Abortion is Just!
Why try so hard to justify the murder of the unborn? The human mind possesses a remarkable capacity for self-deception when individuals engage in behaviors they know are wrong, harmful to themselves, and detrimental to society. Understanding these psychological mechanisms reveals the complex interplay between self-preservation instincts, cognitive biases, and defensive processes that allow people to maintain a positive self-image while acting against their own stated values and societal well-being.
Core Psychological Mechanisms
Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Justification
Cognitive dissonance forms the foundation of self-justifying behavior. When people experience the uncomfortable tension between their actions and beliefs—such as knowing smoking is harmful while continuing to smoke, or knowing abortion kills a human while continuing to support it—their minds actively work to reduce this psychological discomfort. Rather than changing the harmful behavior, individuals often alter their beliefs or create elaborate justifications to maintain internal consistency.
Self-justification emerges as the primary mechanism for resolving this dissonance. This process involves creating seemingly logical explanations for objectively harmful behaviors, allowing individuals to maintain their moral self-image while continuing destructive actions. The mind becomes remarkably creative in constructing these justifications, often operating automatically and unconsciously to protect self-esteem.
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Moral Disengagement Theory
Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement theory provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how people deactivate their moral standards. This process involves eight specific mechanisms:
Behavioral Locus Mechanisms: People cognitively reinterpret their immoral behavior through moral justification (“I did it for the greater good”), euphemistic labeling (using sanitized language), and advantageous comparison (comparing their actions to worse behaviors).
Agency Locus Mechanisms: Individuals diminish personal responsibility through displacement (“I was just following orders”) and diffusion of responsibility (spreading blame across a group).
Outcome Locus Mechanisms: People ignore or misrepresent the consequences of their actions, minimizing harm or avoiding exposure to the damage they cause.
Victim Locus Mechanisms: This involves dehumanizing victims and attributing blame to those harmed, viewing oneself as faultless and the behavior as justified retaliation.
Self-Serving Bias and Motivated Reasoning
Self-serving bias manifests as the tendency to attribute successes to personal qualities while blaming failures on external factors. This bias becomes particularly pronounced when individuals face threats to their self-concept, leading them to protect their ego through selective interpretation of events.
Motivated reasoning represents the active search for information that confirms existing beliefs while rejecting contradictory evidence. Unlike simple confirmation bias, motivated reasoning involves more intensive scrutiny of unwelcome information and easier acceptance of preferred conclusions. This process allows individuals to maintain their desired beliefs despite overwhelming contrary evidence.
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Defense Mechanisms Protecting Self-Esteem
Rationalization
Rationalization serves as a primary defense mechanism, creating logical-sounding explanations for irrational or harmful behaviors. This process operates largely unconsciously, with individuals genuinely believing their constructed explanations rather than consciously deceiving themselves. The mind excels at finding seemingly reasonable justifications for unreasonable actions, protecting self-esteem while avoiding guilt and shame.
External Locus of Control and Blame Displacement
Individuals with an external locus of control consistently attribute outcomes to forces beyond their influence. This orientation facilitates harmful behavior by allowing people to avoid personal responsibility, blaming circumstances, other people, or fate for their actions and their consequences.
Scapegoating emerges as a specific manifestation of this tendency, where individuals systematically blame others for problems they themselves created or perpetuated. This mechanism deflects negative feelings and preserves self-image at others’ expense.
Psychological Reactance
Psychological reactance theory explains why prohibitions or social pressures can paradoxically increase the appeal of harmful behaviors. When individuals perceive threats to their freedom of choice, they experience an aversive motivational state that drives them toward the forbidden behavior. This mechanism can transform societal attempts to discourage harmful behavior into psychological motivators for engaging in it.
Systemic and Social Justification
System Justification Theory
System justification theory reveals how people defend social, economic, and political systems even when these systems disadvantage them personally. This theory explains the paradoxical tendency for individuals to support structures that harm their own interests, driven by psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance.
The theory identifies three motivational foundations underlying system justification: epistemic motives (reducing uncertainty), existential motives (maintaining security), and relational motives (preserving social connections). These needs can override self-interest, leading people to justify harmful systems and their own participation in them.
Just-World Hypothesis and Victim Blaming
The just-world hypothesis reflects the belief that people get what they deserve, leading to systematic victim blaming. This cognitive bias allows individuals to maintain their belief in a fair world by attributing negative outcomes to victims’ characteristics rather than acknowledging systemic injustices or random misfortune.
When applied to self-justification, this mechanism enables people to blame others for problems they themselves have created, maintaining their sense of righteousness while engaging in harmful behavior.
Memory Distortion and Motivated Forgetting
Research demonstrates that people systematically misremember their past behavior to align with their moral self-image. When individuals act selfishly, they tend to recall being more generous than they actually were, effectively rewriting history to preserve their positive self-concept. This motivated misremembering occurs specifically when people’s actions violate their personal fairness standards, regardless of how high or low those standards may be.
The phenomenon disappears when individuals no longer feel responsible for their actions, suggesting that these memory distortions serve a specific self-protective function rather than representing general memory errors.
