against their wills. This is hauntingly similar to forcing you to donate bone marrow even at the cost of your life in Boonin’s ( 2002 ) bone marrow case. In short, the Italian law threatens to harm citizens and undermine professional ethics by requiring medically risky and unnecessary interventions without the patient’s consent.

In contrast, my proposal (Simkulet 2021 ) would merely require physicians limit the number of embryos created at one time; not entirely dissimilar from legal limits on how many drugs a physician can prescribe within a period of time. Furthermore, I do not say such legislation would be easy, only “relatively easy” compared to restrictivist legislation – legislation that has far more in common with the Italian law than Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) acknowledge. Both restrictivist legislation and the Italian law seek to undermine women’s rights to control their body and force them to risk their lives for the sake of others. Meanwhile limiting the number of embryos created does not limit one’s reproductive freedom, nor compel them to take on additional medical risk.

Both OA restrictivist legislation and the Italian law seek to limit women’s reproductive choices and force women to take on additional medical risk. Legislation of this kind faces strong opposition from those seeking to protect women’s liberty and reproductive freedom. This kind of legislation also faces strong opposition from biomedical ethicists and medical professionals, as it threatens to violate patient autonomy and the Hippocratic Oath by forcing patient and physician to perform risky medical procedures to benefit a third party, not unlike forcing you to remain attached to the violinist in Thomson’s infamous violinist case (Thomson 1972 ).

In contrast, it is not clear that my proposed legislation (Simkulet 2021 ) to limit the number of embryos that can be created at a single time, would face much opposition at all. Perhaps eugenicists would oppose such legislation for limiting a parent’s right to choose the “best” fetus from the widest possible net, but this does not seem like a widely held position. Perhaps bioethicists and medical professionals would oppose such legislation believing it cumbersome and impractical, but this seems like a much weaker ground for opposition than the autonomy and professional ethics violations epitomized by OA restrictivist legislation and the Italian law.

The Prochoice Other Beliefs Objection

I have argued (Simkulet 2021 ) that if the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections are not successful in showing inconsistency arguments “do not matter,” they threaten to undermine the discipline of ethics. No person has merely one moral belief, so if a diversity of beliefs invalidates moral analysis, ethics is impossible. In all cases in which a person acts morally responsibly (save maybe some interpretations of Frankfurt-style cases (Frankfurt 1969 ), agents have other possible actions, so if merely having other actions was sufficient to disregard moral analysis, ethics fails. Finally, if interpreting moral analysis as an ad hominem attack of hypocrisy was sufficient to rebuff criticism, one can shut down all moral debate merely by being thin-skinned. Here, I have argued that Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) fail to defend these objections, and fail to show that inconsistency arguments do not matter.

However, these are lofty claims about the discipline of ethics; let’s consider something a bit more down to Earth. Consider the following case:

Jacqueline is surprised to find herself pregnant, calling into question her school’s sexual education program. While discussing the matter with her physician, she learns that some people believe embryos are persons from conception! She finds this view intuitive and compelling, and outraged by her school’s poor sexual education program, she endeavors to work tirelessly to change the public perception of the status of embryos. Later, her physician expresses concern about her exertion, recommending that she puts her efforts to educate on hiatus during the pregnancy, fearing the worst. Jacqueline faces a choice — (i) continue with her pregnancy for the next 6 months, losing ground on her fight to change public perception of embryos or (ii) induce abortion (perhaps by hysterectomy) and continue the fight. When speaking with her physician, Jacqueline quotes an influential piece of literature (Colgrove et al. 2020 ), “It may be unclear, however, which option is superior. Many considerations apply to each, and they may be highly individualistic.” She continues “Objectively evaluating options to determine the most appropriate action for a particular belief held by a specific individual seems a very difficult task.” Upon careful and thoughtful reflection, she chooses (ii), judging that it will do the most good. After all, her embryo is but one embryo and while it is tragic to disconnect it from her body and let it die, her tireless efforts might do more good overall.

