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Russell White🔹13
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You make a good point, and I'm not advocating for restricted abortion access in any way.

I was more trying to take the POV of those protestors; under their model of the world, each abortion is a murder(potentially with great suffering associated). I wanted to find out whether abortion would be an important issue to work on given that starting assumption that gave no weight to the future of the parents or children.

What I found was that, even when using the strongest case of abortion(albeit, that didn't incorporate the potential value of a future human life), it still paled in comparison to other issues such as animal welfare.

Thank you for your constructive criticism! I recognize that this is a contentious issue, and I'll try to soften the language a bit and clarify my very overly-simplifying assumptions.

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by Russell White🔹
2 min read 27

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Animal welfareCause prioritizationEffective givingGlobal health & developmentAbortionMoral philosophyResearch
Frontpage

As I was driving the other day, I saw a group of protestors in front of the local Methodist church. 

"God Hates Abortion! Pray to End the Murder!"

Various signs to this effect were being held up triumphantly by the rather old people who had decided that this was their best use of a Tuesday morning.

This got me curious; how big of an issue is abortion? I realized I didn't know how many abortions happened per year in the U.S. I stopped by the side of the road to look this up, and was flabbergasted to learn that the number of abortion in the U.S. in 2023 was a little over 1 million.

There were 1 million abortions in 2023.

If you're anything like me, that number is probably a little shocking. I don't know what I expected, but probably more like a couple hundred thousand.

For reference, there were about 600,000 malaria deaths in 2023. And that's world-wide.

So if:

  1. Fetuses counted as people(highly debatable)
  2. Fetuses felt as much suffering when being aborted as a malaria victim did when dying(also highly debatable)
  3. We don't care about the potential future suffering of the parents or the child post-birth from them not having an abortion(so simplifying as to make this CoT wrong?)
  4. Preventing abortion is more tractable than malaria prevention(which I would guess is likely true)

Then, that would make abortion a bigger issue than malaria.

I was still curious about how big of a problem abortions were compared to other EA causes, so I looked into factory farming on a vague notion that other EAs thought it was an important problem.

And wow, was I not prepared for the sheer magnitude disparity.

From the USDA Livestock and Meat Domestic Data report(the important section being the Slaughter Statistics), I learned that there were ~9.6 billion land animal deaths from Jan-Nov of 2023.[1]

Of these 9.6 billion land animals, ~8.65 billion were just broiler chickens. These means that broiler chickens accounted for almost 90% of land animal deaths in 2023.

In other words, for every abortion in the U.S. in 2023, there were 8,650 broiler chickens that were killed under horrendous conditions.

For each fetus aborted, there were 8,650 broiler chickens that were slaughtered.

This absolutely floored me.

I realized that if you were even arguing about abortion, then you must value human fetuses(which look a lot like chicken fetuses) 8,650 times more than tortured, murdered chickens.[2][3]

I wanted to illustrate this difference in magnitude more clearly, so I made the following graphic:

Conclusion

It was fascinating doing my own cause prioritization research and not just deferring to 80,000 Hours' or GiveWell's views. I definitely updated towards animal welfare being a top priority. Still solidly behind existential risk, but definitely higher priority than, say, malaria or abortion.

I mostly gained more intuition into how cause prioritization and comprehending differences in magnitude works in practice.

Thanks for reading! If I somehow got my numbers wrong or made a bad assumption, please for the love of all that is precious tell me!

  1. ^

    Keep in mind, this is likely to be an underestimate of the total number. This is only counting those animals that died in federally inspected and commercial farms; this does mean that those 9.6 billion are likely to be the worst treated and factory farmed.

  2. ^

    Or maybe you think that abortion bans seem 4 orders of magnitude more tractable than factory farming bans, which seems extremely unlikely to me. 

  3. ^

    This does rely on disregarding the lives cut short by abortion, which I'm very uncertain as to how much to value in either direction. Because of this, I chose to just focus on the suffering of chickens vs. fetuses.

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Jason21
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You seem to be assuming that the primary harm of malaria deaths and (conditioned on "fetuses counted as people") of abortion is the suffering that children and fetuses experience when dying of malaria and abortion, respectively. That's an unusual assumption; I think most people would identify the primary harm as the loss of ability to live the rest of the child or fetus' life. 

So I think you're missing a step of either (1) explaining why your implied assumption above is correct, or (2) comparing human loss-of-life to chicken suffering rather than suffering to suffering as your infographic does. (In the world where factory farming ended, these chickens would likely not exist in the first place, so I wouldn't include a loss-of-enjoyable-life factor on the chicken side of the equation).

