Since there remain more abortions per annum than deaths by all causes put together, it seems that “abortion reduction interventionists” aren’t doing a very good job.
We can’t measure the success of an intervention by measuring the scale of the remaining problem. We need a reason to think that abortion activists are either ineffective or under-resourced, and given that the legality of abortion is trending downward both in the United States and globally despite rising trends in secularization, that just doesn’t seem plausible on its face. Furthermore, unlike many other charitable donors, anti-abortion activists really are primarily concerned with decreasing the number of abortions—and they’re willing to embrace all methods for doing so, including politics and even terrorism. “Voluntary abortion reduction,” honestly, sounds like one of the least effective means for achieving the aim of reducing abortions, although I could certainly be persuaded that I’m wrong on that point with data.
However, it seems like improving this system’s efficiency (would-be adopters in the US probably shouldn’t have to wait as long or pay as much as they do to adopt) and improving the culture around adoption would be a good idea even if it would be unrealistic for the infrastructure to ultimately scale enough to efficiently handle every child in need.
I want to point out that in the short run, we should actually have would-be adopters pay more and wait longer, because right now, the waiting list is enormous, and it never makes sense to address a shortage by subsidizing demand. It would probably be best if the money they pay went to the women who are having the children, even if by an indirect mechanism.
In the long run, if you did manage to eliminate the waiting list by increasing the production of children for adoption then yes, you would eventually run into the opposite need, to subsidize childrearing. But that cuts against your abortion-reduction cause.
Effectively, my model from a population-growth standpoint is this:
We have an acute child-supply shortage due mainly to paid surrogacy bans. There is no real difference between paying a woman to be a surrogate and paying a woman to carry an otherwise unwanted pregnancy to term in order to allow the child to be adopted. Both should be legal. And it’s likely to be hard to increase people’s willingness to donate this service, as we see in other cases of banned compensation for organ exchange, such as in the case of kidney donation. In combination with extracorporeal pregnancy technologies, I expect this would largely address the supply shortage.
Once the acute supply shortage is addressed by creating a “pregnancy profession,” you are faced with the problem of increasing the desire to rear children.
It’s not at all clear to me how supply and demand would scale with various subsidy measures and technological improvements, but one thing I am pretty confident about is that, on its face and by empirical analogy with the case of kidney donation, voluntary abortion reduction sounds like about the least tractable approach for achieving the aim of scaling up the supply of children available to be adopted. But that’s a strictly epistemic disagreement, and if hard data, or a convincing mechanism, were available, I’d absolutely change my mind on this point.
Edit:
One further point is that if you’re trying to convince people to carry pregnancies they don’t want out of an altruistic spirit, then a natural next move is to encourage women in EA to have babies in order to give them up for adoption (if they don’t want to raise the babies themselves). We find it charming when EAs donate kidneys to strangers, and this seems no different—indeed, a donated kidney will not generate nearly as many QALYs as a newborn baby. I find myself uncomfortable even articulating this idea, but it does seem consistent with your proposal, and more tractable than trying to convince people not to terminate pregnancies they don’t want when they’re not ideologically subscribed to EA-style altruism. All aboard, next stop Crazytown!
It’s not too crazy; being a pregnancy surrogate is something women can get paid to do and doesn’t really require any altruism. This is for an IVF baby generally, not carrying a baby with your own genetic material. The demand for babies is real. Selling eggs or sperm to gay couples trying to conceive is similar.
Edit for numbers: I think in California people pay surrogacy agencies $70,000 for everything and the women who carry the babies get about half that amount.
I should have elaborated more upon why abortion’s scale implies that those who have intervened to reduce it thus far aren’t going about it very effectively, but I’ll let Toby Ord do it instead:
Cancer, in all its forms, kills 7.6 million per year, while spontaneous abortion kills 30 times this number (World Health Organization 2005). In 6 years, the Second World War killed approximately 60 million people, whereas spontaneous abortion kills more than 3 times this number every year. For supporters of the Claim there is little choice but to see it as one of the world’s greatest problems, if not the greatest problem.
The introduction to the Scourge ended with a practical conclusion:
> There was an overwhelming obligation on society to fight it. Other projects had to be put on hold and a major international effort dedicated to loosening the Scourge’s grip on humanity.
For supporters of the Claim, it is difficult to resist a similar conclusion. Finding a means of saving even 5% of embryos from spontaneous abortion would save more lives than a cure for cancer. If we see one of these as requiring an immense international collaboration, then why not the other?
Toby’s argument is about spontaneous abortion’s neglectedness, not induced abortion, but it’s easy to divide the number by 3 (200 million → 73 million) and draw the same conclusion.
I don’t have strong disagreements with your policy prescriptions on adoption. Though you’ve retracted the crazytown comment, I’d also like to note that if (hypothetically) people who donated kidneys took 9 months to regenerate a new donateable kidney, then we’d see posts on the EA forum about how EAs should consider donating a kidney every year or so, and I’d largely agree with those posts.
On voluntary abortion reduction’s tractability, I think it’s worth pointing out that other problems of moral circle expansion including slavery, women’s rights, and hopefully animal welfare all began with voluntarily convincing people to do what was right, even in a time when few agreed. 150 years ago, slavery was widely practiced by many “civilized” countries. I don’t think it’s impossible that in 150 years, abortion will be widely regarded as the worst moral catastrophe in history between human beings. If that day ever comes, it’ll because people were convinced to take a stand, one person at a time.
Again, I really don’t think you can draw conclusions about “effectiveness,” at least as defined as “seizing the lowest-hanging fruit,” by articulating the scale of the problem.
But one other way you might find leverage is by moving the medical ethics community to include miscarriages in mortality statistics. 50% of miscarriages are due to chromosomal abnormalities and occur during the first few months of pregnancy.
