EA - A Case for Voluntary Abortion Reduction by Ariel Simnegar

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Case for Voluntary Abortion Reduction, published by Ariel Simnegar on December 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Trigger warning: Abortion is a delicate topic, especially for those of us who've had abortions or otherwise feel strongly on this issue. I've tried to make the following case with care and sensitivity, and if it makes anyone feel uncomfortable, I wholeheartedly apologize.Disclaimer: This essay specifically concerns voluntary abortion reduction. Any discussion of involuntary intervention is outside of this post's scope.Thanks to Ives Parrhesia, Marcus Abramovitch, Ruth Grace Wong, and several anonymous helpers. Their help does not constitute an endorsement of this essay's conclusions.SummaryMany EA principles point us towards supporting voluntary abortion reduction:Moral circle expansion.We're receptive to arguments that we should expand our moral circle to include animals and future people.We should be open to the possibility that fetuses—the future people closest to us—could be included in our moral circle too.Our concern for neglected and disenfranchised moral groups.If fetuses are moral patients, then they are relatively neglected and disenfranchised, with more abortions occuring each year than deaths by all causes combined.The metric of (adjusted) life years.We commonly use (adjusted) life years as a measure of the disvalue of problems and the value of interventions.This metric arguably doesn't distinguish between fetal deaths and infant deaths.Singerian duties to give to help those in need.We're typically sympathetic to arguments that we should proactively help those in need, even if it reduces our personal autonomy.We should consider whether we should help our children the same way.Longtermist philosophical views.Longtermists are typically receptive to total / low critical level views, non-person-affecting views, and pro-natalism.Just as these views seem to imply that we should care for people in the far future, they also seem to imply that we should care for fetuses, the future people closest to us.Moral uncertainty's implications for a potential problem of massive scale.Given abortion's massive scale, even a small chance that fetuses are moral patients could imply that we should do something about it.In that regard, we should carry out the following interventions:Shift our family-focused interventions to spotlight mothers' physical and mental health, and support adoption as an option.Suspend our support for charities which reduce 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.In our personal lives, we should:Understand the situations of people we know who are considering abortion and do whatever we can to support them in having their babies the way they would like.Help each other to be loving parents and raise thriving children, whether or not some of us have abortions or choose to not have children.Introduction: Moral Circle ExpansionFuture people count, but we rarely count on them. They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can't bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market. And they can't make their views heard directly: they can't tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don't exist yet.Will MacAskill, What We Owe The Future (2022), pp. 9-10.As EAs, we're no strangers to expanding our moral circle. We’re rooted in the idea that distance shou...