This is a very detailed and fairly well thought out post, an I think it’s a very important discussion to have as EA and longtermism in particular leans further towards policy as a goal. However, I strongly disagree with the argument and the framing of the conclusions, even as I agree with a number of the policy suggestions.
While I am a strong proponent of abortion being freely and easily accessible to people who want to have an abortion, I’m also very strongly in favor of people who don’t want to have one being able to access the resources and social security nets that would allow them to carry their pregnancies to term and either raise or give their children up for adoption, which seems to be a large part of what you’re suggesting. However, I don’t think the reduction of abortion is a useful or productive framing for these kinds of policies or interventions.
Goals obviously shape policies and interventions. If the goal of a policy is to reduce abortion rather than raise the quality of life for pregnant people, families and their children regardless of potentially averted abortions, this creates perverse incentives to form policies that are only focused on the pre-natal or immediately post-natal portions of the life cycle. This post outlines some suggestions for more encompassing policies, like daycare or family tax credits, but I believe that these policies should not be closely tied to a goal of reducing abortion in order to avoid these perverse incentives and distortion down the line, and that abortion reduction should at best be seen as a tertiary goal or byproduct.
Instead of spotlighting family planning, we should shift our family-focused interventions to spotlight mothers’ physical and mental health, and support adoption as an option.
I whole heartedly believe that supporting and facilitating adoption is an important and very valuable goal, but I don’t think it acts as a replacement to family planning. Family planning and access to abortion and conctraceptives are interventions that serve a different purpose than adoption services. Ideally, they allow families and individuals to make informed and well considered choices about their future and goals, which can and should be include access to abortion and conctraceptives if one does not want to be pregnant or carry a child to term. Even if adoption is easy and unstigmatized, being pregnant and giving birth can cause long-term (and sometimes catastrophic) physical and mental health effects and significant disruptions to the career of pregnant people, even in developed nations with excellent health care and social security systems in place. Being able to avoid this is an important mechanism for empowering people, including in being the best parents they can be when they choose to have children, and this should not be minimized or written off.
we should suspend our support for charities which decrease the amount of near-term future people, until we can systematically review the effect of the above moral considerations on the morality of the charities’ interventions
The extension of longtermist thinking to abortion in this way is one reason I’ve never felt comfortable with longtermism as a prevalent moral framework without a strong countervailing focus on the rights of already existing people. Interventions offering access to abortion and family planning play an important role in ensuring the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination, particularly in places where these services are not offered otherwise. While you can argue that people should be choosing to not exercise their right, arguing for the suspension of support for charities that offer these services comes off to me as implicitly arguing for a decrease in access to the tools that allow for the realization of these rights. While I’m not arguing that EAs or charities should be tasked with undergirding rights, I do think that this is an important thing to consider. I personally think that the natural conclusion to this line of argument in the abstract is that longtermists should be anti-abortion, which is something that blurs the line between reduction of “voluntary” abortion and abortion altogether, but I realize that there are different ways to interpret it and don’t at all mean to say this is what you’re arguing for.
This consideration is also important for the discussion around personal autonomy. The post argues:
The consequentialists among us would say that it would be morally wrong for us to not help our fellow people in poverty, even if helping them reduces our personal autonomy by preventing us from enjoying some of the amenities of the wealthy countries we typically reside in.
I don’t understand this conceptualization of personal autonomy. Choosing to donate your income instead of spending it is an exercise of personal autonomy, not a diminishment of it. In the same way, choosing to have a child or to have an abortion is an exercise of personal autonomy. Both interventions that increase people’s access to abortion and contraceptives and their access to infrastructure and resources that allow for them to carry pregnancies to term and then raise or put children up for adoption increase and allow for the exercise of personal autonomy. The point at which personal autonomy becomes an important consideration is when access to resources that allow for either choice is cut off, either by defunding these services or making them illegal or harder to access. Concerns about personal autonomy should not (and do not) preclude interventions providing support to people who need resources to have a safe, healthy and happy pregnancy and recovery, but they do preclude interventions that would make access to contraceptives or abortions harder.
For what it’s worth, this does read to me as at least somewhat motivated reasoning—I was more charitable when reading the post and figured it might be because of some confused argumentation or somethings being not expressed as well as they could have been, but reading the comments (particularly the one you’re responding to me) makes me lean more towards motivated reasoning clouding the reasoning and expression of ideas.