Livestream Recap: “Abortion” Across the Aisle
We livestreamed our discussion about how pro-lifers and pro-choicers define “abortion” differently. You can listen to or watch the replay here:
Or, if you prefer, here is a summary of our conversation.
Key Takeaways
- There is no single definition of abortion, and this confusiong makes it hard to communicate well.
- Whether people categorize a scenario as an “abortion” depends on intent, medical emergencies, fetal death, gestational age, and other factors.
- To improve debates and avoid dangerous misunderstandings, we need to define terms clearly.
Summary
When I talk about abortion with people, I notice both pro-choice and pro-life people assume we all know what we mean (and know what the other side means) by the word “abortion.” Unfortunately that’s not at all the case. Major medical institutions, pro-choice organizations, pro-life groups, and legal codes all have different definitions of abortion, sometimes in ways that overlap and other times in ways that contradict. There is no single authoritative definition of “abortion.”
To better understand how different people actually think about this, we created a survey describing 32 clinical scenarios and asking people two simple questions: (1) Is this an abortion? (2) Is this ethical? Hundreds of SPL followers (both pro-life and pro-choice) took the survey, and the results were fascinating. Some scenarios (like a late-term D&E for fetal anomaly) were widely recognized as abortion, while others, such as miscarriage management, produced wide variation. Notably, pro-lifers were more likely to classify some scenarios as “not abortion” when they thought the actions were ethical. In contrast, pro-choicers rarely categorized scenarios as unethical, but whether they did or not had little relationship to whether they considered a scenario an abortion. Intent, medical emergencies, gestational age, and whether fetal death occurred beforehand all influenced how people categorized each case.
This ambiguity matters. Since Dobbs, stories about pregnant women denial medical care have spread widely (though many are misleading). Many people incorrectly believe that when a pro-lifer says she’s “against abortion” that means she objects to miscarriage management or life-saving care. In fact pro-lifers oppose “elective abortion,” but this needs to be better defined. Clarifying definitions upfront helps prevent confusion and builds trust across ideological divides.
I encourage pro-lifers to pause and ask the people you’re talking with “What do you mean by ‘abortion’?” Seek clarity. Better conversations start with shared understanding.
Additional Resources
- SPL’s “What is Abortion” survey
- Defining ‘Abortion’: a call for clarity, Nicholas Colgrove, PhD; Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2025
- “How pro-lifers and pro-choicers define abortion”
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