The Evolutionary Psychology of Abortion Policy

And what we can learn about human nature from the abortion debate.

Political progressives tell a compelling story about why restrictions on abortion are an affront to women’s bodily autonomy. Social conservatives tell a compelling story about why abortion is equivalent to the murder of a child and is therefore an affront to the sacredness of life. I don’t believe either of these stories. I don’t believe progressives when they tell stories about bodily autonomy. I don’t believe social conservatives when they tell stories about the sanctity of life. This is not to say that I think either group is lying about what they believe. Instead, I think people are often driven by motivations that aren’t apparent to anybody, especially themselves.

This post isn’t really about abortion. I want to use abortion and other reproduction-related policy issues to make a wider point about human nature. When human beings give moral reasons for their actions, these reasons are almost always a mask for totally amoral underlying motivations. If we take a naturalistic, evolutionary view of human psychology then it can’t be any other way. “Sanctity of life” and “bodily autonomy” are abstractions that don’t have anything to do with promoting one’s own evolutionary interests. When people attribute moral motivations like these to themselves or others, the moral motivations are almost always a mask for more biologically plausible motivations.

In the case of abortion and other reproductive issues, there is compelling evidence that people on both sides of the political aisle are unconsciously trying to create a world that caters to their particular reproductive strategy. For example, it turns out that opinions on abortion can be predicted by a person’s sexual and reproductive life. On average, politically progressive men and women have more non-marital sex and have fewer children later on in life. Many progressives want to be able to have non-reproductive sex early in life while putting off having children until their 30s or 40s. This lifestyle would be disrupted without easy access to contraception and abortion. This lifestyle is also easier to achieve in a more sexually unrestricted society.

On the other hand, socially conservative men and women are more likely to get married early in life and have lots of children with one partner. This strategy would be disrupted by a more “sexually open” society (which offers more opportunities for infidelity and abandonment) and thus conservatives are incentivized to make society as sexually restricted as possible. Any policy that could help to minimize the consequences of non-reproductive sex should therefore be opposed by social conservatives.

In their 2014 book “The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It” Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban discussed the possibility that opinions on abortion were driven by reproductive strategies.¹

These authors split people up into two groups they call “Freewheelers” and “Ring-bearers”. These groups refer to those who have more sexual partners and get married later in life (freewheelers) and those who have fewer sexual partners and get married earlier in life (ring-bearers). I’ll adopt these terms for the purpose of this post. 

As Weeden and Kurzban point out, the most liberal/left Americans are those with a “freewheeling” lifestyle, meaning they are non-religious, have higher levels of education, and have more lifetime sexual partners:

By far the most liberal profile comes from… people who are less religious, have Freewheeler lifestyles, and have at least a modest amount of education. For this group, eight in ten say premarital sex is not wrong at all; nine in ten think pornography should be legally available to adults; around three-quarters support legal abortion in every circumstance; almost eight in ten think teens should have access to birth control even when their parents disagree; and at least three-quarters support marijuana legalization. (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014 ch. 4)

Freewheelers will have an easier time pursuing their lifestyle in a sexually unrestricted society with easy access to contraception and abortion. Ring-bearers, on the other hand, have an interest in making the freewheeling lifestyle as unavailable and costly as possible. This is because being a successful ring-bearer of either sex requires solving a couple of problems:

1. In the first place, ring-bearers must find a suitable partner early in life to marry. Because chastity is valued by ring-bearing men, ring-bearer women may want to wait until marriage to have sex with their partner because doing so signals that they are more likely to be faithful. This can pose a problem, however, if ring-bearing women have to compete for the attention of men with freewheeling women who are willing to offer sex earlier in a relationship. Ring-bearing women therefore have an interest in reducing the number of freewheeling women in their social milieu. Ring-bearing men, on the other hand, typically don’t want to marry women with extensive sexual histories (as this is a well-known predictor of infidelity), so finding a suitable partner will be more difficult in a society with a higher percentage of freewheeling women. Ring-bearing men and women therefore have an interest in keeping a society sexually restricted so that they are more likely to find suitable partners early in life. 

2. When they do find a partner, reducing the risk of infidelity and/or abandonment is a serious problem for ring-bearing men and women. For ring-bearing men, investing significant resources in their children early in life is only worth it if they can be very sure that the children are actually their own. Certainty of paternity is easier to achieve in a society that discourages a freewheeling lifestyle. If fewer people are having extra-marital sex in general, you can be more confident that your own partner is going to be faithful. For ring-bearing women, having children early in life makes them extremely vulnerable if their partner decides to abandon them for any reason. Social restrictions on divorce and/or extramarital affairs protect women from being abandoned after having children. Government interventions, including child/spousal support, have significantly reduced this risk in the modern world. 

Finding and keeping suitable partners early in life will be easier for ring-bearers in a society that makes the freewheeling lifestyle more costly. Legalized abortion clearly reduces the risk associated with non-marital sex and should therefore be opposed by ring-bearers.

