Guavanaut posted:

David Benatar makes a fairly solid case that there are always harms involved in bringing a child into existence, and that those harms outweigh any benefits by means of asymmetry. (If you exist, you experience both harm and pleasure, if you don't exist, you don't experience the harm and you don't miss the pleasure.) Since the child cannot consent as to whether to exist or not, that balance of harm is taken on behalf of the child by the parent without their consent. Sure, if the parent really wants the child, they will bring the child into existence whatever, but it means that any argument that the pro-life side puts forward about the fetus not getting a choice in being aborted has a counter in the fetus not getting a choice in being born, and we can show that at least one of those does demonstrably cause asymmetric suffering.

The problem with most of the pro-life (and a sizable chunk of pro-choice) people is that they default to the optimistic position that life somehow has an intrinsic or unquestionable value, life qua life, and that the teeming billions of unborn are somehow missing out on this by their nonexistence, rather than conceding that existence causes harm, termination may cause harm, and we're simply debating which is the lesser. (And also whether you actually exist that far back. If you take persistence of memory as a starting point for the existence of a 'self', you don't really start existing until about 5 months old.)

Philosophical pessimists don't get a lot of airtime in public discourse though (Benatar is a rare exception in that he got some radio spots in South Africa about 10 years back) so the intrinsic value argument often goes unchallenged by either side.