The Entitlement-Superiority Complex
Narcissistic Justification Patterns
Narcissistic entitlement provides a particularly clear example of self-justifying harmful behavior. Grandiose narcissists justify their entitlement through perceived superiority (“I naturally deserve this”), while vulnerable narcissists use perceived injustice (“I’ve been disadvantaged and deserve compensation”).
Both patterns allow individuals to pursue selfish goals while maintaining a positive self-image, but through different psychological pathways. This entitlement serves as a shield against feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, protecting fragile self-esteem through claims of deservingness.
The Sunk Cost Trap
The sunk cost fallacy demonstrates how past investments in harmful behavior can perpetuate future harmful choices. People continue destructive patterns because they cannot bear to “waste” the time, money, or effort already invested, even when abandoning the harmful behavior would clearly benefit them and society.
This fallacy involves multiple psychological factors: loss aversion (the pain of losing feels worse than the pleasure of gaining), the framing effect (viewing continuation as success rather than failure), unrealistic optimism (overestimating chances of eventual success), and personal responsibility (feeling obligated to justify past decisions).
Abortion as a Case Study: Justifying the Termination of Human Life
A particularly striking example of these psychological mechanisms appears in abortion justification, where individuals engage in behaviors that terminate human life while employing sophisticated mental processes to avoid confronting this reality.
Biological Reality of Fetal Development
Scientific evidence demonstrates that human life begins at fertilization, forming a new organism with unique DNA distinct from the parents. The embryo develops a heartbeat at 22 days after fertilization, its own circulatory system, and organs. Medical research confirms that the fetal heart begins beating as early as 5-6 weeks gestation, with cardiac activity detectable via vaginal ultrasound.
Brain development begins remarkably early, with the first synapses forming in the spinal cord around the fifth week after conception. This marks the start of detectable brain activity in the fetus. By 8-10 weeks, the fetus moves arms, legs, fingers, and toes, demonstrating complex movements including stretching, yawning, and thumb-sucking.
The Fetal Pain Controversy and Justification
While some medical organizations claim that fetuses cannot feel pain until 24-25 weeks, emerging research challenges this assertion. Fetal responses to therapeutically indicated noxious procedures are evident by 15-16 weeks gestation and are alleviated by analgesics. Babies delivered preterm as early as 21 weeks’ gestation demonstrate reactions to painful stimuli which require active monitoring and management in NICUs.
Research indicates that pain is a neuroadaptive phenomenon that emerges in the middle of pregnancy, at about 20-22 weeks of gestation. A paradox exists in the disparate acknowledgment of pain capability where the same responses to noxious stimuli in similarly-aged fetuses are dismissed as reflexive, while identical responses in preterm infants are treated as evidence of pain.
Psychological Justification Mechanisms in Abortion
The psychological literature reveals how individuals navigate the cognitive dissonance of terminating human life. Cognitive dissonance exists on both sides of the abortion fight. Some abortion patients do not agree with abortion legality, and this subset could experience a degree of cognitive dissonance.erlc+1
Research documents various coping mechanisms women employ after abortion. Some women use self-reflection to justify the decision to abort, while others engage in avoidance coping by repressing thoughts about the abortion. Pain is eased by avoiding thinking about the child that they could have had, perceiving the fetus as a non-human being.
Dehumanization and Euphemistic Language
The abortion industry employs classic moral disengagement techniques, particularly euphemistic labeling and dehumanization. Terms like “product of conception,” “fetal tissue,” or “clump of cells” serve to linguistically distance individuals from the biological reality of human development. This represents a textbook example of euphemistic labeling where sanitized language obscures the moral weight of the action.
Women often engage in temporal distancing, focusing on their circumstances “not being the right time” rather than confronting the permanence of ending a human life. Research shows that multiple interrelated motivations play a role in a decision to have an abortion, often relating to family planning, relationships, and life circumstances. However, the findings mainly provide insight into retrospective explanatory accounts, which may be biased because respondents may feel the need to justify their choice.
Mental Health Consequences and Continued Justification
Despite claims that abortion is psychologically harmless, research reveals significant psychological impact. Abortion is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illness compared to women without a history of abortion. Every woman—whatever her age, background or sexuality—has a trauma at destroying a pregnancy, as one psychiatrist who performed thousands of abortions testified.
The continued justification process involves minimizing these psychological consequences through various cognitive mechanisms, including attributing negative feelings to external factors rather than the abortion itself, or claiming that any distress represents pre-existing mental health issues rather than consequences of the procedure.
Implications and Consequences
These psychological mechanisms create a self-reinforcing cycle where harmful behavior becomes increasingly difficult to abandon. Each justification makes the next one easier, and accumulated rationalizations create psychological momentum toward continued wrongdoing. The individual becomes progressively more invested in their constructed narrative, making honest self-assessment increasingly threatening to their carefully maintained self-image.
The social costs of these mechanisms extend beyond individual harm. When large numbers of people engage in similar self-justifying processes, entire societies can become trapped in destructive patterns, from environmental degradation to social inequality. Understanding these mechanisms represents a crucial step toward developing interventions that can help individuals and societies break free from cycles of self-defeating behavior.
The research reveals that behind every instance of knowing harmful behavior lies a sophisticated psychological architecture designed to protect the self from uncomfortable truths. While these mechanisms serve important psychological functions, their misapplication in the service of harmful behavior represents one of the most challenging aspects of human psychology to address and overcome.