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Russell White🔹5
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That's a very good point! Thank you for your criticism!

I chose to compare fetus suffering to chicken suffering directly because I'm very uncertain about how much an extra life lived compares to prevention of suffering in existing lives; I had a hunch that any value I assigned to additional lives lived would be pretty arbitrary, so I instead focused on the (comparatively) easy part of suffering to suffering.

I'll make sure to add a disclaimer that this is a rough fermi estimate that makes massive simplifying assumptions.

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Larks9
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I realized that if you were even arguing about abortion, then you must value human fetuses(which look a lot like chicken fetuses) 8,650 times more than tortured, murdered chickens.

This seems not at all true to me? Quite apart from my being skeptical about your maths, people are allowed to care and argue about things that aren't as important as factory farming. Very few people spend all their effort on the single most important cause. To be honest, this seems like an isolated demand for rigour.

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Larks6
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Or maybe you think that abortion bans seem 4 orders of magnitude more tractable than factory farming bans, which seems extremely unlikely to me. 

You might be interested in this excellent post by Ariel Simnegar, which argues that mandating fetal anesthesia for late-term abortions could be an effective and tractable intervention.

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Jamie_Harris4
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I really appreciate you reasoning independently, working through to try to overcome scope insensitivity (and communicate clearly/graphically to others!), and make important prioritisation decisions that affect how you can best help others. Interesting to see your thought process; thanks for sharing!

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Woffler4
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If I recall correctly, the number of worldwide abortions currently is higher than the number of deaths (from all other causes) at around 73 million vs 62 million a year. Obviously this is due to demographics and will probably change in the future, but I do think it lends credence that the scope of the problem could be (assuming abortion is wrong) ginormous. Besides questions about whether it's right or wrong, though, I'm personally unsure that it's neglected or tractable. 

The only thing I could imagine saving it on that front is some completely different approach, like GFI has for animals. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, though. Maybe contraceptives really is the only way? Otherwise, perhaps reducing the costs of taking a child to term, but that then sounds a lot less tractable/neglected. Presumably most anti-abortion funding is also concentrated in wealthier areas. 

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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Thanks for the post, Russel! Relatedly, readers may be interested in A Case for Voluntary Abortion Reduction by Ariel Simnegar.

I think the best case for prioritising helping animals over humans is that the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the best human welfare interventions. I estimate:

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James-Hartree-Law3
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I don't understand what is the thought connecting the death of a chicken and the possible death of a baby (if it is not a fetus). The premise of your account, I thought, is that a fetus is possibly a human life. If it is a human life, then a genocide is happening every year. If it is true that a fetus is a human life, then why is it a relevant comparison that drastically more broiler chickens get killed yearly? On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made? As an aside, I was very interested to learn that "broiler" is a species of chicken. Broil: "to cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct, intense radiant heat."

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conflictaverse1
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On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made?


You might be interested in this series of posts by Rethink Priorities about moral weights, which targets precisely the question of how different kinds of lives can be weighed against each other. Many utilitarians (which many people in EA are) believe that lives can be compared like this. 

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idea211
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In a world without evil, without aggression (prosocial) there will be no avoidable deaths from malaria, there will be no abortions, and the diet will be vegan.
Of all the courses of action that an individual committed to a prosocial culture can follow TODAY, which one offers us the greatest guarantee of helping to build a better world?

Those who oppose abortion come into conflict with the personal freedom of women in the context of today's democratic culture.

We have ample evidence from the course of history that some or many animal rights advocates are not always prosocial when it comes to human suffering.

All the avoidable suffering of our fellow human beings has an unequivocal character in terms of the emotions of empathy, compassion, and affection that are the psychological basis of the non-aggressive, benevolent, and rationally introspective ethos of a possible prosocial culture that can already begin to be built today as an active minority.

The latter - along the lines of "virtue ethics"? - seems to me to be a more effective altruism.

It certainly doesn't seem like a trivial debate to me. Thanks for the previous statements.

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yz1
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"democratic culture" -> could you elaborate why this is a cultural thing?

I take it as about equality

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idea211
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I understand "democratic culture" as a conventionalism referring to the consideration of rights and freedoms in Western societies (say, the European Union). The right to abortion as part of "Human Rights" is controversial in other contexts.

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yz1
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Could you explain how is abortion different in non democratic cultures in your opinion?

