Abortion Beyond Morality
When people say “abortion is wrong,” they believe they are saying something deep and decisive. The word “wrong” gets dropped like a hammer, as though it carries the weight of cosmic law. But if you press on it even slightly, the hammer turns out to be made of foam.
Most abortion debates assume that morality is real and that our task is to figure out which side morality supports. Pro-lifers appeal to sanctity, pro-choicers appeal to autonomy, and both sides claim the moral high ground. But what if the ground itself is an illusion? What if moral language never meant what we thought it meant in the first place?
This is not a call to despair, and it is not an attempt to hide behind relativism. The point is sharper than that. I am suggesting that when we use words like “wrong,” “right,” “permissible,” or “impermissible,” we are not making profound claims about the universe. We are disguising our preferences and goals in mystical vocabulary. We think we are making moral judgments, when in reality we are only dressing up “if/then” statements.
If that is true, then the abortion debate looks very different. It means abortion does not need to be justified as morally permissible, because the very concept of moral permissibility is empty. It means abortion defaults to permissible, not because of a moral triumph, but because no one has ever managed to prove a prohibition that survives serious scrutiny.
That conclusion is provocative enough on its own. But the real weight of the argument is in what comes next: what morality actually is, why it collapses into absurdity, and how that absurdity reframes not only abortion but every so-called moral debate humans insist on having.
If you want the full version, with the breakdown of why moral language is incoherent, why pro-choice is not just a position but the null hypothesis, and why every interlocutor has to prove their framework is coherent before it can even pretend to be correct, the complete essay is available on The Extinction Files.
Once you see morality for what it really is, you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, the abortion debate will never look the same.
For more, view the rest of this post.