Right now, we have all kinds of med ethics concerns around the idea that it’s somehow unethical to give an “advantage” by genetic modification or selection of embryos. But if we viewed that embryo as a person, or a medical patient, it is consensus unethical to make medical decisions on behalf of the welfare of anyone except that patient. So you can then only consider the health of the embryo. As a happy consequence, you not only get moral grounds for embryo engineering for health, you also (from a population growth and maternal health perspective) get ~75% fewer miscarriages if this became a common practice.
We can’t measure the success of an intervention by measuring the scale of the remaining problem. We need a reason to think that abortion activists are either ineffective or under-resourced, and given that the legality of abortion is trending downward both in the United States and globally despite rising trends in secularization, that just doesn’t seem plausible on its face. Furthermore, unlike many other charitable donors, anti-abortion activists really are primarily concerned with decreasing the number of abortions—and they’re willing to embrace all methods for doing so, including politics and even terrorism. “Voluntary abortion reduction,” honestly, sounds like one of the least effective means for achieving the aim of reducing abortions, although I could certainly be persuaded that I’m wrong on that point with data.
I want to point out that in the short run, we should actually have would-be adopters pay more and wait longer, because right now, the waiting list is enormous, and it never makes sense to address a shortage by subsidizing demand. It would probably be best if the money they pay went to the women who are having the children, even if by an indirect mechanism.
In the long run, if you did manage to eliminate the waiting list by increasing the production of children for adoption then yes, you would eventually run into the opposite need, to subsidize childrearing. But that cuts against your abortion-reduction cause.
Effectively, my model from a population-growth standpoint is this:
We have an acute child-supply shortage due mainly to paid surrogacy bans. There is no real difference between paying a woman to be a surrogate and paying a woman to carry an otherwise unwanted pregnancy to term in order to allow the child to be adopted. Both should be legal. And it’s likely to be hard to increase people’s willingness to donate this service, as we see in other cases of banned compensation for organ exchange, such as in the case of kidney donation. In combination with extracorporeal pregnancy technologies, I expect this would largely address the supply shortage.
Once the acute supply shortage is addressed by creating a “pregnancy profession,” you are faced with the problem of increasing the desire to rear children.
It’s not at all clear to me how supply and demand would scale with various subsidy measures and technological improvements, but one thing I am pretty confident about is that, on its face and by empirical analogy with the case of kidney donation, voluntary abortion reduction sounds like about the least tractable approach for achieving the aim of scaling up the supply of children available to be adopted. But that’s a strictly epistemic disagreement, and if hard data, or a convincing mechanism, were available, I’d absolutely change my mind on this point.
Edit:
One further point is that if you’re trying to convince people to carry pregnancies they don’t want out of an altruistic spirit, then a natural next move is to encourage women in EA to have babies in order to give them up for adoption (if they don’t want to raise the babies themselves). We find it charming when EAs donate kidneys to strangers, and this seems no different—indeed, a donated kidney will not generate nearly as many QALYs as a newborn baby. I find myself uncomfortable even articulating this idea, but it does seem consistent with your proposal, and more tractable than trying to convince people not to terminate pregnancies they don’t want when they’re not ideologically subscribed to EA-style altruism. All aboard, next stop Crazytown!
It’s not too crazy; being a pregnancy surrogate is something women can get paid to do and doesn’t really require any altruism. This is for an IVF baby generally, not carrying a baby with your own genetic material. The demand for babies is real. Selling eggs or sperm to gay couples trying to conceive is similar.
Edit for numbers: I think in California people pay surrogacy agencies $70,000 for everything and the women who carry the babies get about half that amount.
That is a fair point actually! I retract my crazytown comment.
Thanks for your reply!
I should have elaborated more upon why abortion’s scale implies that those who have intervened to reduce it thus far aren’t going about it very effectively, but I’ll let Toby Ord do it instead:
Toby’s argument is about spontaneous abortion’s neglectedness, not induced abortion, but it’s easy to divide the number by 3 (200 million → 73 million) and draw the same conclusion.
I don’t have strong disagreements with your policy prescriptions on adoption. Though you’ve retracted the crazytown comment, I’d also like to note that if (hypothetically) people who donated kidneys took 9 months to regenerate a new donateable kidney, then we’d see posts on the EA forum about how EAs should consider donating a kidney every year or so, and I’d largely agree with those posts.
On voluntary abortion reduction’s tractability, I think it’s worth pointing out that other problems of moral circle expansion including slavery, women’s rights, and hopefully animal welfare all began with voluntarily convincing people to do what was right, even in a time when few agreed. 150 years ago, slavery was widely practiced by many “civilized” countries. I don’t think it’s impossible that in 150 years, abortion will be widely regarded as the worst moral catastrophe in history between human beings. If that day ever comes, it’ll because people were convinced to take a stand, one person at a time.
Again, I really don’t think you can draw conclusions about “effectiveness,” at least as defined as “seizing the lowest-hanging fruit,” by articulating the scale of the problem.
But one other way you might find leverage is by moving the medical ethics community to include miscarriages in mortality statistics. 50% of miscarriages are due to chromosomal abnormalities and occur during the first few months of pregnancy.
Right now, we have all kinds of med ethics concerns around the idea that it’s somehow unethical to give an “advantage” by genetic modification or selection of embryos. But if we viewed that embryo as a person, or a medical patient, it is consensus unethical to make medical decisions on behalf of the welfare of anyone except that patient. So you can then only consider the health of the embryo. As a happy consequence, you not only get moral grounds for embryo engineering for health, you also (from a population growth and maternal health perspective) get ~75% fewer miscarriages if this became a common practice.