Nudge and Abortion

#1 and #3 put paternalism ahead of liberty and are therefore blanket unacceptable.

Forcing (and that’s the key word: force) people to endure a waiting period is the same as forcing them to acquire a license or permit. All of these are simply ways of denying our rights a little bit at a time.

Similarly forcing (there’s that word again…) medical professionals to offer their services in state-approved locations is of the same species of partial rights-denial.

#2 seems acceptable. I chafe against it because I chafe against all paternalism but it’s hard to characterize it as a rights-denial.

#4 I endorse for the same reasons you do.

I see pursuing any of #1-#3 as a net negative however, because people want abortions, and I never see discouraging people from getting what they want as advancing the good of society (if we must use those words).

I find your arguments un-convincing but I may be biased. So far (my son turns 2 this week) I regret having had a child, and my wife (with my agreement) aborted a second (unintentional this time) pregnancy, due to our exasperation with parenthood and also a major danger posed to her health by childbirth.

There is a severe social stigma against saying you regret having children. Therefore any survey data on the subject is highly suspect.

Doesn’t take a libertarian paternalist to support any of those nudges. Plain old paternalists could easily support all four.

I agree that a libertarian would not support any legal restrictions on abortion, so 1 – 3 are probably out. Whether a libertarian paternalist would support them depends on what his/her libertarian/paternalist split is. (That is, how strongly does one associate with each term.)

I also agree that 4 should be supported by all libertarians.

I would also argue, however, that libertarians have good reasons to be both pro-choice and anti-abortion. First, every abortion eliminates a potential future partner of free exchange, and that limits the freedom of all to engage in that exchange. In the U.S. alone, over a million abortions per year represents a huge opportunity cost. Second, if the woman really doesn’t want to have a baby right now, it would be better for her not to get pregnant. Money spent on eliminating the mistake is money not spent on more productive things. More huge opportunity costs. Bastiat would be spinning in his grave.

So what’s a libertarian to do? 4 for sure. Have no restrictions on birth control? Of course. Remove all government support (i.e. $) for all organizations that perform elective abortions? Maybe.

But other options carry at least a whiff of paternalism. Encourage better education in the use of birth control? Fund public ad campaigns to encourage women to either keep their babies or give them up for adoption? Encourage better education on the development of the embryo/fetus? Provide all abortion seekers with copies of Bryan’s book on selfish reasons to have kids? Provide financial rewards for abortion seekers who choose to keep their babies? The list is endless, depending on how paternalistic one is willing to get.

The truth is that there is no bright line whatsoever between hard paternalism and soft paternalism. If drugs are illegal, I have the option of buying them, taking them, and possibly going to jail. If, in Sunstein and Thaler’s world, they are legal, but I have to hand in an essay and wait in line, I am still being punished, only to a lesser extent and I am being forced to make a prepayment.

Once it is understood that libertarian paternalism is functionally no different from a light punishment, the work kind of falls apart. Why not just impose a light tax and spare the waste of making people endure a queue?

Three comments:

1) The natalist caucus should advocate for pro-fertility paternalism, not for anti-choice paternalism.

2) Please define abortion.

3) Regarding #4, as long as the government pays for healthcare, including for surgical procedures that are self-referred by the physician, I see no compelling reason to treat abortion as any different from any other situation where a doctor performs a surgery to undo the consequences of a lifestyle decision. (Knee replacements, …)

How about a non-libertarian nudge.

On average every person born increases the GNP. On average every person born contributes to the tax base. Therefore terminating a potential taxpayer, GNP grower, is a drain on society.

Rather than subsidizing, or even ignoring abortion, it should be taxed, and taxed heavily. Each aborted tax payer reduces the pool of money for my future retirement entitlements. We can calculate the future contributions of each aborted tax payer. That should be the fee.

