Why Aren't Animal Welfare Activists Pro-Life?

If you can care about a shrimp, why can't you care about a fetus?

Bentham’s Bulldog recently put out an intriguing post about a charity that reduces the suffering of farmed shrimp. BB is a vegan and an active promoter of animal welfare: in just the last month or so he’s published posts about “The Christian Case for Animal Welfare”, “Extreme Suffering on Farms”, and a post on the hypocrisy of outrage over claims that Haitians are eating cats and dogs when most of us eat animals daily. Clearly BB cares a lot about the suffering of animals and believes it is important to publicly advocate to reduce their suffering.

Now I am not a vegan myself, and I don’t believe there is anything wrong with killing and eating animals. Yet I respect BB’s position, and the animal welfare movement as a whole. I do believe it is wrong to cause needless suffering and that we have a duty towards animals not to treat them cruelly. I too am touched by the accounts of horrors that occur on factory farms. In fact animal welfare advocates have changed my own eating habits. Years ago I read a post on Scott Alexander’s old blog that was part of his “Adversarial Collaboration Contest”.¹ The post was on whether eating meat is morally acceptable and went into careful detail about how much suffering animals are likely to be capable of, and how bad the conditions are on American farms for various species of animal. Long story short, based on the information from that post (which I’ve vaguely confirmed with my own research) I now try to avoid eating pork, and less strictly avoid eating chicken. The post convinced me that pigs suffer a lot in our current farm system and are smart enough that the suffering should matter. With chickens I am not certain whether they are smart enough to meaningfully suffer, but their conditions are bad enough that I avoid eating chicken when given other options. I even switched to eating “certified humane” eggs, and they’re at least 25 cents more expense per egg! That’s a big deal for a skinflint like myself.

All of which to say, I am not opposed to the cause of animal welfare even if I don’t take it nearly as far as BB does. I respect that he cares so much for animals and that he’s willing to both advocate publicly for them and make personal sacrifices (such as veganism) to reduce their suffering. More power to him.

What confuses me is that BB is also pro-choice.

He’s not alone in that position, of course. I don’t have hard statistics but we all know that animal welfare activism most comes from the left/liberal side of American politics, the same side that is also significantly more pro-choice than the right/conservative side. Though there is nothing inherent in the concept of animal welfare that would encourage you to be pro-choice, the reality of coalitional politics means that pro-choice and pro-animal politics ends up overlapping significantly². Yet it seems to me that the committed animal welfare advocate should be pro-life in orientation. So why aren’t they? Why isn’t Bentham’s Bulldog, a man who takes ethics seriously enough to care about the suffering of shrimp, pro-life?

Do Shrimp Have Moral Status?

If you have ever debated the morality of abortion, you likely found yourself going down this familiar route:

“How can we decide when human life begins?”

“Are you saying a fetus isn’t human? What is it then, a lobster? It’s definitely one of the early stages of development of a human life.”

“That’s not what I mean, I mean is a fetus a person?”

For many people the debate on abortion isn’t about whether the fetus is human, but whether it has what philosophers call “moral status”. If something has moral status then it needs to be taken into our moral calculations. As an example, why do we think it’s wrong to crush a human in a rock crusher, but not wrong to crush boulders in a rock crusher? The reason is that humans have moral status and rocks do not. From an ethical perspective how you treat things with moral status, such as humans, is extremely different from how you treat things without them. So the question is what kind of things have moral status?

Generally those on the pro-choice side claim that a fetus does not have moral status, and thus aborting a fetus is morally equivalent to removing an appendix. On the pro-life side the fetus does have moral status, so aborting one is murder I don’t know BB’s full views on why he is pro-choice, but in one post he wrote “I don’t think that early abortions kill any person because a person is a mind, not a biological organism.” He’s making a claim that a fetus does not have the moral status of an adult human because it does not have a mind, and only things with minds have moral status.

