, this isn’t true of threats. You can’t use disproportionate force to repel a threat without yourself becoming an aggressor. Even if radical feminists like Sophie Lewis think it’s fair to compare the fetus to a slaveholder, that’s not what the fetus is actually like, and so you can’t justify lethal force to defend yourself against the threat of inconvenience or difficulty; but I’ll talk more about this later.
I want to offer a thought-exercise to help us think about the threat that the human fetus poses to the woman’s health and life during pregnancy. My thought-experiment has two variations because I want to account for the different circumstances of pregnancy. For those who are convinced by the responsibility objection, we have two different levels of responsibility when it comes to pregnancy: women who are pregnant after consensual sex and women who are pregnant after rape. And even if we ultimately believe that abortion is wrong in all cases for any reason, these levels of responsibility can affect our intuition in thought-experiments and intuition of the people we talk with about abortion.
Now, I have talked with pro-choice people who are somewhat convinced by the responsibility objection but think differently about it than I do. For example, they may believe that women who become pregnant after using contraceptive methods have a different level of responsibility for the pregnancy than women who had reasonable access to birth control but willingly chose not to use it while having consensual sex. In other words, I’ve talked with pro-choice people who would sort pregnant women into two responsibility categories: women pregnant after sex without birth control and women pregnant after sex with birth control or after rape.
I’ve also talked with people who are completely unconvinced by the responsibility objection altogether. They believe consent to sex never requires consent to pregnancy, and that the human fetus is always trespassing without consent. They might even say women have no obligation to care for the fetus, even if she was purposefully trying to get pregnant with fertility treatments or something. Because of these varying positions, I want to offer two variations to my thought-experiment that will account for different intuitions regarding responsibility. If you find the responsibility objection convincing, like I do, then you would believe only women pregnant after rape are in the second variation of the story.
Let’s imagine that I have a really nice boat. I don’t mean like a fishing boat for a small lake or even a speed boat for water skiing. I’m talking about the rap music video yacht that has a nice bar and seating. Let’s imagine that I’m kind of a relaxed and laid back person who doesn’t really dwell on worst-case scenarios and even though in this fantasy world it is really common for people to wander on boats at the dock, I like the convenience of leaving my boat unlocked.
So one day, a small child gets lost at the docks, he’s just playing and wandering around and loses his way. He climbs on my boat and hides in a closet. Then I unknowingly later that day take my boat out on the water and it isn’t until we are miles from shore that I discover he is on my boat! And here’s the biggest problem: not only is he getting a free joy ride on my yacht, I know he is carrying a disease that could make me sick. He isn’t sick, he is perfectly okay, but he is a carrier of a disease that mirrors pregnancy in every way. There’s a chance I could have nausea, temporary diabetes, back pain, swollen feet, and I could even die. This disease has every symptom or threat to my life and health that pregnancy carries, with the same likelihoods. And let’s say I know that the only way to defend myself from catching the pregnancy disease is to kill the child. There is no other option, I can’t just stick him on the lifeboat or drive back to the docks. Let’s say I need to either take my chances or kill him. Would that be justified self-defense?
After all, I could die! Someone could say to me “Well, you did leave your boat unlocked and knew that this might happen!  Is that really fair though? We will come back to this question, but first let’s consider the second variation.
If we change the thought-experiment slightly, we could say that instead of being the kind of person that leaves my boat unlocked, instead, I am the opposite. I hear about this problem happening to other people and I really am against children coming on my boat. I am careful to lock it every single time it is parked at the dock and I even put a sign that says “NO TRESPASSING!” in big red letters. Unfortunately, there is an adult human trafficker who has kidnapped a child and he decides to hide the little boy on my boat. He trespasses against my will, breaks my locks, and puts the kidnapped child in my closet. The next day I take my boat out on the water, and miles from shore I discover the kidnapped little boy. He is a carrier of the pregnancy disease just as in the first scenario. Even though I took all the precautions I possibly could, I am still stuck with the same choice. Do I endure the pregnancy disease? Or can I kill the child to protect myself?
I think most people would agree that there is a different level of culpability between the two scenarios, or at the very least, you have more sympathy for me in the second story. But does it really matter? I mean, shouldn’t we have the right to protect ourselves, even if it means killing someone if our life is at risk? Maybe you think that self-defense would be justified even if you won’t die but if you will become very seriously ill.
I will respond to that in a moment, but it is necessary to pause and acknowledge that someone who responds to this thought-experiment by saying that abortion is different than my story because embryos aren’t the same value as small children or because they are dependent on the woman’s bodily resources is making a different argument than the pure self-defense argument I am refuting in this article. I would respond differently to those two objections. I am isolating this one part of the argument, not addressing everything.
I argue that whether or not I am justified in killing the child carrying the disease depends on how significant of a threat he is to my life. If there is a 75% chance I will die, then I think morally permissible options are very different from a 10% chance. When abortion-choice advocates make this argument, they use fear-mongering language about maternal mortality rates on the rise.
In May 2019 Dr. Hern, a late-term abortion specialist, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times. The title of his article is “Pregnancy Kills. Abortion Saves Lives.” subtitle “Every pregnancy poses a ‘serious health risk’ to the mother.” He writes: “pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. Women die from being pregnant.” Later he says, “pregnancy is dangerous, abortion can be lifesaving.” He certainly makes it sound like a pretty significant threat. What do the statistics on maternal mortality and maternal morbidity tell us about how significant this threat is?
To say that killing another innocent person is justified by self-defense, there needs to be some sort of legitimate risk to your life and probably there need to be no other safe alternatives. How do we determine what constitutes a legitimate risk to your life? Should you need to know it is a 50/50 chance that you will live or die? Maybe a 10% likelihood of death? Our intuitions might vary on where the line should be and it probably depends on other factors as well. That exact line might move case by case and I don’t think we need to answer this question before we decide whether or not abortion can be considered self-defense, because of the risk to the woman’s life that pregnancy poses doesn’t even come close to reasonable. It isn’t even a 1% risk. In the United States in 2016, a pregnant woman had a 0.017% chance of dying because of a pregnancy-related complication. You actually have a higher risk of death from getting your appendix removed, which is 0.21% chance for patients under 60 years old.
Like many people, I fully support non-violent efforts to reduce maternal mortality. I don’t want any women to die from childbirth, even if it is a low risk. And of course developing nations have a higher risk of maternal mortality than the United States. Let’s look at Ghana as an example because it is one of the most dangerous places to give birth in the world. In 2017, the maternal mortality rate in Ghana was 0.31%.  My answer is at least higher than 1%.
But pregnancy itself poses a “serious health risk”—including the risk of dying and losing all bodily functions. A woman’s life and health are at risk from the moment that a pregnancy exists in her body, whether she wants to be pregnant or not.
We cannot compare the number of pregnancies with the rate of severe maternal morbidity, because the number of pregnancies is not tracked in the United States. We can only compare the number of live births. Again, using CDC as our source, there were 3,985,924 births in the United States in 2014. This means that in 2014 women had a less than 1.3% chance of having severe, non-fatal pregnancy-related complications. A higher risk than our life-threatening risk of 0.017% Does that justify killing a child to spare ourselves?
I think we need to have a higher than.02% chance of dying and a higher than a 1.3% chance of serious health risks to kill another person and call it self-defense. If you look at these numbers and still want