@Brian, where exactly in the libertarian code of ethics does it say there can be no limitations on abortion. I must have missed those libertarian discussions regarding the sanctity of abortion. If libertarians actually believe in the ‘natural rights’ of the individual, at what point do those ‘rights’ arrive? While it is culturally fashionable to assign no rights to the unborn, that does not obviate a critical thinking libertarian from considering when those rights actually become extant.

If I am a 4 month pregnant mother, and you are the cause of a car accident that results in the death of the fetus, do I as the mother get to decide it was manslaughter? Or if the state decides, if 6 months is not manslaughter, but 8 months is, then where does your statement that ‘a libertarian would not support any legal restrictions on abortion’ rest. The death of the not yet born, should not be so casually set aside.

I am merely suggesting an alternative nudge.

But the other laws you name allegedly prevent harm to *others* not harm to self, no?

You seem to have implied (presumably accidentally) that being gay is a harmful activity. You might like to clarify that.

An obvious counter-argument is that a woman who really wants an abortion will risk her health to get an illegal one if legal ones are not readily available. #1 and #2 strikes me as more defensible a nudge than #3, but that may be status quo bias as I think they’re, or something similar, both already in place in NZ. (Note I’m a woman and currently very pregnant with my second).

@WRD
> What about options that “nudge” toward birth
> control instead?
@Frank Ashe
> if there is no “buyers remorse” for children then
> we should encourage women to have as many as
> possible – they won’t regret it.

Yes, if you take seriously the research Bryan describes, and you’re in the nudging business, you should discourage birth control and generally encourage having more children than people otherwise would have. Nudge away from abortion and nudge _away_ from birth control. Bryan’s nudge is based on the good outcomes from having the child weighed against the bad outcomes from not having the child, and has nothing to do with any evilness of killing the baby. So the same reasoning should apply to birth control as abortion, because it’s not the mechanism of preventing the birth that’s important in this framing.

As to the libertarian position on abortion, I don’t see that libertarianism provides a natural position on the issue. The question of when exactly you consider a person to have rights (potentiality, conception, second trimester, birth, 2 years old, 21 years old, after death) is a funny one without an obvious answer.

Number 3 seems like a significant cost/obstacle. Nudges are supposed to help you overcome bias without significant difficulties (checking a box, for example, is not so hard).

> Since most women who have abortions either have or
> go on to have children, Bryan’s premise is
> patently invalid.

This is true only if abortion doesn’t reduce the number of children the mother would have had, which seems unlikely. In any event, it is an empirical question. Hypothetically if it was the other way around, say because having aborting a child (say, at 24 early in your law career) would allow you to subsequently have more children than you would have if you hadn’t aborted, then you’d want to nudge towards abortion. But I find it a little hard to believe that’s the normal case.

Bryan isn’t saying anything about the morality of abortion. He’s saying having more babies makes the mother better off, even if she isn’t so sure at the time of abortion, therefore you want to nudge her in the direction of making a decision she herself will get more utility from measured over her whole life.

This whole thing is a little hard to follow because its an issue normally dripping with moral sentiment, and Bryan has dodged most of the morass to concentrate on one interesting aspect of it.

the goal is to improve outcomes for people AS JUDGED BY THEMSELVES, not policy maker’s taste

Forget the abortion stuff. I got completely hung up on this point.

If Ms. A judges for herself that taking action B will yield some desired outcome C, why does she have to be “nudged” at all?

What he must mean is either that (1) Ms. A hasn’t actually judged for herself that action B would yield the desired outcome C, but would if she were wiser, or (2) Ms. A has judged for herself that action B would yield outcome C, but she doesn’t actually desire outcome C, but she would desire it if she were wiser.

This paternalist argument is based on minimizing self-reported regret. It’s unlikely that people are being particularly rational when they introspect on this. One of the most common regrets of people on their deathbed is that they worked so hard. Should the state crack down on overtime and 40-hour workweeks? Secondly, a principle of maximizing life-satisfaction would seem to be preferable over regret-minimization. And most studies show that having children makes people less happy.

