Abortion vs. Contraception? is This Really a Question?

Apparently so.

Priest One has,

harshly criticized the bishops of [a] country for their opposition to the law on “reproductive health” with its support for contraception, backed and steered through the legislature by...  a Catholic.
[He] charged the ...bishops with being “backward” and “closed off” not only toward the insights of modernity by also toward the appeals of Pope Francis.

For him,

abortion is always and in every case a greater evil than contraception, and therefore it is fine to permit the lesser evil if it serves to reduce the greater evil.

Priest Two, on the other hand, asks, and answers

Is it true that abortion is a greater evil than contraception, even 'decidedly more serious'? Not necessarily....it is a greater evil to deprive someone of existence than to deprive someone of temporal life.

But it is NOT depriving "someone," it is, frankly, depriving no one. Unless the contraceptive has functioned as an abortifacient, no one has begun to exist, to be deprived of life or not.
If "depriving" not persons but potential persons, or the idea of persons, were evil, it would be evil for every woman not to procreate continuously.
(This does not mitigate the problem of Priest One's thesis that it is permissible to do evil to achieve good.)