wrote a little about uncertainty<\/a> in the context of global warming and California\u2019s Prop 8; we\u2019ll use similar tools here.\u00a0 Instead of asserting beyond our knowledge that humanity begins at some discrete point, a better approach, from a policy perspective, is to define a set of possibilities and work from that. \u00a0Assign the probability, for every week from 1 to 40, with birth as a special end case, that the fetus has gained humanity by that point.\u00a0 Then the \u201cexpected value\u201d of the fetus is B times that probability.\u00a0 It is not, by the way, the actual value of the fetus, which is unknown and, for us, unknowable.\u00a0 It is our best guess of that value.\u00a0<\/p>\nExample 1:\u00a0 We assign a steady, uniformly increasing probability to the fetus being human (meaning beyond then it is in some sense irrevocably attached to a given spirit).\u00a0 Thus the chance that a 10 week old fetus is, in this sense, human is 10\/40, or 25%.\u00a0 A 22 week old would be 22\/40.\u00a0 In that case, the expected value of a 10 week old is about one quarter that of a newborn.\u00a0 If the value of a newborn is around 3 million, for example, then the value of a 10 week old fetus, in expectation, would be about $750,000.\u00a0 Remember that we don\u2019t know the actual value, this is just our best guess.<\/p>\n
Example 2:\u00a0 I assign a small probability in the early months, that rises rapidly as I hit viability.\u00a0 Thus I might think the chance of a newly fertilized egg being human are one in 100 (or one in a million), but by the time I get to week 25 the probability is close to 1.\u00a0 Depending on how I assign the intermediate probabilities, a 10 week old might be worth anywhere from B\/1000000 to close to B. \u00a0By somewhere around week 25,\u00a0the baby is worth about B until brought to term. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
So where in the world could we get such probabilities?\u00a0 Shy of God revealing them, we have to be somewhat fanciful.\u00a0 We could perhaps conduct a vote based on a “wisdom of the masses\u201d sort of argument.\u00a0 Not, by the way, a vote of \u201cwhen do you think humanity begins\u201d, but rather \u201chow likely is it that humanity begins by week X\u201d.\u00a0 Or we could use a uniform distribution like that in the first example as an expression of our ignorance \u2013 until we know more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Current policy, and this is crucial to understand, does not avoid this problem.\u00a0 It currently acts, as best I can tell, as if the probability was almost completely stacked up around birth.\u00a0 This is probably not what you would get from a poll.\u00a0 In other words, you cannot get away from this problem by ignoring it.\u00a0 We can infer back from current policy what we are implicitly assuming about when humanity begins.\u00a0 Given then, that we have to make some<\/em> choice, we might be better off thinking about it up front, rather than hiding from what we are assuming.<\/p>\nThis post is long enough, so I won\u2019t go into a lot of detail on this, but suppose we knew, hypothetically, that a ten week old baby\u2019s value was around B\/20 or approximately $150,000 (i\u2019m making this up, but you can infer back from the above examples what assumptions would give you that number).\u00a0 Then we might begin thinking seriously about whether or not prospective aborters internalized the full weight of that cost. \u00a0If, for example, what pregnancy delivered were not a baby, but rather $150,000 in cash, \u00a0I’m guessing the number of abortions in the U.S. would drop like a rock.<\/p>\n
So if whoever is making the abortion choice, whether it be parents, grandparents, or a single mother, are not internalizing that cost, we’d want to think about how to get them to face the full weight of it, so that they can make a socially optimal decision.\u00a0 Much like we often wish to tax polluters to make them internalize the full social cost of their pollution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A thoughtful reader asked me if there were any economic tools that could be brought to bear in valuing a fetus.\u00a0 Of course there are! \u00a0And in fewer than a 1000 words, no less!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6891,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890\/revisions\/6891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}