00:00:23.880So, tell me, when did you—what got you into that?
00:00:27.860It's a good question. Like, as you probably have realized living here, abortion is not a big issue in the U.K., for the most part.
00:00:34.220Nothing like it is in America. But as a doctor, you kind of come into contact with it a bit more.
00:00:40.000You have to figure out, what do I think about this? Do I want to be involved in this in any way?
00:00:43.420So, you kind of come into contact. Like I said last time I was on, one in three women has an abortion, so it's a common thing.
00:00:49.400And I went to medical school pro-choice. I didn't think—I thought that, like, late abortion is bad, like most people do.
00:00:55.980But early abortion, I was like, what's wrong with it? That's fine.
00:00:58.800And so, that's what I was like when I went to medical school.
00:01:02.000But then gradually, over time, seeing the reality of embryology, seeing the reality of abortion, seeing the impact on women, seeing the impact on society, I changed my mind.
00:01:12.020The evidence was convincing. The arguments were convincing.
00:01:14.420And so, I ended up becoming pro-life and thought, hold on, this is crazy.
00:01:19.380There's, like, 200,000 abortions in this country every year.
00:01:22.160In America, there's a million abortions every year.
00:01:24.820And almost no one is talking about this or thinks this is, like, a big problem.
00:01:28.060And so, I just felt like I have to speak about it.
00:01:31.240And so, yeah, I found it a fascinating topic in itself.
00:01:34.280But I also thought this is a huge problem that so many people in our society come into contact with, suffer from as a result.
00:01:42.100We're missing so many children as a result.
00:01:44.340Someone has to say something about this and study it more.
00:01:46.600And so, I just kind of found myself thrown into it unexpectedly.
00:01:50.580So, what changed your mind from being pro-choice?
00:01:54.380Like, what was your understanding of abortion before to what your understanding is now?
00:02:00.400But the key thing, you know, a lot of it was, I guess, what opened my mind to begin with was thinking about the impact on women.
00:02:08.940Like, we know that this is bad for women's mental health.
00:02:11.260It causes increased risks of suicide, anxiety, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, et cetera.
00:02:16.200It caused so many problems apart from that just for women.
00:02:19.420But then, for me, fundamentally, it was about human equality.
00:02:22.840When I looked at the literature on this and debated this in philosophy and things at university,
00:02:28.280you really only get two positions in ethics.
00:02:31.140You get pro-life people and then you get people who think abortion is fine and infanticide is okay.
00:02:36.900Because what they say is, well, it's not really a person because it doesn't have the right mental capacities yet.
00:02:42.920And so, it's only when the baby gets real mental capacities like an adult or like a child that it becomes a person and has the right to life.
00:02:50.300And so, those philosophers say, well, that's also true of newborn babies.
00:02:55.620They're not like, you know, children or adults.
00:02:57.800So, we should be able to kill them as well.
00:03:00.200So, I was faced with this choice between like pro-life or infanticide.
00:03:03.760And both of them seem kind of extreme, but there's really only two plausible options.
00:03:07.540And so, like I said, for me, it's fundamentally about human equality.
00:03:11.760Either you believe that all human beings are equal and have a right to life or not.
00:03:15.340If not, then that's kind of bad because you're not really, like, you don't really belong super well in the Western world if you don't believe in basic human equality in some sense.
00:03:25.800And so, then I thought, well, okay, I believe in human equality.
00:03:31.680And then whether a baby in the womb is a human being is just a scientific question.
00:03:35.600Like, we can't just decide it's a human being.
00:03:38.460We can't just say it's inconvenient so it's not a human being.
00:03:40.800We have to look from a biological perspective, from a scientific perspective, is this a human being?
00:03:46.600And the science on that is completely obvious.
00:03:49.040Like, it's the first thing you learn in embryology is that a human being begins at fertilization.
00:03:55.200And so, for me, it was really just a combination of human equality and basic science was the thing that convinced me from an intellectual perspective
00:04:02.260that this is something that is part of the human family and therefore something we have to protect and speak out about.
00:04:07.420So, when you say there's only two options, I'm a little confused by that because I think the most common answer I hear is three months.
00:04:17.820So, it's, when I say there's only two options, I mean, like, generally that's the case for most people who study this in real depth from an ethical point of view.
00:04:27.160So, the average person, absolutely, the most common thing is, like, three months or in England, they often say six months because that's the law in England.
00:04:34.440You can have an abortion for any reason up to six months here.
00:04:38.660When I say there's two options, I mean there's two kind of plausible options.
00:04:42.220So, what most philosophers, whether they're pro-life or pro-choice, have pointed out is that nothing morally significant happens at three months.
00:04:50.120Like, at three months, it finally looks really like a baby.
00:04:54.760But, like, it looks quite a lot like a baby much earlier than that.
00:04:58.500And we also know that what you look like doesn't really affect what you are morally.
00:05:11.240So, yeah, many people would say three months.
00:05:13.940But when you ask them what changes at three months to make this morally significant, what makes this a valuable human being at three months, it's very rare that they could give you an answer.
00:05:23.640I think the most common things I hear are, like, heartbeat.
00:07:27.200So, there's a huge, you know, load of development really, really early on.
00:07:31.580At 10 weeks, when pain kind of is possible and when consciousness is possible is pretty controversial because we can never really know for certain.
00:07:41.920But the world's leading researcher on fetal pain, who is pro-choice, he says, like, women should have the choice to have an abortion, but we have to be honest about fetal development.
00:07:50.940He actually changed his mind a couple of years ago and said pain is probably possible from about 10 weeks after fertilization.
00:08:00.200Some people think it's even earlier, like seven weeks.
00:08:27.640So often people will say, okay, late-term abortions after, like, 20 weeks, this is a baby that's pretty much viable.
00:08:33.560Viability is now around 21 to 22 weeks.
00:08:35.840They will say that late-term abortions are only ever for these extreme situations, like the baby has a fatal disability and it's going to die after birth anyway, or the mother has an emergency medical situation that needs an abortion.
00:08:50.820There are multiple studies, multiple sets of government data, which show very clearly most abortions after 20 weeks are for social and economic reasons.
00:09:06.140So, like, in the UK, for example, the Department of Health categorizes every abortion.
00:09:11.820So every abortion that's done in England legally, they have to fill out a form that actually has a lot of interesting data on it.
00:09:18.220And we know that 98% of those abortions are done for so-called mental health reasons, which can mean anything at all.
00:09:24.340It can mean because the baby's a girl, you can say having a baby girl would affect my mental health, therefore I can have an abortion for mental health reasons.
00:09:31.800So mental health is 98% of them in the UK official data.
00:09:36.720The baby having a disability is about 1.5%.
00:09:39.720And then about 100 abortions a year are because the woman's life is at risk.
00:09:44.540So that's like 0.01%, something tiny, tiny.