Opinion essay in Washington Examiner argues moral uncertainty about fetal personhood does not resolve the abortion question in either direction
An opinion piece published September 20, 2026 in the Washington Examiner, authored by Andrew Moore, examines the moral implications of uncertainty about fetal personhood in the abortion debate. Moore argues that an inability to establish whether a fetus is a person does not constitute proof that it is not, and that costs exist on both sides of the decision. The essay draws on analogies from baseball, criminal justice, and literary works including Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Single source · Not corroborated
Andrew Moore, described as a small-business owner and author, published a philosophical opinion essay in the Washington Examiner on September 20, 2026, arguing that moral uncertainty about fetal personhood cannot be resolved simply by assuming the fetus lacks personhood. The piece does not advocate for a specific abortion policy but frames the question as one of how uncertainty itself carries moral weight.
Moore uses a baseball analogy — specifically the rule that a runner is safe when it cannot be established that the defense tagged the base first — to argue that unresolved evidence should not be treated as proof of the opposing conclusion. He writes that uncertainty about fetal personhood does not by itself establish that the fetus is not a person, and draws a parallel to the criminal-justice presumption of innocence, noting that the irreversibility of capital punishment creates a standard of extra caution.
The essay explicitly rejects a one-sided framing. Moore states that the uncertainty about fetal personhood "cannot make the cost to the woman disappear," and that pregnancy carries its own physical, psychological, and sometimes life-threatening consequences. He writes that when continued pregnancy would threaten a woman's life, "the more substantial the burden on the woman, the more difficult it becomes to justify asking her to bear that burden for an uncertain moral principle."