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idea211
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This is a question of cultural evolution. Infanticide was acceptable in Old Rome - but not tolerable to early Christians. It would be difficult to explain the cultural understanding of the right to life in each specific case. In my opinion, those of us interested in moral progress should put first the mutual perception of empathy and benevolence as the basis of human relations of extreme trust.

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Dacyn1
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Preventing abortion is more tractable than malaria prevention(which I would guess is likely true)

Huh, my guess would have been the opposite. To prevent an abortion, you have to actually convince someone to do something they didn't want to do (or advocate for political change to force them to do it), whereas people already don't want to die from malaria, they just need resources to help them do that. That said I really have no idea, you may be right.

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Russell White🔹3
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I was thinking more in terms of political difficulty. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned and several states have instituted abortion, it seems like there could be a lot more momentum and support for further abortion bans.

Comparatively, it seems politically hard to coordinate on ending the suffering of those in different countries in a way that as many people as support abortion bans would get behind.

That's why my hunch would be that abortion is more tractable in terms of pure legal bans, but you might be right that going beyond that into actually stopping people from getting abortions might be far less tractable than malaria.

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yz1
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I think it is interesting to view abortion as killing "lives"; the suffering for fetus is very low if aborted, and suffering for the human is very high if not. Abortion right is quite essential for equality in my opinion.

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huw-2
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We legalise abortion because it helps people live their lives on their own terms, which is good (and some small cases where abortions are medical procedures that prevent death or physical harm directly). Young people can take risks and be stupid without it changing the course of their lives; or in more extreme cases, escape their abusers.

So, in the sort of Quixotic spirit of trying to avoid this thread getting out of hand, I want to be constructive. I think that such an obviously fraught and tense issue deserves more thought and care than a quick BOTEC. I get the broader point that you’re making, but you’re making it in a pretty crude way that feels insensitive to the very real harms people face due to restricted abortion access; I am not sure that the comparison was needed to make that point either.

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MichaelDickens49
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I think that such an obviously fraught and tense issue deserves more thought and care than a quick BOTEC.

I am opposed to adding more barriers to doing BOTECs, they're already difficult enough and rare enough as it is. I appreciate that OP did a BOTEC.

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Neel Nanda28
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I disagree. I think it's an important principle of EA that it's socially acceptable to explore the implications of weird ideas, even if they feel uncomfortable, and to try to understand the perspective of those you disagree with. I want this forum to be a place where posts like this can exist.

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huw2
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I think that’s a false dichotomy. It should be possible to have uncomfortable/weird ideas here while treating them with nuance and respect. (Are you instead trying to argue that having a higher bar for these kinds of posts is a bad idea?)

Equally, the original post doesn’t try to understand the perspective that abortion might be net good for the world. So I think the crux might actually be more about who you think should shoulder the burden of attempting-to-understand.

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yz3
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I am surprised and disappointed that this got downvoted; this comment to me is a perfectly reasonable and respectful discussion

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yz-1
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I see generally this may be good, but there are cases that require more socially aware education to be discussed. Additionally, this discussion seems to be from a view that is unfortunately only negatively affect or restrict half of the humans; it seems to be easy for the humans who are not affected to discuss on restricting; the barrier is unfairly lower unfortunately by human nature. I do think writers need to bear some responsibility for knowledge/background learning

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Russell White🔹13
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You make a good point, and I'm not advocating for restricted abortion access in any way.

I was more trying to take the POV of those protestors; under their model of the world, each abortion is a murder(potentially with great suffering associated). I wanted to find out whether abortion would be an important issue to work on given that starting assumption that gave no weight to the future of the parents or children.

What I found was that, even when using the strongest case of abortion(albeit, that didn't incorporate the potential value of a future human life), it still paled in comparison to other issues such as animal welfare.

Thank you for your constructive criticism! I recognize that this is a contentious issue, and I'll try to soften the language a bit and clarify my very overly-simplifying assumptions.

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Jeff Kaufman 🔸6
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I don't think this is the strongest case for abortion, taking the world view of the protesters as a given. If you presented this BOTEC to them, I think it's very likely that they would tell you that they care much more about humans than chickens.

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Rebecca3
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That is what I understood Russell to be saying? See:

I realized that if you were even arguing about abortion, then you must value human fetuses(which look a lot like chicken fetuses) 8,650 times more than tortured, murdered chickens.

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Milena Canzler🔸7
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I agree with @huw, thanks for the thoughtful and constructive comment. 

Adding to it: We also legalise abortions to protect not only the would-be parents, but also the children who are born to parents who might not be prepared (mentally, physically, economically) to care for them. 

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