What’s Wrong with the World

I can't help wondering if pro-aborts think this dreadful argument is going to go somewhere because of the way that government spending on "finding a cure for X" has become a sort of frenzied duty in the last thirty-forty years. Most people are now ready to accept that if you "really care" about some one natural cause from which a lot of people die, however hopeless it may seem to find a cure for it, you will be testifying before Congress and agitatedly demanding that "we" (meaning the federal government) make research on it a greater priority than it presently is. Now, the truth is that natural miscarriages are _exceedingly_ resistant to medical solution. It's not that there is nothing that can be tried and is tried, when a woman has good medical care and is threatened with miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy. It's just that there are plenty of times when nothing works or when a miscarriage occurs without any warning and without any possibility of doing anything about it. The assumption of medical omniscience and omnipotence is just false when it comes to natural miscarriages. And pro-lifers, being probably more sensible people than disease activists of other stripes, recognize this and realize full-well that we aren't just going to "find a cure for" especially first-trimester natural miscarriages and that it is simply false that "we" must not care about them if we aren't spending millions of government research on the question.

But pro-aborts assume that they can somehow play "gotcha" by taking it for granted that pro-lifers would be pushing in this way on research if they "really believed" that unborn children are human beings. They try to spin it as if miscarriage is some sort of plague. And hey, if a million people were all dying of the same plague, _surely_ those who knew this would be clamoring for government to find a cure.

That's not a form of the argument that I've ever seen. The more typical version goes something like this: if you believe that embryos are fully human and deserving of the same protection & effort we extend to, say, an eight-year-old, then where are the hospitals dedicated to saving the lives of embryos? Where is the medical research aimed at preventing the horrible deaths of huge numbers of innocent people every year?

Suggesting that this is a question of "priorities" is a non sequitir, for two reasons. First, we can walk and chew gum at the same time -- looking for a cure for a fatal disease does not prevent us from (e.g.) prosecuting people who attempt murder by infecting others with that disease; these are two separate questions. Second, there are many more spontaneous abortions every year than induced ones, so this is not a question of a million vs. a million but something on the order of a million vs. 11 million. If I believed that 11 million innocent Americans were dying of a preventable medical condition every year and that essentially zero resources were being allocated toward ameliorating this, I would certainly consider it a moral issue, even if an additional million were being deliberately murdered in the same manner.

I also think you are getting the argument's conclusion wrong. When I have seen this argument raised, it is generally with the intention of showing that abortion opponents are less concerned with saving lives than with controlling female sexuality. I can't see how anyone's "eternal fate" would be relevant, since this is a matter of faith and not public policy.

They try to spin it as if miscarriage is some sort of plague.

But if miscarriage kills a fully human being, isn't that exactly what it is?

You seem to be arguing that there is nothing medical science can do to prevent miscarriages. How do you know that? How much research effort has been devoted to preventing them? If a comparable medical condition were killing eleven million eight-year-olds every year, would Americans be more concerned? I think it's difficult to argue that they would not.

A plague can plausibly be cured or a vaccination developed. This is simply not true of miscarriage. That is not to say that there are no treatments that can be, and are, tried for women threatened with miscarriage when there is warning. There are, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. But in a very great many cases the first hint of trouble comes after the child is already dead--for example, if no heartbeat can be detected.

Moreover, SNK, you are absolutely not reckoning with Zippy's point, which is that the public authority has _far more_ legitimate concern with making sure that deliberate murder is illegal than with preventing natural death. Part of the point of my comment--and I apologize if I was not clear--was that in our "therapeutic society" people just absolutely don't get this. They regard the government as _at least_ as responsible to dedicate money for research to prevent natural death as to track down and stop active murderers. This is so prevalent a confusion as to constitute a kind of mental fog.

