Utilitarianism and Abortion

[feotakahari]

 I avoid casting judgment on abortion, because it’s not a concept Utilitarianism was built to handle.

Suppose aborting a fetus decreases utility, because that fetus would have grown up to have a happy life. By the same token, aren’t you decreasing utility by not getting pregnant in the first place? This would seem to obligate people to keep having children up until the point where having children decreases total happiness, and that would create a lot of unhappiness for people who aren’t equipped to raise children or simply don’t want to.

Now suppose aborting a fetus increases utility, whether because the child won’t have a happy life, or for any other reason that gets away from the previous problem. Is killing the infant at birth, as some cultures do, any less moral than simply aborting? What if you’ve raised a child for five years, but realize you’ve made a mistake that will decrease total happiness–rather than continuing to raise the child, is it better to immediately kill it?

I once saw immanentizingeschatons​ and fnord888 trying to resolve this problem. They talked about “population ethics” and “counterpart theory” and lots of other phrases I’d never heard before, but it didn’t look like they were making much headway. Personally, I just stay out of the way. If you judge that an abortion is the right thing to do in your case, then I figure you know more about your life and your values than I do.