Transformative experience and the limits of legal consent: a response to Räsänen

Joona Räsänen argues that abortion is a paradigmatic 'transformative experience' and that such experiences weaken autonomy-based justifications for abortion because individuals cannot fully anticipate how either abortion or continued pregnancy will alter their future values and identities. This response challenges the legal implications of that claim. Transformative experiences are pervasive across medicine and ordinary life, yet legal standards of informed consent do not require predictive insight into future identity, only disclosure of material clinical risks and alternatives. Moreover, the epistemic uncertainty Räsänen highlights applies symmetrically to both abortion and childbirth, making it conceptually unsound to treat abortion as uniquely deficient in informed consent. Introducing heightened epistemic demands risks reinforcing antiabortion restrictions premised on assumed decisional incapacity. Rather than tightening consent requirements, a more defensible approach is to strengthen the structural conditions that enable meaningful reproductive choice. Uncertainty is not a threat to autonomy; it is a normal feature of human agency that legal doctrine already accommodates.