There is also the fact that in this fallen world, babies are conceived that cannot possibly mature and live -- extremely deformed, e.g. Natural miscarriage is often the result of this fact, especially the early ones that happen before or just as a woman even realizes she is pregnant. (I barely suspected that I *might* be pregnant a day or two before I miscarried.) Later threatened miscarriages are more amenable to possible help in a variety of ways, and I know people who have, successfully and unsuccessfully, been given all available help to prevent these. I wonder how many miscarriages occur extremely early (and many of these are probably not even known to be miscarriages -- just seem to be an extra painful/heavy period), and how many occur after the first couple of months? I know a lot of doctors take the prevention of miscarriage very seriously, and while I don't have any statistics on research dollars, it's not like it's just an ignored condition. But in any case, Zippy's point holds: murder is a matter that should obviously be addressed by the public authorities; natural death not necessarily so, or at least not with the same urgency.

People have absolutely no idea how un-amenable especially very early miscarriage is to treatment and prevention. In essence it is a fertility issue, and the causes, as Beth notes, may very well lie within the body of the child himself, so that he literally cannot be saved. This is not in any way to deny that such a child is a full person, precious in the eyes of God. It is merely to point out that at certain stages embodied human persons are incredibly physically vulnerable and that contrary to popular opinion science is not omnipotent to save every human life, not even every young human life, from natural death, not even with "more research."

A plague can plausibly be cured or a vaccination developed.

True, miscarriage is not literally comparable to a disease. However, there are many other things to which it is comparable -- for example, genetic defects or allergies. Certainly more medical effort has been devoted to eliminating even comparably minor conditions like harelips than has been devoted to preventing miscarriage for its own sake.

Let's say, for the sake of analogy, that 35% of children developed a fatal allergy to their mothers at the age of eight. The amount of medical effort devoted to correcting this problem would be immense -- it would be considered among the greatest priorities of the human race. If half the American adult population believe that we currently face a public health crisis of comparable magnitude, then what are they doing about it? It seems to me you are being far too dismissive in saying that miscarriage happens quickly, is hard to detect, would require unreasonable constraints to prevent, etc. Many things can kill children almost instantly and with no prior warning. We devote a great deal of regulatory energy to ensuring that children with peanut allergies are not exposed to peanuts or anything that was processed in the same facility as peanuts, and we don't consider those constraints unreasonable.

Moreover, SNK, you are absolutely not reckoning with Zippy's point, which is that the public authority has _far more_ legitimate concern with making sure that deliberate murder is illegal than with preventing natural death.

I would not disagree with that. But surely we all agree that "the public authority" does have some moral obligation to attempt to prevent natural death. If it does not, then the government should not endow any medical research at all, should not have safety standards for household products, etc.

People have absolutely no idea how un-amenable especially very early miscarriage is to treatment and prevention.

Ironically, you have just made the opposition's point for them. If people "have no idea" how hard it is to prevent miscarriage, and fully half of those people believe that hour-old embryos have identical moral status to infants, then the outcry to do something about miscarriage should be enormous. It isn't.

If half the American adult population believe that we currently face a public health crisis of comparable magnitude

I'm a pessimist. I'd be surprised if half the American adult population truly believes that the unborn child is a human person from the moment of conception.

But if you deal with real pro-lifers, I think you will find that if they are well-informed they will deny your analogy, as a matter of actual medical and biological fact, to other conditions that do in fact kill people by natural death and can be prevented, solved by research, and treated. I myself do question, by the way, the government's large-scale role in medical research.

As for genetic defects--there's an interesting analogy. What has chiefly developed in the realm of "helping" or "preventing" genetic defects is preventing the term birth of people with them--search and destroy, in essence, whether in vitro or in vivo. I have no clear idea what you mean by "eliminating" harelips, but you really need to get it clear in your head that miscarriage cannot be prevented or cured, somehow, by surgery. Harelips can be treated by surgery. Of course, _children_ with harelips can be eliminated before birth, and if I recall my news stories correctly, some have been. This is hardly helpful from a pro-life perspective.

I'd be surprised if half the American adult population truly believes that the unborn child is a human person from the moment of conception.

I'd be surprised too. There is a thought experiment that tests that, I don't know if the analogy has an official name or not, but it is similar to the runaway trolley. The emergency in this case is a fire in a hospital and you know you have mere seconds to rescue either a days old infant or a container with 40 frozen embryos. Nearly everyone's intuition would lead them to rescue the infant, but if all other things were equal they would try to save the greatest number of persons.

