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What about a button that would disappear all murderers? Or thieves? Or whatever? I'd push the button.
Would you want more life, no matter what, at the margin? Even if adding these lives made everyone miserable? That's just the repugnant conclusion. It elevates mere breathing over quality of life and I reject it.
Murderers, probably. Thieves? Probably not. There's a reason we don't have the death penalty for theft: it's less bad than dying.
Also also, people who have abortions are only weakly correlated with being murderers or thieves. If I had a button that would predict the future and abort only fetuses who were guaranteed to become murderers in the future, I'd probably agonize over the morality of punishing someone for a crime they hadn't yet committed, but if guaranteed of the accuracy of the prediction I'd probably reluctantly press it. If you give me a button that kills 10 completely innocent people in exchange for each murderer it kills I would not press that button. And that's what we have.
Also, the repugnant conclusion is about trying to maximize total quantity of life, while most sane versions of utilitarianism is about trying to maximize quality of existing people. Once a fetus exists, it's a person, and so its quality of life matters too. There's a huge moral difference between failing to bring people into existence, and literally killing them
(World with 10 billion happy people) > (World with 100 billion struggling people) > (World with 10 billion happy people and 90 billion corpses)
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Couldn’t the argument be made that it’s not about increasing volume of life, but rather just about not ending life that already exists? Prevention =! Elimination after all. He even gave the birth control argument (though many conservative Christians would oppose this as well).
Why would we distinguish these scenarios?
I think choosing not to count potential lives rules out a lot of really stupid gotchas. It brings utilitarianism closer to something usable.
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Because actively destroying something is fundamentally different than preventing its creation? This is one of those things that is so intuitive I do think the onus would be on you to prove the inverse, but:
The end result is not the same. Things that are destroyed leave ghosts, things that were never made do not. Memories, physical damage, emotional attachments, etc are all left behind and change the calculus.
The process is obviously different, and processes have by-products and side effects. In the case of abortion, a case could be made that normalizing abortion weakens norms around the inherent value of human life, or the value of facing the consequences of your own actions (I don’t necessarily believe this, but it is just an example)
Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.
Different subgroup impacts. Sex education will likely have stronger impacts on the more educable, and abortion on the more avoidant.
This applies to basically every instance of prevention/elimination. Why prevent cavities when we can simply fill them? Why prevent infections when we have antibiotics? Prevention and elimination are only the same in the most spherical-cow utilitarian nonsense world imaginable.
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