If the other actions objection shields OA from inconstancy arguments, it seems that it equally shields Jaqueline from restrictivist OA arguments that seek to restrict her freedom. Therefore, it seems that Blackshaw et al. face a dilemma — (i) reject the position that merely having other actions, beliefs, etc. is sufficient to shield a position from criticism, or (ii) abandon their opposition to induced abortion. If (i), then inconsistency arguments matter. Then again, if (ii), then it seems as though no ethical arguments matter.

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Melinda French Gates: The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match.

By Melinda French Gates

Ms. French Gates is a philanthropist and the founder of the charitable organization Pivotal.

Many years ago, I received this piece of advice: “Set your own agenda, or someone else will set it for you.” I’ve carried those words with me ever since.

That’s why, next week, I will leave the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , of which I was a co-founder almost 25 years ago, to open a new chapter in my philanthropy. To begin, I am announcing $1 billion in new spending over the next two years for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.

In nearly 20 years as an advocate for women and girls, I have learned that there will always be people who say it’s not the right time to talk about gender equality. Not if you want to be relevant. Not if you want to be effective with world leaders (most of them men). The second the global agenda gets crowded, women and girls fall off.

It’s frustrating and shortsighted. Decades of research on economics , well-being and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone. We know that economies with women’s full participation have more room to grow. That women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them. That reducing the time women spend in poor health could add as much as $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040.

And yet, around the world, women are seeing a tremendous upsurge in political violence and other threats to their safety, in conflict zones where rape is used as a tool of war, in Afghanistan where the Taliban takeover has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls, in many low-income countries where the number of acutely malnourished pregnant and breastfeeding women is soaring.

In the United States, maternal mortality rates continue to be unconscionable , with Black and Native American mothers at highest risk. Women in 14 states have lost the right to terminate a pregnancy under almost any circumstances. We remain the only advanced economy without any form of national paid family leave. And the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.

Despite the pressing need, only about 2 percent of charitable giving in the United States goes to organizations focused on women and girls, and only about half a percentage point goes to organizations focused on women of color specifically.

When we allow this cause to go so chronically underfunded, we all pay the cost. As shocking as it is to contemplate, my 1-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had.

Over the past few weeks, as part of the $1 billion in new funding I’m committing to these efforts, I have begun directing new grants through my organization, Pivotal, to groups working in the United States to protect the rights of women and advance their power and influence. These include the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home. For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.

I’m also experimenting with novel tactics to bring a wider range of perspectives into philanthropy. Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit. That group — which includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, the athlete and maternal-health advocate Allyson Felix, and an Afghan champion of girls’ education, Shabana Basij-Rasikh — represents a wide range of expertise and experience. I’m eager to see the landscape of funding opportunities through their eyes, and the results their approaches unlock.

In the fall, I will introduce a $250 million initiative focused on improving the mental and physical health of women and girls globally. By issuing an open call to grass-roots organizations beyond the reach of major funders, I hope to lift up groups with personal connections to the issues they work on. People on the front lines should get the attention and investment they deserve, including from me.

As a young woman, I could never have imagined that one day I would be part of an effort like this. Because I have been given this extraordinary opportunity, I am determined to do everything I can to seize it and to set an agenda that helps other women and girls set theirs, too.

Melinda French Gates is a philanthropist and the founder of Pivotal, a charitable, investment and advocacy organization.

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Title: sayself: teaching llms to express confidence with self-reflective rationales.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work elicits confidence from LLMs by direct or self-consistency prompting, or constructing specific datasets for supervised finetuning. The prompting-based approaches have inferior performance, and the training-based approaches are limited to binary or inaccurate group-level confidence estimates. In this work, we present the advanced SaySelf, a training framework that teaches LLMs to express more accurate fine-grained confidence estimates. In addition, beyond the confidence scores, SaySelf initiates the process of directing LLMs to produce self-reflective rationales that clearly identify gaps in their parametric knowledge and explain their uncertainty. This is achieved by using an LLM to automatically summarize the uncertainties in specific knowledge via natural language. The summarization is based on the analysis of the inconsistency in multiple sampled reasoning chains, and the resulting data is utilized for supervised fine-tuning. Moreover, we utilize reinforcement learning with a meticulously crafted reward function to calibrate the confidence estimates, motivating LLMs to deliver accurate, high-confidence predictions and to penalize overconfidence in erroneous outputs. Experimental results in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SaySelf in reducing the confidence calibration error and maintaining the task performance. We show that the generated self-reflective rationales are reasonable and can further contribute to the calibration. The code is made public at \url{ this https URL }.