Regarding the subject of the post, I vaguely recollect that a few external factors can lead to miscarriages or stillbirths, malnutrition being one of them. I wouldn't say that this should be a high priority for pro-lifers, at least in this country, but it should have some sort of attention.

But if miscarriage kills a fully human being, isn't [a plague] exactly what it is?

Not at all. A plague is an abnormal disease which attacks the population from some outside source, radically altering the situation from what is normal and natural. Miscarriages are, as I suggest in the post, much more analogous to dying of old age. To the extent that it ought to be a frenzied government priority to prevent people from dying of old age it ought to be a concomitant frenzied government priority to prevent miscarriages, I suppose. But of course it is not, and should not be, a frenzied government priority to prevent death by old age.

On the other hand, preventing or at least prohibiting and punishing actual mass scale murder ought to be, and in a properly functional society would be, an urgent top government priority.

At the risk of getting repetitive:

Suppose we choose a demographic in the population in which 40% or 60% or 80% (pick a number) has a life expectancy of less than nine months, for whatever reason. Now suppose some people are picking 4,000 out of that demographic group every day and chopping them to pieces with a machete.

It seems to me that the existence of that demographic with that life expectancy profile might present a legitimate public challenge, worthy of effort and help. But just thinking about that kind of thing is not even in the same universe of priorities as the 4,000 murders every day.

Not at all. A plague is an abnormal disease which attacks the population from some outside source, radically altering the situation from what is normal and natural. Miscarriages are, as I suggest in the post, much more analogous to dying of old age.

Neither one of those analogies really works. The "old age" analogy makes no sense at all -- people do not, in fact, die of "old age", they die of some illness or organ failure to which their age makes them vulnerable. The distinction between "normal" and "abnormal" death or suffering is also likely spurious and certainly irrelevant; I'm unclear what your objection is there.

I suggest that the best analogy is a developmental genetic defect or perhaps an extremely dangerous allergy. Of course no analogy is exact, but "old age" is about as inexact as it gets (we are talking about embryos!).

It seems to me that the existence of that demographic with that life expectancy profile might present a legitimate public challenge, worthy of effort and help. But just thinking about that kind of thing is not even in the same universe of priorities as the 4,000 murders every day.

But if you're going to break it down on a daily basis, you'd have to stipulate that if 4,000 people in that demographic are being murdered every day, then 40,000 of them are dying of their condition every day. At that point I'd say it becomes a lot less clear what one's priorities should be. Certainly, it cannot be the case that zero effort should be devoted to a cure. (And by the way, nine months would not be their "life expectancy" -- it would be more like, if they survive nine months, they're out of the woods.) And it gets worse than that: we devote vast resources to curing diseases that claim far fewer than 40,000 victims a day. There is no moral logic that could lead us to prioritize AIDS or cancer research over the prevention of miscarriage, no matter what the murder rate of embryos, if we believe that they are deserving of consideration equal to any other human being.

We just don't live in a world where any significant number of people, even any significant number of people who are pro-life and believe life begins at conception, actually behave as if they believe it. The philosophical argument is made constantly, but the logical, practical consequences of that argument simply are not pursued, with the single exception of outrage toward abortion. Bear in mind that we are not just talking about political action here. Where are the charity hospitals working to prevent Sudden Embryonic Death Syndrome? Where are the public-awareness campaigns encouraging people over 40 to stop having sex, or use birth control, given their absurdly elevated chance for early miscarriage? Where are the pregnancy tests that can give a reliable result within days of conception? (It is possible to do this, just very technically challenging and expensive -- but why spare any expense to potentially save your child's life?)

people do not, in fact, die of "old age",...

That assertion pretty much says it all. The only kind of person who will find the argument even interesting is the kind of person who will assert that people don't die of old age and think that assertion actually carries some water.

The distinction between "normal" and "abnormal" death or suffering is also likely spurious and certainly irrelevant;...