Similarly the history of animal welfare has been significantly affected by whether animals have moral status or not. There are philosophical perspectives that would say animals have no moral status whatsoever, in which case why should we care about animal welfare? There are others that grant animals moral status but less moral status than humans. That’s why you can’t own a person but you can own a dog, yet if you torture your dog the law will intervene. Finally there are perspectives where humans and animals have equal moral status, which is PETA’s position.

Most people believe that animals have some moral status, but not as much as humans do. They wouldn’t be happy if a cow was tortured to death for no reason but don’t think it’s wrong to kill and eat one. Animal welfare advocates tend to lean towards giving animals higher moral status than the average person would. This is why BB can write a long post saying it would be morally good to reduce the suffering of shrimp. As he puts it “The reason (shrimp welfare) seems crazy is because of bias; shrimp look weird and we don’t naturally empathize with them. But that’s not a reason to ignore their plight.”

Yet here we reach the first confusion: in other posts BB has implied³ that killing a fetus is morally acceptable because it doesn’t have a mind. Yet in his shrimp post he states that reducing the suffering of shrimp is morally praiseworthy. He does not couch this in a claim that shrimp have minds (certainly not human minds) but rather that shrimp can suffer. In fact he explicitly rejects the idea that we should only care about whether someone is a “human” when judging moral standing:

One objection that I think misses the mark is that there are things other than pleasure and pain that matter and for this reason, it’s better to help humans. This is ill-thought out; that pleasure and pain are not the only things that matter doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all. Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain.

From this we can reasonably conclude that BB, like most animal welfare advocates, believe that things other than adult humans have moral standing. In fact BB goes on to explicitly extend this moral concern to fetuses later in his post:

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

So BB agrees that the suffering of a fetus is morally “bad”, regardless of if they ever grow older and smarter. It would be wrong to burn a fetus with a hot iron and cause them pain.

So the question then becomes “can a fetus suffer?”

The Problem of Pain

People used to be pretty sure that animals can’t feel pain.

I mean certainly they look like they feel pain: they limp, they protect wounds, they howl and whimper when injured, but that was all stimulus and response. There wasn’t any actual suffering involved because they didn’t have a mind to suffer with. Descartes thought of animals as being machine like automata who were not capable of suffering any more than a clock can suffer. Behaviorists saw animals as unconscious, unable to really experience anything. Animals perhaps could feel pain, but they didn’t suffer from it the way humans do.

We consider this ridiculous today, but it stemmed from an important problem. We have no way of actually observing or measuring pain, only the behaviors the pain might cause. We don’t have a “pain-ometer” that we can use to tell whether a rat is suffering, or even to tell whether another human is suffering. So it’s understandable that whether an animal can suffer has been a matter of debate since there is no way to prove it one way or another. Still, over time people have come to believe that animals can feel pain, and suffer, and animal welfare advocates believe that suffering matters.

The human fetus has faced a similar problem. For decades the medical consensus was that the fetus could not feel pain: in fact until the late 1980s the consensus was that newborns couldn’t feel pain either. If a surgeon working on a newborn bothered to administer anesthesia they did so to keep the baby from moving and not for pain relief, since a newborn’s brain wasn’t developed enough to feel pain anyway. This changed after a 1987 study gave some babies undergoing surgery painkillers and found that they had lower levels of adrenaline in their system, showed fewer stress responses, and were less likely to have post-surgery complications than the control group that got no painkillers. This led to a movement to start treating newborns as if they could suffer, though it still took more than a decade before giving newborns painkillers was standard practice.

So when do humans become capable of suffering? The question is controversial to say the least. Because we can’t measure pain directly there are currently three proposed developmental stages where suffering might begin.⁴ The earliest possible stage is at 7 weeks gestation, which is the point at which the fetus has pain receptors, a spinal cord, a brain stem, and a thalamus. This is considered the minimum amount of nervous system for pain to be possible at all. Others say that while pain sensations can occur at this stage they can’t realistically be experienced until the development of the cortical subplate, which occurs at 14 weeks gestation. The third proposed option is when the cortical subplate connects to the cortex at 24 weeks gestation.