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• America’s Most Powerful Pollster Has Some Doubts

When Nate Cohn releases a poll, people pay attention. Cohn, who created and oversees the New York Times –Siena College poll, is perhaps alone among peers in his capability to drive a narrative with proprietary data. For example, in November 2023, NYT-Siena polls that found President Biden trailing Donald Trump in several swing states set off a (familiar) cycle of Democratic anxiety and recriminations about Biden’s prospects that continues to the present moment. Cohn is highly regarded in the field — his sophisticated methods and high transparency levels merit FiveThirtyEight’s highest rating , and his 2022 polls were uncannily accurate . But he is hardly infallible: Among other things, the NYT-Siena surveys in 2016 and 2020, like many others, significantly underestimated Donald Trump’s strength in swing states. Last week, I spoke with Cohn about the unusual elements of the Biden vs. Trump 2024 rematch , why we still don’t know what went wrong with 2020 polling, and whether the New York Times covers its own polls appropriately. (Our conversation took place hours before Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 charges, which, Cohn later wrote , could provide a boost for Biden among key voters he’s been struggling with.)

Most polls, including yours, have Trump currently leading in the important swing states. I want to start with the question of how predictive polls are at this point in the election cycle, because I’ve seen various theories on that. And I’m wondering if they’re more predictive this far out than they used to be, since people’s political views are so entrenched now. We don’t see huge swings like we did in the Dukakis vs. Bush days, for example. The short answer is that polls at this stage are not typically extraordinarily predictive of the final outcome, but as you mentioned, they’ve become more accurate in recent decades. American politics is more polarized, so there are fewer swing voters. Voters know a lot more about the candidates in recent cycles than they have in the past. We’ve had a lot of well-known candidates like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump who aren’t unknown like Michael Dukakis was in 1988.

There are other things that we  see in the data nowadays that suggest that the polls are less volatile than they used to be. For instance, Michael Dukakis built that tremendous lead in the summer of 1988 after the Democratic convention that year. It was pretty common for candidates to come out of a convention enjoying a huge double-digit bounce, and we just don’t see things like that happen anymore. The catch is that our elections are much closer than they used to be. So even though the polls at this stage may be more quote-on-quote predictive than they were 20 or 30 years ago, because the range of election outcomes has also narrowed as well, it’s not like now we know who’s going to win. And that’s especially true in this race, where the candidates are, as you know, fairly close in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Plus, there weren’t real primaries this time around, and it doesn’t really feel like there’s been the usual election slog yet — just a creeping sense of dread among Americans that it’s going to be the same two guys. Yeah. This is pretty subjective, but I don’t really feel like this campaign is underway yet.

I agree. You were early to mark one of the major polling story lines of this election , which is the split that’s showing up in polling between likely voters and registered voters. Democrats are doing quite well among the first group, made up of enthusiastic voters who cast ballots regularly, and less well among the second group, who vote irregularly. Every poll seems to show this split — how confident are you at this point that it’s actually happening? When we’re talking about polling, saying something like “actually happening” is always hard. Polls are fuzzy things, and they are inherently imperfect, so even when all the polls agree on something, it’s hard to ever be 100 percent sure it’s real. But in this particular case, as far as I’m aware, all of the evidence suggests that something like this story is real. We can debate about the degrees, we can debate about whether it’ll last until November, but I don’t think that there’s very much room to disagree with the notion that the Democrats are showing a lot of strength among the most regular and highly engaged voters, and Joe Biden in particular is extremely weak among less engaged voters, and in particular less engaged Democrats.