The distinction is between natural death and murder. Stopping the deliberate genocide of millions of people is more politically important than curing cancer too - to such an extent that the latter isn't even in the same priority universe as the former. Even if I granted the dubious premise that miscarriage is an epidemic, which I don't, you might as well say that anyone who tries to stop the Holocaust doesn't really think Jews are fully human unless he acts as though finding treatments for Tay-Sachs disease is just as high a priority as stopping the Holocaust.

Again, I don't see why anyone takes the argument seriously. When people do I actually become embarrassed on their behalf.

stillnotking:

There is no moral logic that could lead us to prioritize AIDS or cancer research over the prevention of miscarriage, no matter what the murder rate of embryos, if we believe that they are deserving of consideration equal to any other human being.

Sure there is. We might believe that money spent on preventing miscarriage is less likely to work than is money spent on cancer research. And some previous comments have already alluded to this.

A problem with the type of argument criticized by the OP is that it is often hard to figure out what is being argued, exactly. Lots of Africans die every year of dirty water, malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, and other inexpensively cured/treated/prevented conditions. Lots (but many fewer) of Africans got intentionally murdered in Rwanda during Mr Clinton's Presidency. People got significantly more excited about the latter, and many people thought that military action was obligatory in the latter case but not the former. What does this prove about our views concerning the humanity of Africans, exactly? That if Mr Clinton really cared about Africans, rather than machete control, he would talk/do more about poverty and less about Rwanda? Therefore, he *really* cares about machete control, not the lives of Africans.

Why can't the pro-lifer just say that, for the same reason Rwanda vs poverty does not prove much of anything about the perceived humanity of Africans, abortion vs miscarriage does not prove much of anything about the perceived humanity of unborn babies?

There are weird is/ought tensions in these arguments as well. The fact that most people *would* choose, say, to run out of the burning building with the infant does not establish that they *should* run out of the building with the infant rather than the frozen embryos. People, even in large numbers over extended periods, do make wrong moral choices, right? Relatedly, plenty of people think we are spending too much money on cancer and AIDS, relative to other diseases.

Also, the alleged fact that we are doing nothing to save the lives of the miscarried is kind of non-factual. The Institute which funds such research at NIH is the National Institute for Child Health and Development. Oh, and on my planet there are home pregnancy tests on the market and advertised on TV which give results in the eighth day of pregnancy.

So SNK is arguing that pro-lifers are hypocrites or don't really believe what they say they believe if they don't clamor for "our" devoting huge numbers of "resources" to research into miscarriage.

Look, SNK, does it ever occur to you that some people (like me, for example) do not even accept the "X number of people are dying of natural cause Y, therefore it becomes a major political cause to press for devoting money to finding a cure for Y" approach to politics, medicine, and science? I certainly don't. Not even with cancer. And _especially_ not with genetic defects. Research into reducing the number of people born with genetic defects has been, in essence, research into early detection of genetic defects. Which is, to put it mildly, not the same thing, and which has had devastating effects from a pro-life perspective.

Oh, I would add, too, that the 40,000 vs. 4,000 and the presumed impact upon "where our priorities should lie" seems to assume some sort of utilitarian calculus that no pro-lifer should grant. I say here and now that 4 _million_ natural deaths are nowhere close to as important and horrifying an evil as _one single_ deliberate murder.

Look, SNK, does it ever occur to you that some people (like me, for example) do not even accept the "X number of people are dying of natural cause Y, therefore it becomes a major political cause to press for devoting money to finding a cure for Y" approach to politics, medicine, and science?

Lydia, it's not that I don't understand your position. I do. But surely you recognize that you are in a tiny, tiny minority here. Public health expenditures in the United States approach $1 trillion annually. Charitable donations surely dwarf that amount, though I couldn't find any concrete figures. Dr. Jonas Salk is the most famous doctor in American history. Clearly, most Americans believe that society has (and they personally have) a moral duty to combat illness, death, and physical suffering, particularly in children.

I am not saying that you are wrong to disagree, just pointing out that your premise is so narrowly accepted as to be irrelevant to the question under discussion. I am sure I am on solid ground to assert that, whatever the reasons pro-lifers have for their indifference toward early miscarriage, a philosophical belief in the inappropriateness of public-funded or charitably-funded medical research surely is not among them.

