With the recent Roe v Wade decision many are thinking about ways to support reproductive rights in America.
I’m not here to argue that this is a global priority or a more important cause area than others. I’m instead here to ask, given one considers reproductive rights in America an important cause area, what actions are most effective to increase things like access to abortion, contraception, and family planning?
I’d be interested in things like studies of what interventions work best, data on what orgs might make most effective use marginal donations, etc.
ETA: I’m not very interested here in discussing the question of if reproductive rights of Americans are an EA cause area. There’s one comment about this from user Larks. I’ll ask future comments about this topic to be deleted as off topic. I’m only interested here in the question of, assuming you accept this is a cause area to do something about, what can we say about the ways to do the most good assuming that framing. I’m asking it that way because I specifically want to avoid discussing a charged political issue on the forum. If it would make people happy, I’d be just as interested to see a similar question asking for the best ways to restrict access to abortion and contraception.
The purpose of the forum is ‘writing that will help us do the most good’, not how to effectively pursue some political objective that people care about for non-EA reasons. It is fine to advocate that some novel cause area perhaps could be an EA cause, even if that seems unlikely or highly speculative, but I don’t think we should encourage people to post about their personal cause with indifference to whether it could be highly effective. ‘How to support abortion’ is the topic du jour on a huge variety of online venues; this forum should be focused on what is distinctly EA.
In this case, not only does this seem unlikely to be a top priority by cause-neutral EA lights, EA considerations (e.g. moral circle expansion, caring about future generations, moral uncertainty, total view population ethics, scope sensitivity, and advocating for those who cannot advocate for themselves) seem like they would actually push in the opposite direction: they make abortion look worse, and trying to reduce it seem better, than would appear to a non-EA with similar background. Despite this, I am intuitively somewhat skeptical that trying to reduce abortion would be a top EA cause area either, because it does not seem very neglected.
I have downvoted this comment.
I broadly resonate with the message that EAs should focus on the things that make them unique and that we should uphold the mentality of figuring out the most impact.
But I think some parts of the EA mindset would be very useful to tackle some other important issues like reproductive rights, and I think we should encourage playful and scientific exploration of topics.
These explorations are good exercises of cost effectiveness analysis, will help us find new problems to tackle and curiosity is a great value to promote.
I think this is a reasonable position, but I don’t think it’s a convincing defense of the OP. “Does it make sense to fly business class, and if so when” is a plausible ‘playful and scientific exploration’, that could benefit from EA-style analysis. But “how can I get my employer to let me fly business” is not, because the it assumes the part of the question—whether flying business class at all is good—where EA considerations can bring the most light. Considering a wide range of possible issues can help us find new problems to tackle, and hence is worthwhile as you said, but not if you simply assume they are good things to work on—you have to actually analyze this question, including the potential that the exact opposite is true.
I disagree. Questions like this one (or like what is the best NGO for hunger relief in Somalia?) are relevant to doing good better. Even if you think (eg) abortion access is bad on the margin, many reasonable people think it’s good, and regardless some interventions are more robustly good than others. Insofar as someone is trying to do the most good with their resources, they should consider many possible causes; insofar as resources are locked in the particular goal of expanding reproductive rights, they should look for the very best interventions in that domain.
If you believe this, doesn’t it flip the sign of the “very best interventions” (ie you would believe they are exceptionally bad interventions)?
Insofar as the relevant interventions are only assessed by something like “number of abortions counterfactually caused,” yes. But within the “reproductive rights” domain, there are interventions that affect other relevant dimensions too.
I notice a similarity to this post.
Somebody writes about an issue that happens to be a popular mainstream cause and asks, “how can I be most effective at doing good, given that I want to work specifically on this cause?”
I’m not saying the two issues are remotely equivalent. Obviously, to argue “this should be an EA cause area” would require very different arguments, and one might be much stronger than the other. With Ukraine, maybe you could justify it as being adjacent to nuclear risk, but the post wasn’t talking about nuclear risk. Maybe close to being about preventing great power conflict, but the post wasn’t talking about that, either. So, like this post, it is outside of the “standard” EA cause areas.
This comment seems to imply that if somebody is posting about a cause that isn’t within the “standard” cause areas, then they should need to justify posting about it as to why this would be better than other cause areas. They cannot “leave that exercise to the reader.” The first paragraph of this comment makes a meta-level point that suggests people shouldn’t even post about an issue and let readers debate it in the comments (which, in fairness, is not what the author of this post did, when explicitly asking for it not to be debated in the comments after this comment was written). Instead, the author themselves must make a case for the object-level merits of the cause.
It seems others might agree, given that this comment has more karma than the original post (edit: this may or may not be currently true, but it was true at the time of this comment). If people on the forum have these beliefs about meta-level discussion norms, then I ask: why apply it to abortion and not Ukraine?
I strongly suspect that the answer is that people are letting their object-level opinions of issues subtly motivate their meta-level opinions of discussion norms. I’d rather that not happen.
I agree it should apply to both; if your question is why didn’t I object to the previous post I don’t have any specific defense other than having no recollection of seeing the Ukraine post at the time, though maybe I saw it and forgot.
I wasn’t intending to single out you or any specific person when asking that question. More that the community overall seems to collectively have responded differently (in view of up/downvotes). Due to the fact that different people see different posts, it’s hardly a controlled experiment, so it could have been just chance who happened to see the post first and make a first impression.
I’ve edited my post to make it clear I think this is an off topic discussion within the context of this question. I think it’s fine for this comment to stay because it was there before I made this clarification, but I have asked the moderators to convert this from an answer to a proper comment.
Hi OP—thanks for posting. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about too. The doctor based out of the Netherlands running Aid Access is doing a lot of good work in this space (specifically to abortion). It’s a system that has been widely scaled.