Do you have any theories as to why it’s playing out this way? That seems to be the big question right now. I think there are two broad theories. One is that it’s a matter of engagement, that these people aren’t paying close attention, that if they did — or when they do — that they will end up behaving like more highly engaged voters of the same demographic profile. So in this theory, a Black voter who’s paying attention is for Biden and one who’s not paying attention is ambivalent. And once they pay attention, they’ll support Biden. You can come up with evidence to support that theory.

You could also look at their evaluations of the economy. Less engaged Democrats are much more likely to say the economy is poor than highly engaged Democrats. That may reflect actual factual knowledge about the unemployment rate, or how the stock market is doing, and so on. You can posit that some of these voters, as they tune in, and as the campaign heats up, will glean the same information the highly engaged voters already have, and they’ll swing Biden’s way.

The second theory is that it’s not just about engagement, it’s that these are fundamentally different kinds of voters who will never be as engaged as someone who watches MSNBC every night. And as a consequence of their relative lack of knowledge of American politics, of policy and economics, they’re much less likely to be voting on the issues. They’re less likely to think about abortion or democracy and instead vote on character and which candidate looks strong or weak. They’re more likely to want a candidate who supports change, just because they’re not happy with the status quo, and they’re not going to make the rational calculation that, “Oh, I’m not happy, but I think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and therefore, I’ll vote for Joe Biden, even though I don’t like him.” Those just aren’t the kinds of calculations that less engaged voters make. And it’s worth noting that we know that the people who didn’t vote in recent elections, almost by definition, are not the ones who were motivated to stop Donald Trump last time. If they were, they would have voted. So we know that this is a group of people that just can’t be that upset about Donald Trump. And if that’s true, then Joe Biden’s problem is going to be really deep.

That group of voters, who aren’t paying attention to the news and are voting on things like character, is always enormous. The difference for Democrats, though, is that there’s this gap between likely and not-so-likely voters that I don’t think existed even four years ago. So what changed? Donald Trump has never been popular. He’s still not popular . His unfavorability rating is just as high today as it was heading into Election Day 2020. This group of disengaged voters doesn’t like Donald Trump and never did. What’s changed, to my mind, is that Joe Biden went from being a broadly appealing person — they didn’t necessarily love him, they didn’t necessarily even like him, but he was acceptable — to someone who many voters do not find acceptable anymore.

They think his stewardship of the economy is terrible , and they think he’s simply too old to be president and that he no longer passes some sort of basic visual gut check for millions of Americans. And Biden is trying to still win those voters on a pretty sophisticated argument, frankly, about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy and about his opposition to abortion rights. It’s an issue-based appeal that I think very naturally would resonate among those who pay close attention to politics, who have well-informed opinions on the issues, and would naturally not resonate so well with those who don’t.

And then for good measure, we have the economy looming over this whole picture. Many less engaged voters are less likely to have college degrees, and they are less likely to make $100,000 a year. Donald Trump in 2020 and 2016 was seen as the best candidate on the economy, and now that issue matters much more for voters, because they say the economy is bad.

It doesn’t sound like you think that much of Biden’s current strategy in going after these voters. And his team’s general attitude toward negative polls , at least publicly, is “They’re not right.” Do you think their outreach strategy reflects a denial of the reality they’re up against? I’m not sure whether it reflects reality denial or not. I think that it may reflect the hand they have to play. Voters don’t think Joe Biden has done a good job, and they don’t think the economy’s especially good. And many of the arguments that Democrats would traditionally make against the Republican, like, “Oh, they’re going to help the rich and not the working class,” are harder to make against Donald Trump than they were against Mitt Romney in 2012. The arguments that the Democrats have at their disposal that are strongest, and that might well win them the election in the end, are about democracy and abortion. There just aren’t very many other places where they can fight.

