Yet, besides the proven cases of concept creep and moral judgments, there are also multiple documented examples of the slippery slope happening (or slipping) in various social domains, such as:
Abortion
Gay marriage
Euthanasia
IVF (New York Times article)
Whether or not one considers these slippery slopes to have been good, i.e. slopes that *should* have slipped, it is incontestable that they indeed did.
In this post I shall provide some material on the slippery slope of abortion. Hopefully in future posts I will follow up on the others (with the exception of IVF, since the NYT has already covered that).
In the United Kingdom, the 1967 Abortion Act allowed abortion if two medical practitioners certified:
(a)that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or
(b)that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.
In 1974, only 7 years later, Dr John Habgood, the Bishop of Durham and House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics noted that:
The Abortion Act has shown what happens. Whatever the rights and wrongs concerning the present practice of abortion, there is no doubt about two consequences of the 1967 [Abortion] Act:
(a) The safeguards and assurances given when the Bill was passed have to a considerable extent been ignored.
(b) Abortion has now become a live option for anybody who is pregnant. This does not imply that everyone who is facing an unwanted pregnancy automatically attempts to procure an abortion. But because abortion is now on the agenda, the climate of opinion in which such a pregnancy must be faced has radically altered.
Even in 7 years, the slippery slope had already slipped (presciently, Habgood warned of the slippery slope of euthanasia)
In 2008, Lord Steel, who had introduced the 1967 Abortion Act itself, said that abortion was now being used as birth control, and people were being lackadaisical and irresponsible.
Similarly, in 2017, Ann Furedi, the Chief Executive of bpas (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), an independent healthcare charity in the UK, said that:
Abortion is birth control that women need when their regular method lets them down
(Naturally, I've been told that it's a myth that anyone is calling abortion birth control)
And of course today, anyone in the UK proposing to hew to the 1967 Abortion Act (i.e. not having abortion on demand) would be labelled a misogynist who wanted to control women's bodies (with the possible exception of Northern Ireland - though activists are of course unhappy with the status quo there).
Doubtless, this won't stop liberals from mocking people who invoke the very real possibility (perhaps even inevitably) of the slippery slope.
Why the slippery slope happens is an interesting question, and harder to answer than establishing its existence.
In 1972, H. L. A. Hart, who had supported the 1967 Abortion Act which legalised therapeutic abortion, noted that: "its effects had been greatly underestimated by those who brought about the change. What had been envisaged by many as simply a permission, recognising an area of liberty in place of prohibition, had proved to be the introduction of a vast structure of new relationships, institutions, funding, professional obligations, and so forth, involving changes in the ethics, practices, and dispositions of doctors, midwives, social workers, psychiatrists, and people at large" (as paraphrased by Finnis).
More specifically, Finnis notes that medical professioners who had been against the 1967 act "soon became massively opposed to any reform that might slightly reduce the treatment options that had become available to them". To summarise, we could perhaps call this status quo bias (which would explain the stabilisation at each slip, though not further slips).
As for further slips, as previously mentioned, the human brain is wired to find problems. So as each reform is passed, or each change happens, new causes are found and latched on to.
Virtue signalling is another reason - in a related phenomenon to the above, as each proposition becomes uncontroversial, the optical value of holding it goes to zero. So the virtue signaller needs to look for new positions to hold to show how moral or virtuous he is.
Hopefully there will be more research on this in the future.
