On family planning, I explain the moral considerations behind the proposal to temporarily suspend support for family planning charities in more detail here.
Women will often not want to have children—so we should ensure they don’t conceive in the first place instead of terminating their pregnancies.
I agree with you completely that preventing a person from being born through contraception is much better than through abortion, because the former is much better for the woman’s physical, mental, and economic health. However, the loss of a future person is common in both cases, and I elaborate on why I think that’s a moral concern here.
Something I find lacking in your description is how much more fetuses matter morally over time in my view at least.
Your observation is very fair. Your description of the disvalue of fetal death best matches the time-relative interest account (TRIA), which you can read more about here. I do bring this measure up in a footnote, but you’re right that it could have warranted a more thorough treatment in the post. TRIA best matches our intuition that the fetus’s moral significance increases through the pregnancy, and through moral uncertainty, I would justify the same intuition. However, I personally find the deprivationist approach of purely measuring the disvalue of death through the amount of (adjusted) life years prevented to be more intuitive.
Hi Denise, thank you for your thoughtful comment!
On family planning, I explain the moral considerations behind the proposal to temporarily suspend support for family planning charities in more detail here.
I agree with you completely that preventing a person from being born through contraception is much better than through abortion, because the former is much better for the woman’s physical, mental, and economic health. However, the loss of a future person is common in both cases, and I elaborate on why I think that’s a moral concern here.
Your observation is very fair. Your description of the disvalue of fetal death best matches the time-relative interest account (TRIA), which you can read more about here. I do bring this measure up in a footnote, but you’re right that it could have warranted a more thorough treatment in the post. TRIA best matches our intuition that the fetus’s moral significance increases through the pregnancy, and through moral uncertainty, I would justify the same intuition. However, I personally find the deprivationist approach of purely measuring the disvalue of death through the amount of (adjusted) life years prevented to be more intuitive.