On a vaguely more serious note, an ethicist friend told me that arguing future lives have at least some moral status brings out a lot of anger, and I didn't believe him! Maybe I'm being naive, but the slope between that claim and some sort of Handmaid's Tale hellscape doesn't seem so slippery to me?
People visualize future people as if they are already real, the same way we imagine lottery winnings with no grasp of their probability. We are bad at that sort of thing.
Every atom that moves changes who all the kids will be next generation because of fluid dynamics in sperm. So every sneeze is a holocaust to all the kids who won't be born because of it. Only real people can possibly matter, then.
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