The Nonlinear Library EA - The effective altruist case for pro-life/anti-abortion advocacy by Calum Miller
Nov 13, 2023
31:56
Welcome 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: The effective altruist case for pro-life/anti-abortion advocacy, published by Calum Miller on November 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
There is a good case that abortion is morally impermissible - or at least there is significant moral uncertainty.
Even if these arguments fail, abortion could still be a matter of serious concern for EAs (e.g. because fetuses could have significant but not full moral status, or because there are ways to reduce abortions without punishing women for getting them). Put another way, even if one believes abortion is permissible, it likely remains a comparable problem to any problem of infant mortality - but with even more lost life-years, and occurring on a much larger scale than infant mortality.
This is a very important problem, given the life lost and the scale of the problem - tens of millions of abortions around the world each year.
Outside the US, the problem is virtually unchallenged - and even in the US, there are high-impact sectors with minimal anti-abortion sentiment or efforts.
The issue is more tractable than one might think, for various reasons: it is a highly neglected area in most of the world; there are effective and popular policy interventions even in the most pro-choice countries, but even more so in more pro-life countries; progress can be made even without policy interventions; even small reductions in the abortion rate save huge numbers of lives; many people are open to changing their minds about abortion and can do so in a relatively short time; etc.
If you are one of the ~15% of religious EAs, you probably have even more reason to be convinced.
Sex education and contraception may or may not work depending on the case.
Introduction
I realise this is a sensitive topic. In the developed world around 1 in 3 women have an abortion in their lifetime, meaning it is likely people reading this post have been, or will be, personally invested and affected by the topic of abortion. Please forgive me if I fail to address it in a sufficiently sensitive way, and know that this was not my intention. There is, of course, so much more to say about this, but I wanted to try and keep the post relatively short.
I wrote most of this up a couple of years ago but never got round to posting it until Ariel Simnegar's post, which encouraged me to refine it a little and share here. Though I've always been on the fringes of EA and certainly don't consider myself to be up to date on EA thinking, it was EA thinking that originally made me passionate about this area some years ago, subsequently focusing my academic research on it.
I think this is an important topic for effective altruists to wrestle with, for various reasons: a) if I am right, this one of the most important, neglected, and tractable problems facing humans in the near term; b) as Ariel Simnegar previously pointed out, effective altruists have typically been pretty open to considering neglected causes and particularly neglected communities - animals, future people, etc; c) so much popular discourse around abortion is hostile and badly reasoned, and effective altruists with a common interest in improving the world can improve the calibre of conversation a lot; d) effective altruists have also been open to the idea that morality can involve serious sacrifices of one's own welfare (even the permanent sacrifice of one's organs, for some EAs).
Inevitably, as a blog post this discussion will have to cut out the large majority of relevant literature (especially on moral considerations), but I have tried to collect a load of the most commonly asked questions (along with my answers) at https://calumsblog.com/abortion-qa/. Please do get in touch if you would like further references/resources on these questions.
The first-order ethics of abortion
Arguably, for moral uncertai...
Summary
There is a good case that abortion is morally impermissible - or at least there is significant moral uncertainty.
Even if these arguments fail, abortion could still be a matter of serious concern for EAs (e.g. because fetuses could have significant but not full moral status, or because there are ways to reduce abortions without punishing women for getting them). Put another way, even if one believes abortion is permissible, it likely remains a comparable problem to any problem of infant mortality - but with even more lost life-years, and occurring on a much larger scale than infant mortality.
This is a very important problem, given the life lost and the scale of the problem - tens of millions of abortions around the world each year.
Outside the US, the problem is virtually unchallenged - and even in the US, there are high-impact sectors with minimal anti-abortion sentiment or efforts.
The issue is more tractable than one might think, for various reasons: it is a highly neglected area in most of the world; there are effective and popular policy interventions even in the most pro-choice countries, but even more so in more pro-life countries; progress can be made even without policy interventions; even small reductions in the abortion rate save huge numbers of lives; many people are open to changing their minds about abortion and can do so in a relatively short time; etc.
If you are one of the ~15% of religious EAs, you probably have even more reason to be convinced.
Sex education and contraception may or may not work depending on the case.
Introduction
I realise this is a sensitive topic. In the developed world around 1 in 3 women have an abortion in their lifetime, meaning it is likely people reading this post have been, or will be, personally invested and affected by the topic of abortion. Please forgive me if I fail to address it in a sufficiently sensitive way, and know that this was not my intention. There is, of course, so much more to say about this, but I wanted to try and keep the post relatively short.
I wrote most of this up a couple of years ago but never got round to posting it until Ariel Simnegar's post, which encouraged me to refine it a little and share here. Though I've always been on the fringes of EA and certainly don't consider myself to be up to date on EA thinking, it was EA thinking that originally made me passionate about this area some years ago, subsequently focusing my academic research on it.
I think this is an important topic for effective altruists to wrestle with, for various reasons: a) if I am right, this one of the most important, neglected, and tractable problems facing humans in the near term; b) as Ariel Simnegar previously pointed out, effective altruists have typically been pretty open to considering neglected causes and particularly neglected communities - animals, future people, etc; c) so much popular discourse around abortion is hostile and badly reasoned, and effective altruists with a common interest in improving the world can improve the calibre of conversation a lot; d) effective altruists have also been open to the idea that morality can involve serious sacrifices of one's own welfare (even the permanent sacrifice of one's organs, for some EAs).
Inevitably, as a blog post this discussion will have to cut out the large majority of relevant literature (especially on moral considerations), but I have tried to collect a load of the most commonly asked questions (along with my answers) at https://calumsblog.com/abortion-qa/. Please do get in touch if you would like further references/resources on these questions.
The first-order ethics of abortion
Arguably, for moral uncertai...