I would have thought that economists/libertarians would prefer revealed preference as a measure of satisfaction over self-reports.

Fine-grained access to the neural correlates of well-being are going to be just around the corner, given advances in neuroscience. Maybe the paternalists should hold off until a more objective measure of life satisfaction comes around.

@Brian:

I would also argue, however, that libertarians have good reasons to be both pro-choice and anti-abortion. First, every abortion eliminates a potential future partner of free exchange, and that limits the freedom of all to engage in that exchange.

Let me play the devil’s advocate here and point out that childhood – at least early childhood – is fundamentally nonconsensusal. So every abortion eliminates an inevitable victim of nonconsensual distress and violation.

(Those who sugar-coat childhood should come and listen to my neighbor infant’s screams every day. If life is a gift, then kids are forced to pay dearly for getting it.)

@John: kids don’t “judge for themselves” that tooth-brushing leads to a desired outcome. That’s my point. I think Thaler is being disingenuous.

Planned parenthood implemented by governments is misanthropic. Whether Chinese Style, or Ceausescu-era Romanian style.

Planned parenthood as it came to be in modern USA and most of the western world differs in that it is voluntary and generally left for the person involved to implement. As such, I find it difficult to paint as misanthropic the desire to regulate one’s fertility as one sees fit. And I have serious doubts that any significant percentage of these practitioners utilize birth control for fear of overpopulation.

Ironically, for all its roots in population control and eugenics, planned parenthood ended up being enthusiastically adopted by relatively prosperous people who came to the not surprising conclusion that being able to choose if and when to have children is an ability much better to exercise than not.

MingoV said:
> My view is simple: If the fetus can live outside
> the womb, then abortion is murder.

This is a pretty common view, with interesting implications. While it means you view abortion as murder after about 20 weeks (which might be a little early for some people), the rapid rise of neonatal care technology means that in 50 or 100 years, you’ll view all abortion as murder.

I don’t know if there’s a medical incentive to develop the technology, but since very early stage embryos can be cultured outside the body, I wonder if we could extract and preserve them before some stage and thereby accidentally close the window from the other end?

I’ve argued in other contexts that easy, reliable birth control will eventually make all pregnancies “wanted.” I imagine such a society will deeply frown on abortion, and may look back on our era with horror, missing the subtlety of the moral decisions that got made.

> With more older mothers and fertility technology,
> this is happening more and more as accidental
> triplets and quads show up, although no one wants
> to admit it and physicians who practice it must do
> so in secret to avoid public controversy.

Liability is a major component in these calculation. The physician doesn’t get sued for the abortions, but does get sued if something goes wrong in the pregnancy (often whether or not they had anything to do with it).

But it’s wrong to say there’s anything secret about it. The vigor with which physicians push reduction (some have “nothing more than twins or find another doctor” rules) is a significant factor in why women pregnant with multiples choose one doctor over another. Which doctor has which attitude is well-known in mother-of-multiple circles.

@Tom West
You could argue that all pregnancies (save rape) are voluntary today since birth control is cheap, effective, easy to use, and easy to get, but I think that’s a stretch. I was thinking about a future where birth control defaults to always-on via some medical implant that manages your health.

> That is correct. Fetal incubators could eliminate
> abortions and increase adoptions (since unwanted
> fetuses are likely to be abandoned). Both are
> worthy goals.

That’s a refreshingly straight answer for a blog commenter.

At that point, will you view failure to conceive a child you could have conceived as murder? Is it the child imposing demands on the mother (even though the whole thing was voluntarily entered into by the mother, usually) the thing that makes termination okay? Then why can’t you terminate toddlers?

I’m not trying to be a jerk here – my own views are muddy. I don’t think I’ve got this figured out so I’m not trying to push a view on anyone. I vacillate between thinking “uh oh, it looks like potential people should count as people,” and “maybe murder isn’t so bad.” Both of those positions leave me pretty uncomfortable and I’m left feeling unresolved.