Abortion as a Secular Pascal's Wager

AbstractIn the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many legal and philosophical arguments against abortion appeal to moral risk: if abortion might be murder, individuals and lawmakers must “err on the side of life.” I argue that this form of “abortion as homicide risk” reasoning is a secular descendant of Pascal’s Wager. It assigns effectively infinite or lexically absolute disvalue to the possibility of killing a person, while treating all competing harms—risks to bodily autonomy, health, equality, and the life-trajectories of pregnant people and future children—as merely finite. Drawing on work in decision theory, infinite ethics, and population ethics, I show that such Pascalian templates break down once large or “infinite-like” stakes appear on multiple sides of a decision, and that their apparent asymmetry is sustained by a contestable ontological choice: discretizing fetuses as full persons from conception while modeling others’ suffering as continuous and compressible. I develop a non-antinatalist, localist ethical stance that foregrounds foreseeable, context-specific harms without presupposing that life as such is bad, and I argue—within a public reason framework—that Pascalian moral-risk arguments are inadmissible as foundations for coercive abortion law in a pluralistic society. A comparatively permissive, pro-choice legal regime is best understood as an ethical hedge under deep moral uncertainty: it does not enforce any one metaphysical wager about personhood at the cost of conscripting unwilling individuals into reproductive roles justified only by that wager. AI collaborator statementThis work was developed in sustained collaboration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT-5.1 Thinking), which served as a structural refiner (proposing and revising the overall organization of the framework), a stress-tester (probing for inconsistencies, gaps, and failure modes), and a stylistic drafter (producing initial text later edited and curated by the human author). The human author remains the sole legal and moral author of record, responsible for the selection, acceptance, and modification of all AI-generated material and for all substantive claims made in this document. abortion ethics, moral risk, Pascal’s Wager, public reason, infinite ethics