Others argue that even though all the equipment is in place to sense and process pain at 24 weeks, pain doesn’t matter until the fetus is conscious. Since we don’t have a “conscious-ometer” either there is no way to prove when this occurs. However there is some evidence that the cortex is not required for consciousness, and that the brain-stem and thalamus alone is sufficient: children born with hydrocephalus lack a developed cortex but behave as if they are conscious, and definitely behave as if they are capable of feeling pain. We also know that the fetus appears to be aware and capable of planning their actions and moving purposefully at 13 weeks gestation. For example, a fetus at 14 weeks will move its little arms around, but will move them much more slowly and carefully if they’re headed for his developing eyes. In twin fetal studies we have observed 15 week old fetuses reaching out and feeling their twin in a way that appears to be purposeful as well.

Fetuses also react as if they can feel pain. A fetus will react to being touched at 7 weeks gestation, and by 14 weeks will move away from painful stimulus. Fetuses at 16 weeks development show increased blood flow to the brain as a response to painful stimuli, a pain response that is also observed in children and adults. They also show hormonal elevations in response to painful stimuli in a way that also matches adult humans.

All of this to say that a fetus could at least potentially feel pain as early as 7 weeks gestation, shows significant signs of feeling pain at 14 weeks, and almost certainly feels pain at 24 weeks. This is reflected in our current ethical standards for fetal surgery which recommend using anesthesia on fetuses during surgeries starting at 14 weeks. Except for abortions, of course.

So a fetus can probably suffer at 14 weeks onward, if not earlier.

Does it Hurt to be Cut to Pieces?

According to the CDC, in 2021 there were 625,978 abortions in the United States. Of those 55.2% (412,275) occurred at 7 weeks gestation or later, the earliest point that a fetus might suffer. 6.6% (31,106) occurred at 14 weeks gestation or later, and .9% (4,070) occurred after 21 weeks gestation. How were these fetuses killed?

There are essentially only three methods of abortion in use in the United States today: medication abortions, surgical abortions, and inspiration abortions. Medication abortions were the most common in 2021 at 56% of all abortions, almost all of which occurred at 9 weeks gestation or younger. Surgical abortions make up almost all of the rest, with most occurring at 13 weeks or younger and with 6.4% of all abortions (36,147) occurring as surgical abortions on a fetus that is 14 weeks or older. Inspiration abortions are rare, but 99 of them occurred in 2021 (mostly in New York, for some reason).

So what exactly are those methods, and would we expect the fetus to suffer while they’re happening?

A medication abortion cuts off the production of progesterone and changes the uterine environment to either prevent implantation or detach the fetus and placenta. There isn’t a lot of good data on whether this hurts: presumably being detached from the uterus would cut off the fetus from oxygenated blood, killing it from hypoxia. Would this hurt? It’s hard to say. Most of the suffering from asphyxiation comes from too much carbon dioxide in the lungs which wouldn’t be a factor here: though presumably the carbon dioxide the fetus produces has to go somewhere. Certainly at later stages of pregnancy when the fetus doesn’t get enough oxygen it shows signs of distress. Still, we don’t know with any confidence that the fetus suffers significantly from a medication abortion, and in the worst case the suffering would be similar to suffocating to death.

A surgical abortion usually refers to either a D&E or D&C abortion, and is more straightforward when it comes to suffering. In both cases a little vacuum is put into the uterus to suck up the fetus and remove it. In a D&C a loop curette, a tool with a little loop of sharp metal at the end of it, is used to cut the fetus into small pieces which will fit through the vacuum for removal. A D&E is similar but does not use a curette, instead using forceps to tear the fetus into smaller pieces. This medical document, which describes how to perform the D&E procedure, instructs that at the end of the procedure the doctor should “Examine the fetal tissue to ensure that evacuation is complete: Identify fetal parts (thorax, spine, calvarium, all 4 extremities and placenta, for all procedures 14 weeks and greater).” The procedure takes 20-30 minutes total, though not all of that is spent cutting or tearing the fetus.

