The "plausible alternative coalitions" game seems to illustrate — by contrast — the historical processes by which actual political positions came about. For instance, the anti-abortion position didn't actually come about through an "expanding sphere of moral worth" extending rights to fetuses; and the fact that anti-abortion folks are not the same people as animal-rights folks is evidence that it didn't.

Early anti-abortion jurisprudence in England and the U.S. categorized a woman taking an abortifacient as felo de se — a felon against herself — the same standing as a suicide. [1] The crime was not defined in terms of the fetus possessing rights, but in terms of a violence against the woman's body. On similar reasoning, many first-wave feminists opposed medical abortion as a violent intrusion;[2] while they were interested in reproductive freedom, for many of them this meant the right of a wife to choose when and whether to have sex with her husband.

Other issues involved in banning abortion in the U.S. included the legal establishment of the medical profession (with physicians using the law to drive midwives out of business) and eugenics. The major customers of abortion in the 19th century were middle- and upper-class native-born white women; and eugenicists raised the concern that these desirable classes would commit "race suicide" and be outbred by undesirable immigrants and poor people. [3]

The modern religious "pro-life" anti-abortion position, although it is often stated in terms of fetal rights, is also entangled with other motives: among these, religious opposition to contraception in general, and opposition to the social consequences of individual control over reproduction, viz., sexual freedom or license.

Few of these actual historical entanglements have the sense of an "expanding sphere of moral worth" towards the fetus; in other words, a moral foundation of fairness and justice. They show patterns more attached to other moral foundations — care towards the woman herself; loyalty towards racial and class groups; religious authority; and sexual sanctity or purity.