Why do describe your response to point two as suggesting a truly secular argument? I understand the difficulty of drawing lines regarding fetal development, but it seems to me that in order to make a case against abortion, at some point you have to make a leap and say “and killing unborn babies is wrong.” How does that fit into your definition of secularism?

While I would quibble with the use of the word “wrong” (which is inherently a moral evaluation) and substitute “undesirable”, I’ll stipulate that, given the questioner, such quibbles are mostly pedantry on my part. I consider my suggested argument to be “strictly secular” because it does not invoke any absolute right or wrong as received from a deity but rather bases its argument on existing legal precedents and scientific knowledge. In other words, rather than simply saying, “killing babies is wrong” (a moral statement that, while I agree with it, largely depends on some form of religious or spiritual sentiment) the argument says, “a zygote is sufficiently likely to develop into a fetus and eventually into a healthy baby that it is only logical to afford a zygote similar protection under the law as would be given to persons already born.”

We don’t allow parents to kill their own one-year-old babies. Why not? It wouldn’t seem to cause any mass disruption in society, because one-year-olds would not perceive that other parents are killing their babies, so it wouldn’t cause any panic or fear in the potential victims. Is there a secular reason why we don’t allow infanticide by a child’s own parents?

Pragmatism. At some point there must be a demarcation between the age at which, if murder were allowed, there would be mass disruption of society. For example, it seems very clear to me that a child who grew up knowing that his or her parents could kill him could suffer some fairly severe psychological damage. The age at which a child would be sufficiently mentally aware of such things (and therefore able to be damaged psychologically by them) would naturally vary from child to child making a hard line of demarcation difficult. Birth is a well-defined and documented point that can effectively serve as this demarcation point. For pragmatic reasons one can argue that it is rational to adopt birth as the point at which a person “becomes a person” and is therefore granted protection under the law.

This argument can actually work further in favor of restricting abortion as one could say that, at the time when this standard came into wide use, there was a lack of ability to determine when conception occurred and a lack of understanding of the fetal development process. As we now know more about the process and are able to understand the concept of conception and the processes that surround it, one can argue that it is rational to change the demarcation point from birth to conception. In this case the revision is based not on any moral principle but on a revision in scientific knowledge.

Question one. Why do describe your response to point two as suggesting a truly secular argument? I understand the difficulty of drawing lines regarding fetal development, but it seems to me that in order to make a case against abortion, at some point you have to make a leap and say “and killing unborn babies is wrong.” How does that fit into your definition of secularism?

Question two. We don’t allow parents to kill their own one-year-old babies. Why not? It wouldn’t seem to cause any mass disruption in society, because one-year-olds would not perceive that other parents are killing their babies, so it wouldn’t cause any panic or fear in the potential victims. Is there a secular reason why we don’t allow infanticide by a child’s own parents?

Actually, that’s incorrect. Murder is not outlawed because it is considered to be morally wrong. Murder is outlawed because the alternative, namely that anyone could kill anyone else at any time without fear of repercussions, would create widespread panic and fear for one’s own safety. Such conditions would be tantamount to anarchy and no modern social structure could possibly survive. It is murder’s immediate destabilizing effect on the social structure that causes it to be outlawed rather than any “moral” attribution.

Abortion causes no similar widespread panic and presents no threat of causing the social structure to disintegrate. This is not a moral judgment, it is an observable empirical fact. In cultures where murder is permitted (or where the government is unable to prevent it) there is a demonstrable decline in societal structure and the ability of citizens to go about their normal lives (e.g. Sudan, Afghanistan, etc). In cultures where abortion is permitted, there is no demonstrable decline in societal structure.

Also, I have not dismissed the anti-abortion position as non-secular. I have dismissed the common anti-abortion arguments as non-secular. I even went so far as to suggest a truly secular argument against abortion in my response to point number two.

You say “from a purely secular viewpoint, the only “need” is to preserve the ability of a society to function and there is no compelling evidence to suggest that the current abortion rate is in any way impairing the ability of society to function.” But this argument simply begs the question: how is it that we want society to function? To what end shall our laws direct the functioning of our society? If you think an important aim of society is preservation of human life, and you think that fetuses count as a form of human life, then it seems pretty rational (in a secular sense) to ban abortion. Indeed, under this standard, society can hardly be said to be “functioning” well at all when it allows millions of innocent lives to be taken every year. The pro-choice crowd values a competing moral principle: freedom of women to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. It is far from clear to me that the moral values underlying the pro-choice position, but not those underlying the pro-life position, constitutes a valid secular argument. Both positions are based on difficult moral judgments, as are most laws we pass.

I’m not saying anything original here about the pro-life or pro-choice positions. All I’m saying is that you can’t summarily dismiss the pro-life position as non-secular. The secular argument and the moral argument about abortion overlap broadly.