What I was saying is that, for the type of longtermism that assumes that the average persons life will be of positive value, and that it is morally good to maximize the total number of people to maximize total happiness, and assumes that allowing a life to come into existence is as good as saving a life, abortion seems to be morally bad, unless you argue that abortion being banned will have enough of a negative effect to outweigh all the lives that would not have existed if it were banned (which I think one could definitely argue). I say type of longtermism because there are definitely different approaches to longtermism and these assumptions are not representative of all, and I disagree with many of the assumptions here. I particularly disagree that total value or wellbeing, as opposed to aggregate as you mention in your comment, is a meaningful metric, but I realize there are different views on that.
For total-view longtermism, I think the most important things are ~civilization is on a good trajectory, people are prudent/careful with powerful new technology, the world is lower conflict, investments are made to improve resilience to large catastrophes, etc. Restricting abortion seems kinda bad for several of those things, and positive for none. So it seems like total-view longtermism, even ignoring all other reasons to think this, says abortion-restriction is bad.
I guess part of this is a belief that in the long-run, the number of morally-valuable lives & total wellbeing (e.g. in a 10 million years) is very uncorrelated or anti-correlated with near-term world population. (though I also think restricting abortion is one of the worst ways to go about increasing near-term population, even for those who do think near-term & very-long-term are pretty positively correlated)
I agree with everything you’ve said here.
What I was saying is that, for the type of longtermism that assumes that the average persons life will be of positive value, and that it is morally good to maximize the total number of people to maximize total happiness, and assumes that allowing a life to come into existence is as good as saving a life, abortion seems to be morally bad, unless you argue that abortion being banned will have enough of a negative effect to outweigh all the lives that would not have existed if it were banned (which I think one could definitely argue). I say type of longtermism because there are definitely different approaches to longtermism and these assumptions are not representative of all, and I disagree with many of the assumptions here. I particularly disagree that total value or wellbeing, as opposed to aggregate as you mention in your comment, is a meaningful metric, but I realize there are different views on that.
I guess I did mean aggregate in the ‘total’ well-being sense. I just feel pretty far from neutral about creating people who will live wonderful lives, and also pretty strongly disagree with the belief that restricting abortion will create more total well-being in the long run (or short tbh).
For total-view longtermism, I think the most important things are ~civilization is on a good trajectory, people are prudent/careful with powerful new technology, the world is lower conflict, investments are made to improve resilience to large catastrophes, etc. Restricting abortion seems kinda bad for several of those things, and positive for none. So it seems like total-view longtermism, even ignoring all other reasons to think this, says abortion-restriction is bad.
I guess part of this is a belief that in the long-run, the number of morally-valuable lives & total wellbeing (e.g. in a 10 million years) is very uncorrelated or anti-correlated with near-term world population. (though I also think restricting abortion is one of the worst ways to go about increasing near-term population, even for those who do think near-term & very-long-term are pretty positively correlated)