FWIW I would have appreciated a BOTEC for the cost-effectiveness of various anti-abortion interventions (under the assumption of the wrongness of abortion). You gesture that it’s possible to affect the number of abortions via policy, but this is obviously a pretty limited analysis. Absent this sort of BOTEC, this reads as a case for policy-makers to restrict abortion, rather than an effective altruist case for pro-life/anti-abortion advocacy, as your title promises.
I guess I should add why I’d like such a BOTEC: I’m broadly skeptical that anti-abortion interventions will turn out to be competitive with animal welfare interventions on a cost-effectiveness basis under the assumption of foetal moral patienthood, given that my impression is that animal welfare has a vastly wider scale (perhaps with exceptions like choosing to not have an abortion or voting for your polity to criminalize abortion).
Here’s one example—I suggest it only needs to be in somewhere near the right ballpark to have a significant impact.
We don’t know how many legal abortions there are in India each year, because they don’t keep good statistics. But suppose the rate is similar to most other countries with legal abortion—this would be about 4 million abortions a year. If, as I suggest, prohibition of abortion prevents at least half of abortions, then for every year you delay the legalisation of abortion, that would be at least 2 million lives saved. Given how neglected the topic is politically in many countries like India (on the pro-life side, at least), I think you could have delayed the legalisation of abortion by at least a month with a team of 10 people working full time for, say, a year. That’s perhaps £100,000 - and would have saved ~170k lives.
Again, this is pretty speculative, but if it is anywhere near the right ballpark, then it looks pretty compelling in terms of cost-effectiveness.
FWIW I would have appreciated a BOTEC for the cost-effectiveness of various anti-abortion interventions (under the assumption of the wrongness of abortion). You gesture that it’s possible to affect the number of abortions via policy, but this is obviously a pretty limited analysis. Absent this sort of BOTEC, this reads as a case for policy-makers to restrict abortion, rather than an effective altruist case for pro-life/anti-abortion advocacy, as your title promises.
I guess I should add why I’d like such a BOTEC: I’m broadly skeptical that anti-abortion interventions will turn out to be competitive with animal welfare interventions on a cost-effectiveness basis under the assumption of foetal moral patienthood, given that my impression is that animal welfare has a vastly wider scale (perhaps with exceptions like choosing to not have an abortion or voting for your polity to criminalize abortion).
Here’s one example—I suggest it only needs to be in somewhere near the right ballpark to have a significant impact.
We don’t know how many legal abortions there are in India each year, because they don’t keep good statistics. But suppose the rate is similar to most other countries with legal abortion—this would be about 4 million abortions a year. If, as I suggest, prohibition of abortion prevents at least half of abortions, then for every year you delay the legalisation of abortion, that would be at least 2 million lives saved. Given how neglected the topic is politically in many countries like India (on the pro-life side, at least), I think you could have delayed the legalisation of abortion by at least a month with a team of 10 people working full time for, say, a year. That’s perhaps £100,000 - and would have saved ~170k lives.
Again, this is pretty speculative, but if it is anywhere near the right ballpark, then it looks pretty compelling in terms of cost-effectiveness.