It really seems like a surgical abortion causes a significant amount of suffering in the fetus! The fetus is cut or torn into small pieces. No anesthesia for the fetus is used, regardless of gestational age. That means when a fetus at 8 months development is aborted (legal in 26 states!), a stage of development at which almost nobody disagrees he can feel pain, he will feel everything while forceps rip his arms and legs off and then crush his skull. If you think ripping a newborn baby’s limbs off would hurt, you should believe a D&E does as well.

Finally we get to inspiration abortions, the rarest. In an inspiration abortion (also known as a saline abortion) a concentrated salt solution is injected into the amniotic sac. This slowly kills the fetus, a process that can take multiple days to complete. The salt causes the fetus to die be dehydration, and fetuses aborted this way are often found with burnt skin. BB mentioned that it would be wrong to burn a fetus with a hot iron: a saline abortion is a close analogue too that. Fortunately they are rare because they come with higher risk of complications for the mother, but before the 1980s they were fairly common.

Why Not Advocate for Fetal Welfare?

In 2021 36,147 fetuses at 13 weeks development or older were torn to pieces without anesthesia. 99 more were slowly killed by dehydration over a period of days. Why don’t most animal welfare advocates care?

I can understand an animal welfare advocate supporting abortion before 7 weeks gestation, when 44.8% of them occur anyway, or even supporting it before 14 weeks, since that covers 93.5% of abortions and the fetus might not suffer much yet. I would hope that advocates could agree with pro-lifers that we shouldn’t be ripping fetuses to pieces after that. Yet 26 states allow this to happen all the way through the third trimester.

When Kamala Harris was asked if there should be restrictions in the third trimester for abortions she said she just wanted to go back to the status quo of Roe. Yet that status quo banned restricting abortion before viability, and past viability required such strict legal standards and specific exceptions for any proposed regulations that in 2021 41 out of 50 states reported abortions occurring after viability. Now Kamala Harris isn’t an animal welfare advocate, but I image most animal welfare advocates support her and many would support a return to how things were before the Dobbs decision. And they really shouldn’t, because before Dobbs it was extremely difficult to regulate abortions at all.

I know what the answer to my question is: animal welfare advocates are not pro-life because of coalitional politics. Most animal welfare advocates are on the left side of the political spectrum, and any regulation on abortion is seen as a human rights violation by the left. So they advocate for regulations reducing the suffering of farm animals, but not for the suffering of fetuses. It doesn’t make logical sense but it makes political sense.

I would just hope that advocates like BB, who care more about ethics than politics, would support legislation to ban abortion after 14 weeks, or at least after 22. Or join with our good friends the Mormons in Utah, who in 2016 passed a law requiring anesthesia for the fetus for abortions after 20 weeks. Surely everyone on both sides should support requiring fetal anesthesia for all abortions where the fetus is likely to feel pain. I think the only reason we don’t all support that kind of regulation is that pro-choice activists worry it will humanize the fetus too much. Admitting that a fetus can suffer is admitting that it has moral status at all; after all, we don’t worry about the appendix suffering when we remove them.

Animal welfare advocates perhaps shouldn’t necessarily be “pro-life” in terms of wanting to ban abortion completely. But they logically should be pro-life in terms of wanting to regulate abortion with the well being of the fetus in mind. What’s sauce for the shrimp is sauce for the tiny humans as well, as they say.

1. An adversarial collaboration is where two people on opposite sides of a contentious issue work together to write a paper about it. The rule is that nothing can be published in the final paper unless both authors agree about it, with the idea being that this creates a paper that only contains facts about the topic that both sides can agree is true. It seems to work very well in practice, I think people should do more of them.

2. Again, I don’t have any hard data to back that up but it seems pretty obvious. If you do have data that would dispute the idea that a majority of animal welfare advocates are also pro-choice, please comment with it.

3. I say implied with good reason: I don’t want to put words in his mouth on this matter, and I don’t presume to understand his fully articulated reasons for being pro-choice.

4. You can find the paper where I found most of the pain research for this post here:

Thill B. Fetal Pain in the First Trimester. Linacre Q. 2022 Feb;89(1):73-100. doi: 10.1177/00243639211059245. Epub 2021 Dec 6. PMID: 35321491; PMCID: PMC8935428.