If you think that embryos and fetuses have moral value, then abortion becomes a very important issue in terms of scale. However, it’s not very neglected, and the evidence suggests that increased access to contraceptives, not restricted access to abortion services, is driving the decline in abortion rates in the U.S.
Designing medical technology to reduce miscarriages (which are spontaneous abortions) may be an especially important, neglected, and tractable way to prevent embryos/​fetuses and parents from suffering. (10-50% of pregnancies end in miscarriages.)
It would be interesting if person-affecting arguments lead one to pass on reducing abortion, because while you care about currently existing babies, by the time any intervention you might support today will have any effect, they will have already been born or not, and hence too late to help. There will be a new cohort in need of help, of course, but you don’t care about them until they’re conceived, so won’t be interested in working to help them now.
More generally, you would neglect any intervention that only affects people under the age of X if it will take longer than X years to implement the intervention.
However, if such an initiative was started by longtermists, person-affecting-view-ists might join it half way through. This suggests an interesting way for longtermists to leverage* the help of people with person-affecting views! (It is possible you might think it was immoral to exploit their temporal inconsistency in this way however).
This is assuming that death isn’t bad, though, right? In a sense, the fetus exists in the whole of the outcome, past, present and future together, regardless of what we do, and then it becomes a question of whether or not a longer life can be better on such an account for a fetus (and whether or not fetuses should count). New_EA did write:
I think the world ending would be bad because 7 billion people would die
EDIT: Ah, did you mean we’d always be too late? On a wide person-affecting view, the future ones could still matter.
However, it’s not very neglected, and the evidence suggests that increased access to contraceptives, not restricted access to abortion services, is driving the decline in abortion rates in the U.S.
The linked opinion piece asserts that abortion regulations are not responsible for the improvement, but doesn’t seem to provide any evidence to back it up?
I am not that familiar with the literature, but it would seem prima facie rather implausible to me that making something illegal wouldn’t help reduce its prevalence. If statistics suggest the US decline is being driven by other policies, I would guess this is because the restrictions that have been put in place are quite weak—abortion-for-convenience remains legal in all 50 states, and even a your state did impose some limitation, they cannot stop someone travelling to an unregulated state. However, a quick google suggests that some academic research does find that the restrictions that have been put in place have helped reduce the rate. Additionally, it seems that the number of abortions in Ireland has gone up significantly since their law change, even taking into account people travelling to the UK, so presumably reversing that change would help reduce the number. This also fits with my impression of what has happened in other many countries when they banned/​unbanned abortion.
I totally agree that reducing miscarriage rates could be very interesting. Are you aware of any tractable interventions? I had a little look a few years ago but did not find anything very satisfactory.
If you think that embryos and fetuses have moral value, then abortion becomes a very important issue in terms of scale.
This might not be the case if you have a narrow person-affecting view so that whether A or B is born doesn’t matter, even if one would be substantially better off than the other (see my answer on the nonidentity problem). In that case, the fetuses that don’t yet exist (or those that won’t exist until after some point) might not matter, because which ones would come to exist could be sensitive to your actions (think butterfly effect). Then, the scale of the problem is restricted to the fetuses whose identities are already determined, and you might be too late to help almost all of them.
Same conclusion with presentist views, so that only those that currently exist matter.
If you think that embryos and fetuses have moral value, then abortion becomes a very important issue in terms of scale. However, it’s not very neglected, and the evidence suggests that increased access to contraceptives, not restricted access to abortion services, is driving the decline in abortion rates in the U.S.
Designing medical technology to reduce miscarriages (which are spontaneous abortions) may be an especially important, neglected, and tractable way to prevent embryos/​fetuses and parents from suffering. (10-50% of pregnancies end in miscarriages.)
Plausibly, feotuses will not be morally relevant on such a view as they won’t exist whatever we choose to do.
It would be interesting if person-affecting arguments lead one to pass on reducing abortion, because while you care about currently existing babies, by the time any intervention you might support today will have any effect, they will have already been born or not, and hence too late to help. There will be a new cohort in need of help, of course, but you don’t care about them until they’re conceived, so won’t be interested in working to help them now.
More generally, you would neglect any intervention that only affects people under the age of X if it will take longer than X years to implement the intervention.
However, if such an initiative was started by longtermists, person-affecting-view-ists might join it half way through. This suggests an interesting way for longtermists to leverage* the help of people with person-affecting views! (It is possible you might think it was immoral to exploit their temporal inconsistency in this way however).
This is assuming that death isn’t bad, though, right? In a sense, the fetus exists in the whole of the outcome, past, present and future together, regardless of what we do, and then it becomes a question of whether or not a longer life can be better on such an account for a fetus (and whether or not fetuses should count). New_EA did write:
EDIT: Ah, did you mean we’d always be too late? On a wide person-affecting view, the future ones could still matter.
The linked opinion piece asserts that abortion regulations are not responsible for the improvement, but doesn’t seem to provide any evidence to back it up?
I am not that familiar with the literature, but it would seem prima facie rather implausible to me that making something illegal wouldn’t help reduce its prevalence. If statistics suggest the US decline is being driven by other policies, I would guess this is because the restrictions that have been put in place are quite weak—abortion-for-convenience remains legal in all 50 states, and even a your state did impose some limitation, they cannot stop someone travelling to an unregulated state. However, a quick google suggests that some academic research does find that the restrictions that have been put in place have helped reduce the rate. Additionally, it seems that the number of abortions in Ireland has gone up significantly since their law change, even taking into account people travelling to the UK, so presumably reversing that change would help reduce the number. This also fits with my impression of what has happened in other many countries when they banned/​unbanned abortion.
I totally agree that reducing miscarriage rates could be very interesting. Are you aware of any tractable interventions? I had a little look a few years ago but did not find anything very satisfactory.
This might not be the case if you have a narrow person-affecting view so that whether A or B is born doesn’t matter, even if one would be substantially better off than the other (see my answer on the nonidentity problem). In that case, the fetuses that don’t yet exist (or those that won’t exist until after some point) might not matter, because which ones would come to exist could be sensitive to your actions (think butterfly effect). Then, the scale of the problem is restricted to the fetuses whose identities are already determined, and you might be too late to help almost all of them.
Same conclusion with presentist views, so that only those that currently exist matter.
EDIT: Larks made the same point.