In other words, trying to convince people that the economy is strong, which it is on paper, is a losing battle. Well, I’m not saying they shouldn’t try and do more in that space, and I can’t prescribe what the optimal economic message is for Biden. I don’t know if it’s to say that the economy is good, and try and convince people that it’s not as bad as they think: “Look at these great stats.” I don’t know if it’s to acknowledge that things are bad, but say things are getting better. I don’t know if it’s to say that Donald Trump would make it worse. I’m not going to speculate about what would do best on the economy. I’m just saying that, in terms of how Joe Biden can actually try to win this election, as opposed to playing defense, clearly abortion and democracy are two powerful arguments, and they may be their best arguments. If they have another argument that has the potential to resonate a little more broadly with voters, in particular those concerned about pocketbook issues, I haven’t seen anyone floating it.

Abortion and democracy have worked very well for Democratic candidates in the last two to four years. But we’re seeing that state Democratic candidates are outrunning Biden right now, which also ties into the theory that is really just about the president and less about Trump.  Yeah. The thing that the Democratic Senate numbers and other numbers down ballot remind us of is that Biden’s weakness right now is among voters who usually vote for Democratic candidates, and maybe even people who don’t usually need to think too hard about who they’re going to vote for. Maybe they’re registered as Democrats and they come from demographic groups that typically vote Democratic. And there are lots of reasons why people are Democrats. For some, it’s because of their views on a host of policy issues. Others are from identity groups that bind them in different ways toward the Democrats, like as a union worker or an African American. And other people support the Democrats out of perceived self-interest — they might think that Democrats are going to protect their Medicare and Social Security, or that they’re good for working people, and so on.

And I think that latter group, that group of people who have traditionally supported the Democrats on pocketbook-issue grounds, might well be the heart of Biden’s problem here. It explains, to my satisfaction at least, why the numbers are so unique at the presidential level. Because Democrats aren’t being weighed down by Biden’s economic stewardship, it seems, and similarly, other Republicans don’t have Trump’s unique brand name on economic management.

He’s a businessman, as voters like to remind us. Biden has a problem with Black and Hispanic voters in particular right now, as you alluded to. How much does that overlap with the disengaged-voter problem? Is it basically the same problem, or are these two distinct issues?  That’s a good question. They’re certainly related, but it is worth noting that Biden is holding up among well-engaged, high-frequency Black voters. He’s also holding up among Hispanic midterm voters in our poll. We’re talking about small groups, and now we’re looking at the subset of small groups that don’t regularly vote. So there’s an extra layer, I think, of uncertainty around exactly where Biden’s weakness among Black and Hispanic voters lies. But it’s conceivably consistent that most of his weakness among Black and Latino voters is among relatively disengaged Black and Latino voters. And if that’s true, it carries some interesting possibilities. If it’s a low-turnout election, maybe you end up with the Black and Latino share of the electorate declining, but then Biden does better than the polls show among Black and Hispanic voters. Which wouldn’t necessarily net out any differently in the top-line poll result, because many of these Black and Latino voters staying home are still, on-net, Biden voters. They may not be as good for Democrats as in the past, but they still lean Democratic. And so you could get the sort of scenario where the final results demographically look considerably more normal, but the turnout of Black and Latino voters is quite low. I think that’s at least imaginable.

Which is one reason Democrats may want lower turnout for once — another strange thing about this election.  The funny thing about turnout is it’s not just the level — it’s who is voting and staying at home. If you get low turnout and the people who show up are the people who showed up in the midterms, that may be fine. If you get high turnout and the increase is coming out of Black and Latino voters, that could be good for Biden, but if it’s coming out of white working-class voters, it wouldn’t be. And so on.

