The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,260

Just as the legally recognized end of life is now defined by the cessation of brain activity rather than the cessation of a heartbeat, the beginning of life is sensed to depend on the first stirrings of consciousness in the fetus. The current understanding of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty-six weeks of gestational age.152 More to the point, people conceive of fetuses as less than fully conscious: the psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel Wegner have shown that people think of fetuses as more capable of experience than robots or corpses, but less capable than animals, babies, children, and adults.153 The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.

At the same time, we might expect a general distaste for the destruction of any kind of living thing to turn people away from abortion even when they don’t equate it with murder. And that indeed has happened. It’s a little-known fact that rates of abortion are falling throughout the world. Figure 7–16 shows the rates of abortion in the major regions in which data are available (albeit differing widely in quality) in the 1980s, 1996, and 2003.

The decline has been steepest in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, which were said to have had a “culture of abortion.” During the communist era abortions were readily available, but contraceptives, like every other consumer good, were allocated by a central commissar rather than by supply and demand, so they were always in short supply. But abortions have also become less common in China, the United States, and the Asian and Islamic countries in which they are legal. Only in India and Western Europe did abortion rates fail to decline, and those are the regions where the rates were lowest to begin with.

FIGURE 7–16. Abortions in the world, 1980–2003

Sources: 1980s: Henshaw, 1990; 1996 & 2003: Sedgh et al., 2007. “Eastern Europe” comprises Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic & Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia/Serbia-Montenegro, Romania. “Western Europe” comprises Belgium, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden. “Asia” comprises Singapore, Japan, South Korea (2003 equated with 1996). “Islamic” comprises Tunisia and Turkey.

The causes of much of the decline, to be sure, are practical. Contraception is cheaper and more convenient than abortion, and if it’s readily available it will be the first choice of people with the foresight and self-control to use it. But presumably abortion has a moral dimension even among those who undergo it and among their compatriots who want to keep the option safe and legal. Abortion is seen as something to be minimized, even if it is not criminalized. If so, the trends in abortion offer a sliver of common ground in the rancorous debate between the so-called pro-life and pro-choice factions. The countries that allow abortion have not let an indifference to life put them on a slippery slope to infanticide or other forms of violence. But these same countries increasingly act as if abortion is undesirable, and they may be reducing its incidence as part of the move to protect all living things.

During the long, sad history of violence against children, even when infants survived the day of their birth it was only to endure harsh treatment and cruel punishments in the years to come. Though hunter-gatherers tend to use corporal punishment in moderation, the dominant method of child-rearing in every other society comes right out of Alice in Wonderland: “Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes.”154 The reigning theory of child development was that children were innately depraved and could be socialized only by force. The expression “Spare the rod and spoil the child” has been attributed to an advisor to the king of Assyria in the 7th century BCE and may have been the source of Proverbs 13:24, “He that spareth the rod hateth his son: But he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”155 A medieval French verse advised, “Better to beat your child when small than to see him hanged when grown.” The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (Increase’s son) extended the concern for the child’s well-being to the hereafter: “Better whipt than Damn’d.”156

As with all punishments, human ingenuity rose to the technological challenge of delivering experiences that were as unpleasant as