Should we believe the stories that ring-bearers and freewheelers use to justify their policy preferences? Is the ring-bearers’ opposition to abortion and contraception really motivated by a deep-seated commitment to the sanctity of life? Is the freewheelers’ pro-choice attitude truly driven by a commitment to bodily autonomy? Jonathan Haidt’s famous 2001 paper “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment” provides evidence that moral judgements often have little to do with the reasons we give to justify those judgements. Instead, people have emotional reactions to moral dilemmas and seek out rational justifications after the fact. We should not expect moral judgements about abortion and contraception to be any different. Many people have strong emotional reactions to policies on the availability of abortion and contraception. We tell stories to justify these reactions, but those stories are unlikely to align with any biologically plausible motivation.

The stories told by ring-bearers and freewheelers are just that — stories used for justification, and not reflections of real underlying motivations. Again, this is not to say that either party is consciously lying. Social conservatives genuinely believe in the sanctity of life just as progressives genuinely believe in the importance of bodily autonomy. These beliefs are genuine in the sense that they need not involve any conscious deception on the part of the believer. Nevertheless, the stated reasons people give for opposing or favoring legalized abortion are post-hoc rationalizations rather than reflections of real underlying motivations. 

If abortion policy was really about the sanctity of life vs. bodily autonomy, then opinions about abortion should have little to no correlation with people’s sexual habits. But that’s not the case. Instead, the strong opinions people have on the availability of abortion and contraception are more plausibly explained by the fact that ring-bearers and freewheelers thrive in different kinds of societies. 

Each side of the debate likes to tell stories about themselves which reinforce their sense of righteous indignation. The pro-life ring-bearers tell themselves that they are fighting against the mass slaughter of unborn babies. What could be more righteous than that?

Let’s begin by setting the stage. It is a bloody stage indeed. It is a stage that has seen the slaughter of 60 million human children since Roe v. Wade. Why do some of us find this slaughter to be unthinkable and an injustice? Well, because every single one of those 60 million were innocent and defenseless human beings.

— conservative pundit Matt Walsh

Likewise, the pro-choice freewheelers tell themselves that they are fighting against an oppressive group of religious fanatics who want to exert undue control over women’s bodies, putting women at risk and forcing them to give birth to children against their will (e.g., the progressive-coded series “The Handmaid’s Tale”).

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is a freewheeler’s nightmare.

Each of these stories appeals to deep-seated moral intuitions that nearly everyone shares. Almost nobody is in favor of the wanton slaughter of innocent babies. Likewise, most people do not want other people telling them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies. Depending on how the issue is framed, everybody has a compelling story to tell themselves.

The truth is that none of us are as morally righteous as we would like to believe. Instead, each of us is trying to advance our interests in the world, and sometimes it’s advantageous to advance our interests using moral rhetoric that disguises our real motivations, even to ourselves. If this explanation is correct, it means that you are (probably) not as morally righteous as you think you are and your political enemies are (probably) not as stupid and evil as you think they are. 

In this post I used the example of abortion and other reproductive issues to make a point about morality in general. Any time somebody gives a righteous-sounding explanation for why they support a particular policy, that explanation is most likely bullshit. Everybody is pursuing their evolved interests. Moral language (e.g., the language of rights, sacredness, or purity) is a tool that we sometimes use to pursue our evolved interests. Recognizing this fact doesn’t mean that we need to collapse into moral relativism. This view of morality leaves me with no hang ups about condemning murder, theft, and rape even though my disdain for these actions is the result of evolved, relatively self-serving preferences.

Recognizing that morality is an evolved psychological adaptation doesn’t lead to moral relativism because we can still imagine the kind of society we would like ourselves or our progeny to live in and work to create policies that will lead to that kind of society. Ring-bearers and freewheelers will always have conflicting interests regarding how sexually restrictive a society ought to be. Both groups will always try to advance those interests through policy.

Ring-bearers will attempt to make a freewheeling lifestyle more difficult to achieve by (among other policies) criminalizing abortion and attempting to restrict the availability of contraception. In some parts of Africa and the Middle East, men and women are barely allowed to interact with each other outside of the home while women are forced to wear full-body covers and endure female genital mutilation to reduce the pleasure of sex (with the ultimate goal of reducing the likelihood of infidelity). This is ring-bearer morality taken to the extreme. Freewheelers, on the other hand, will always attempt to increase the availability of non-reproductive sex while reducing the risk and cost associated with it. When freewheelers go too far, a society can end up with an epidemic of fatherless households and rampant divorce/infidelity. 

Where does our own society fall along this spectrum? Your opinion on that will probably depend on whether you are a ring-bearer or a freewheeler. And that’s OK. Human beings are not objective, detached observers. We are creatures hardwired to pursue our biological interests. Recognizing that your own moral intuitions are a little bit selfish might result in seeing the other side of the debate as fellow human beings rather than evil baby killers or woman-hating fascists. 

Actually, that’s a pipe dream. Real political fanatics can’t help but see the other side as stupid and evil. In fact, they would probably be less effective as political operatives if they were more in touch with reality. This post will probably be more useful to those confused observers of political fanaticism who can’t figure out why seemingly rational people on both sides of the political aisle become so nasty and stupid when discussing their most important political opinions. As somebody who grew up as one of those confused observers, this view of morality helped me to understand the vitriol of moral/political/religious fanatics a little better. Everybody wants to create a world that caters to their preferences and everybody wants to portray themselves as a heroic savior while doing it. Your own moral tribe is no exception.

1. Kurzban is on substack now and you should subscribe to his newsletter.