Pivoting a bit to polling more generally: The New York Times– Siena polls were dead-on in 2022 and also extremely accurate in 2018. They were considerably less accurate in 2016 and 2020, underestimating Trump support in swing states in those years. I remember, after 2020, you were trying to understand what had happened . Four years later, what is your thesis about why your surveys were so off 2020 yet so good two years later?  The truth is that there is not an excellent explanation for what went wrong in 2020. And I should note that I didn’t feel like this was true after 2016. After 2016, there was no shortage of plausible explanations for why the polls had underestimated Donald Trump, which were backed by hard evidence. We knew that the polls in that cycle were probably underestimating the number of people with a college degree. We thought that undecided voters were prone to switching, and there was real evidence that you could look at after the election that suggested that this could explain why most of why the polls underestimated Donald Trump, and therefore, why we could be pretty confident that we could do well in the future, provided that we represented people without a college degree in the numbers that we wish we had.

As a consequence, we went out and we did 100 polls in 2018. That was a reflection of the level of confidence that we had, that despite what we saw in 2016, that there were real credible paths to being accurate in the future, and that we didn’t think it represented some sort of lasting issue. And I can’t say the same thing after 2020. There are, at the end of the day, no really strong theories backed by hard evidence that explain why the polls were wrong in 2020 and offered us a path to doing something different, or, alternately, to be sure that it wouldn’t happen next time.

In polling, when you can’t come up with a strong theory to explain what went wrong, you usually fall back on this diagnosis of exclusion — nonresponse bias. There’s this idea that if everything we did looks right, but we didn’t get the answer we wish we did, there must be some reason why the people who backed Donald Trump were still underrepresented in our surveys, and it was probably just that they’re less likely to respond than demographically similar Biden voters. So even if, say, you had the right number of white working-class voters, you didn’t have the right number of white working-class Trump voters.

I don’t think that’s what happened in 2016. I think in 2016, if you had the right number of white voters without a degree, you would’ve come way closer to the result than you would’ve in 2020. So there’s something extra going on in 2020 that’s still not fully explained. One possibility, and I think this is the most optimistic one for the survey industry, is that it’s about COVID , that all these liberals were staying home and taking polls, while Republicans were out living their lives. We know that the coronavirus had different effects on the behavior of Democrats and Republicans — we can see that in the vaccine numbers. Why couldn’t it be the case that we were just systematically getting more people who were concerned about COVID, who were staying indoors, and consequently, that our polls had too many Biden voters controlling for all the demographic traits we try to adjust for?

Yeah, you’ve said that your numbers were more accurate in 2019. The 2019 polls were great, and our 2022 polls were as well. But it’s also worth noting that there are more pessimistic possibilities as well. Perhaps Trump voters are just so distrustful of the media and institutions that they’re just systematically less likely to respond than Biden voters among the same demographic group — that’s a real possibility too.

Not only is it that Trump supporters are less likely to respond to surveys than Biden supporters, but they’re overwhelmingly concentrated among the kinds of people who don’t show up in midterm elections. That’s another theory that I think you could argue that would sort of square all of the various data points. I think that’s conceivable. One interesting thing I could note in this respect is that our polls right now show Donald Trump doing really well among disengaged voters. That was the whole start of this conversation. That wasn’t true in 2020. Is it possible that Trump was similarly strong among these voters in 2020, and that’s who we were missing? I don’t know. I don’t know that that’s not true. The 2020 polling was so bad that it’s hard to rule out anything about it. But it’s just an example of how the introduction of this uncertainty about the way polls are handling these presidential-year voters makes it harder to be confident in what we’re measuring sometimes.

I appreciate the transparency and lack of confidence. It goes to this whole larger discussion about polling that makes people crazy, especially in the internet era. I feel like every four years, there’s this ongoing and kind of tiresome debate where someone asserts that polling is fundamentally broken, and then the pollsters respond, “Actually, the polling errors aren’t as bad 40 years ago.” Are you tired of that conversation? And are people expecting too much here? This is an unclear question.  It is an unclear question. I sympathize with all of the various emotions that went into it, though. In some respects, it’s a miracle how good polling is. It is so hard to talk to people, and the response rates of telephone surveys can be one percent. And I know that I just spent all this time talking about how bad the 2020 polls were, and they’re bad by the standards that we need in our era of fairly close and competitive elections. But it is true that they weren’t horrible for many purposes. The polls overestimated Joe Biden nationwide, by about four points on the margin, which is to say the difference between Trump and Biden. So Biden was at plus eight and a half, as opposed to Biden plus four and a half. But that’s two points off on the percentage for the two candidates: Biden at 52 percent as opposed to 54 percent. A two-point difference on 95 percent of questions that we ask is entirely tolerable.

