If my mother hadn't married my father I wouldn't exist. Even if she had married him, I wouldn't exist if they'd not been able to be together during those days in late 1942 when I was conceived - for example, if one of them had taken a holiday then, unaccompanied by the other, in Port Elizabeth or Cape Town. Does this mean it would have been wrong on my mother's or father's part to have married someone else? Evidently not. Would it have been wrong of either of them to go on that holiday? Nonsense.
I raise these profound and unsetlling questions apropos a post at Comment is Free. In explaining why she thinks it would have been better if her mother had aborted her, Lynn Beisner refers to anti-abortion arguments deploying the claim that someone or other alive today wouldn't be had abortion been legal and/or had their mothers chosen to terminate the pregnancy of which they were the issue.
But since there are many things a mother might quite legitimately - legally and morally - have done which would have led to the non-existence of her present children, the circumstance that abortion would have had this sorry effect cannot by itself establish that abortion is wrong, however dismaying the thought of their own non-existence may be for those children.