Oh, I would add, too, that the 40,000 vs. 4,000 and the presumed impact upon "where our priorities should lie" seems to assume some sort of utilitarian calculus that no pro-lifer should grant. I say here and now that 4 _million_ natural deaths are nowhere close to as important and horrifying an evil as _one single_ deliberate murder.

Again, this is not a view that is shared by, well, almost anyone in America. A disease that kills 4 million people a year will be a greater social priority than finding and punishing a single murderer.

Sure there is. We might believe that money spent on preventing miscarriage is less likely to work than is money spent on cancer research. And some previous comments have already alluded to this.

That would be a legitimate reason to deprioritize spending on miscarriage. But is it true? How do you know? As far as I can tell, the prevention of early miscarriage is a subject that has hardly been explored in the medical literature, and to the extent that it has, it is usually from the standpoint of improving fertility rather than saving the lives of embryos per se.

Why can't the pro-lifer just say that, for the same reason Rwanda vs poverty does not prove much of anything about the perceived humanity of Africans, abortion vs miscarriage does not prove much of anything about the perceived humanity of unborn babies?

African poverty is (and has always been) a big issue in the US. Where is miscarriage's We Are The World? Where is the funding for miscarriage research to match what we spend on foreign aid to Africa?

Also, the alleged fact that we are doing nothing to save the lives of the miscarried is kind of non-factual. The Institute which funds such research at NIH is the National Institute for Child Health and Development.

The NICHD has an annual budget of just over $1 billion. If 10% of that (a generous figure) is spent on prevention of miscarriage, it would represent $100 million, about 0.01% of public-health expenditures in the US. We spend more than $5 billion annually on cancer research, and cancer claims about 500,000 lives per year, as compared to an estimated 10 million miscarriages.

Oh, and on my planet there are home pregnancy tests on the market and advertised on TV which give results in the eighth day of pregnancy.

You got me on that one. :)

stillnotking:

Lydia, it's not that I don't understand your position. I do.

So you agree, then, because you understand Lydia's position, that the argument I am criticizing is errant nonsense?

I'm not sure why you spent all that verbage talking about the popularity of various opinions ("so narrowly accepted as to be irrelevant" etc.), since that obviously isn't at all pertinent. Even if, say, only two people on earth believed that embryos are fully human, the particular so-called argument I am criticizing would be just as manifestly stupid.

Lets say that 4,000 Jews were being marched into the gas chambers every day, and some nazis told us that because we aren't pursuing the treatment of Tay-Sachs disease as aggressively as we are opposing the gas chambers we must not really believe that Jews are fully human. Does that argument even scan for someone who really does believe that Jews are fully human, or is it just pathetic choir-preaching amongst the nazis? Pretty obviously the latter. If the Holocaust were not going on right in front of our faces we might well be worrying about things like Tay Sachs. But the notion that because Tay-Sachs isn't as high a priority to us as the gas chambers that that suggests anything, anything at all, about the sincerity of our belief that Jews are fully human, is risible.

Isnt a soul taken by angels to the place they are meant to be after death regardless of how they die? NO ONE ON THIS EARTH HAS CONTROL OF GODS CHILDREN'S DESTINY IN HEAVEN. I didnt mean to press the caps buts its quite effective after reading back isnt it. Maybe it was god.

the prevention of early miscarriage is a subject that has hardly been explored in the medical literature, and to the extent that it has, it is usually from the standpoint of improving fertility rather than saving the lives of embryos per se.

I don't quite see the argumentative force of this. Regardless of the _motives_ of the researchers, fertility research is _highly_ relevant to the question of the causes of early miscarriage. Consider implantation failure, for example. The phenomenon of in vitro fertilization, and the motivation to make it work, has motivated research into the phenomenon of implantation failure. One doesn't have to agree with the morality of IVF nor have a lot morally in common with the researchers to have some idea of the results: Pretty darned poor. In other words, to the extent that much of anything can be found out about the causes of implantation failure, it doesn't seem like much can be done.