Does it make a difference whether 72 or 74 percent of Americans think Biden is just too old to be an effective president? That’s substantively the same. So polls are actually still pretty darn good for lots of things, but they are inherently imprecise. And we live in this era of close elections, where the level of precision that polls offer may not be sufficient to tell, at least to readers, what they really want to know, which is just: Who’s going to win? And in 1988, and in 1984, and in 1996, the polls could tell you who was going to win, because Reagan and Bush were up double digits in the final month of the race. And frankly, if Trump is up double digits in the final month of this race, he’s probably going to win. But the odds are that our polls will not show him with such a large lead — they don’t do so now — and consequently, we’ll go into Election Day knowing full well that either candidate will probably win.

The other difference now is that there’s the internet, and every piece of data is digested and spit out so quickly. The panic that has greeted your recent polls from Democrats, pundits, and otherwise — and I include myself here — is quite something. Does it always surprise you how exercised people get?  Yeah. I remember our November 2019 polls , which showed Biden narrowly ahead and Elizabeth Warren losing.

That one helped tank Warren’s campaign, I think, because she was doing so poorly compared to everyone else. I did not think that Elizabeth Warren was on a path to win personally, but I certainly did not help her. Of all the polls we’ve ever done, I feel like that’s the one where the response was just completely beyond anything that I had expected, and maybe that was naïve of me. But it is extraordinary how much attention the polls get. In some sense, it’s merited. If you look at how our polls have done compared to others, it really is pretty remarkable how well we’ve done in a way that doesn’t seem sustainable. It’s hard to believe, over the long run, that if you average our poll against all other polls that we’re going to win, but it’s true up to this point.

But I think that it really reflects much more people’s interest in who’s going to win the election, not some considered view of just how much better our poll is or something. And I’m not sure that is healthy. As we said at the beginning, (a) we’re still six months out, and (b) even at the end of the race, it’ll probably be so close that either candidate can win. People are obsessed with our polls, and not just our polls, but all the polls, in hopes that we will be able to answer a question that, in all likelihood, we can’t. And maybe even worse than that: People sometimes do think we’re answering that question even when we’re not, and we can’t.

I also just wonder what the alternative is. There’s no better method of analyzing what’s happening in the election, I think. There’s no real substitute.

I guess we could have fewer polls, or none at all. If we didn’t have polls, I think we know what we would get. We would get information based on partisan polls, filtered through the campaigns and campaign committees and party committees and so on, and they would tell us a similar story. Or it would be based on on-the-ground reporting. I actually think that economics coverage is probably the best analogy to what the world without polls would look like. Like politics, economics is fundamentally a social-science problem. Economics coverage solves this problem through survey research. The jobs report is a poll.

I didn’t quite realize that, actually. The jobs report is a great poll; it’s a Census-funded poll, but it’s a poll. We don’t have the equivalent of that in politics. There is no federally funded political survey. And so we basically are stepping in as the New York Times , and other media organizations do the same, to provide what the government provides in economics. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to talk about the economy without having a jobs report. And, similarly, it’s very hard to understand how we would talk about the electorate without surveys.

It would probably be the old cliché about yard signs — anecdotal stuff. Yeah. And you can imagine the same thing for the economy perhaps, that people would go and talk to the person running some shop on Main Street in suburban New York somewhere, and then someone would have a different conflicting report from someone running a different kind of shop in New Mexico, and it would be a total mess. We wouldn’t have any idea.

This all plays into something I’m also curious about, which is the New York Times ’ treatment of your polls. You started the poll in 2016. And since then, the paper has made them into more and more of an event, where the readers get a write-up of the actual findings with the top-line numbers, which gets sent out as a “breaking news” alert. And then there’s all these follow-up articles for five, seven days afterward reporting on the poll’s sub-findings, some of them written by you, some by others. And then the numbers from the poll are cited again and again in more articles by Times reporters. I’ve always been impressed about how careful you are in your write-ups to say, “Hey, here are all the caveats. Here’s what I found. Here’s how we did it. And it might be wrong.” But I sometimes wonder about the Times ’ presentation of all this stuff, as if it’s like, “Here’s the news.” And it’s actually polls.  Yeah. There’s a real tension between the thing I just told you, which is that polling is this inherently imprecise instrument — probably better than anything else, but still imperfect — and an organization like the New York Times , which is accustomed to writing up its articles as its objective truth.

Exactly. And a New York Times –Siena is not an objective truth, it’s not the Census. And by the way, the Census in the jobs report isn’t objective truth either — they revise them every month.

But it’s not in that tier of survey, either. That’s a really hard needle to thread. And we’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years to try and thread the needle of “How do we both relay what we think is the best information that probably exists on the electorate and also make it clear to people that it could be wrong, that it’s subject to all these sources of error?”

And there are lots of things that we’ve done in this space that I think were somewhat promising. We have tried to show the margins of error. Like, even this most recent poll, you could see that there was a little band around each of the numbers that was supposed to indicate that there’s this fuzziness around our estimates. We’ve done something called “live polling” before, where we showed people every call we made and every response. As a consequence, people can see that most people weren’t responding, which in some way communicated the imperfection of it, even in the moment.

We try to report different turnout scenarios. All of these things — they don’t solve the ultimate problem, which is that we still have to figure out how to write up a New York Times survey result for the public, even though we know it’s not perfect. That’s a really hard problem that I don’t think we’ve had luck in solving. At the same time, we do have to write it up. These polls are really expensive, they do contain a wealth of information, and very little of what we’ve found we couldn’t print. I’m not saying that every article is perfect, and I know sometimes it’s a weeklong event, but that seventh article that comes out usually still contains useful information that we couldn’t have realistically gotten after the first story.

No, I’m not saying it’s padded out in that way — more what you pointed out at the top, that there’s just fundamental tension between the Times as a news organ and its putting out the poll in the first place, even though it may be the best one. Yeah. For informational purposes, the findings are essentially true. When we blare that voters think Biden is too old to be president , that’s a finding that’s so far outside of any margin of error that we can be reasonably confident in it. I don’t know whether, if we have an absolutely perfect poll, like literal truth for a moment and we could basically conduct an election today, or simulate an election — I don’t know Donald Trump would be ahead or behind in the three midwestern battleground sites, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that are reasonably close in our polling. It’s possible that with such a perfect poll that truly simulated the election, with the exact right people going into the voting room tomorrow, that Biden could take the lead.

I do have reasonable confidence that such a perfect poll, however, would contain a whole lot of very bad news for Joe Biden in terms of the public’s assessment of the economy, in terms of what they think about how he’s handling his job as president, favorability ratings, his strength among Black and Latino and young voters.

You can imagine that there could be a case where we put out a poll that says, “X result,” and it’s a news alert, it’s on the front page, it leads the home page, there’s a Daily episode about it. And then the very next day, another reputable poll says the exact opposite, and we then go and try and poll again in a few weeks, and we no longer find that either. That hasn’t happened this cycle. And that reflects, I think, that the way our articles are framed appreciates that we have to rely most heavily on the findings that are robust and resilient to survey error. There’s some element that we can’t escape, like who’s up or down in our poll, and that’s really hard. We really could do a poll again and now find Biden had a lead in Pennsylvania. That’s conceivable.

And then the news cycle would be totally different. It’d be like, “Oh, he’s back.”  Exactly. And one reason we do these six state battleground polls is because they offer extra layers of robustness to the overall finding. One state poll can bounce one way, but all six of them are a lot less likely to move around.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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