Photo by Matt Hardy on Pexels.com

Note: This blog discusses early miscarriages, and does so in a pretty impersonal way.

Someone recently shared a thought with me that they had had about the moral status of embryos. It went like this

“Fertilised eggs die all the time, without us noticing. We don’t notice or care about this. What are we supposed to believe, that millions of human beings are tragically being created only for their lives to be ended days afterwards? If so, so many embryos die, can it matter if I intentionally make one more die: it seems like all I am doing is adding a drop to an ocean that is already so deep that an extra drop seems insignificant.”

(They might appeal to studies like this.) For what it’s worth, I think a lot of pro-life people do care about this a lot. All pro-life people I know care when known pregnancies end in miscarriage. It goes without saying that this is really sad, and can be an extremely difficult for families and their friends. And I think that many pro-life people do very much want there to be fewer miscarriages. But, it’s true that, speaking for myself, I invest a lot more effort in pro-life efforts to prevent abortion than I do in anything to do with preventing the natural death of extremely early embryos.

Before I get into my long-ish discussion of this argument, I do want to point out that an easy response to it is something like this ‘Old people die all the time, and I don’t donate to cancer research programs, dementia research programs, or do anything generally to promote causes that would prolong their lives. But if a group of people started an ‘eldercide’ campaign to kill old people against their will to save the state money, I would get very actively involved in attempts to oppose this.’ Killing people is very wrong even when the people you kill are likely to die anyway.

In a way, that’s the TLDR of what’s to follow. Here’s a more detailed response to this kind of objection.

1) The Least Charitable Reading of This Argument 

Here is one way of spelling this argument out that makes it seem, like, well, a really terrible argument:

Premise 1: A lot of members  of Group X die. Their deaths are a regular occurrence.

Premise 2: If a group contains a lot of members who die, it doesn’t matter if they die.

Conclusion: Therefore, it doesn’t matter when members of Group X die.

This argument is obviously unsound.  Why? Because Premise 2 clearly isn’t true. If about 90% of children died between their 11th and 13th birthdays, that wouldn’t mean that their deaths didn’t matter. It would mean that lots and lots of deaths that do matter were nonetheless a common (but still tragic) occurrence. If you want a more realistic example, think about people living in war zones, or minority groups who are persecuted and killed in large numbers.

2) A Better Argument? 

A more sympathetic reading of what the argument might be something like this:

Premise 1: A lot of members  of Group X die. Their deaths are a regular occurrence.

Premise 2: We don’t notice or care when they die.

Premise 3: If a group contains a lot of members who die, and we don’t care that they die, it is inconsistent to care about preventing people from intentionally killing members of this group.

Conclusion: Therefore, it doesn’t matter when members of Group X die.

This argument is more plausible because none of the premises invoke principles that are blatantly untrue.

3) First Problem With the Better Argument: The Difference Between Killing/Causing Death and Letting Die

But is Premise 3 really true? Is it true that if a group contains a lot of members who die, and we don’t care that they die, it is inconsistent to care about preventing people from intentionally killing members of this group.

I think that it’s true that there would be something wrong if we didn’t care at all that members of these group died a lot, and only cared about whether they lived or died when they were killed. But I also think think that it makes sense to care more about stopping people from being killed or unjustly treated than from dying of natural causes. I am always sad to hear that a 94 year old has died. But I don’t think that I need to do anything to stop this. However, I would be incensed if I heard that 94 year olds in a particular nursing home had died because of their carers’ poor hygiene standards contaminating the water they were drinking.

There is usually a difference to how you should react to people causing a death, and how you should react to that death happening through no one’s action or fault.

4) Second Problem With the Better Argument:

Here’s another problem with the argument. Believing inconsistent things is bad, and I think you should always try to make your beliefs consistent with one another. But there are always two ways of making an inconsistent set of beliefs consistent. Take these two inconsistent beliefs:

  1. I stole my neighbour, Jack’s, car, because I don’t like him, I do like his car, and I didn’t want to spend my money on buying my own. I have done nothing wrong.
  2. My neighbour, Jill, stole my car, because she doesn’t like like me, she does like my car, and she didn’t want to spend my money on buying my own. She has grievously wronged me.

If I believe these two things I am being inconsistent. One way to my beliefs consistent with each other is to accept that I did something wrong when I stole John’s car. But another way to resolve the inconsistency is to decide that I didn’t do anything wrong, but neither did Jill.

Often, our personal moral progress involves resolving inconsistencies in our moral beliefs. So for example, imagine an inconsistent racist policeman who believes that with young black men, a ‘shoot first, ask later’ policy is appropriate. This belief is inconsistent with his behaviour: he is actually often unable to bring himself to do this. It’s pretty clear that he should resolve the inconsistency, and should do so by revising his belief. But he could also resolve the inconsistency by changing his behaviour, and surely would be worse than continuing on in his current inconsistent state, because more innocent people would die as a result, even if his beliefs would also be more internally consistent.

So, even if pro-lifers were being inconsistent, this doesn’t mean that they should resolve the inconsistency by deciding that they should care less about abortion. They could also resolve it by deciding that they should care more about preventing early miscarriages.

Ciara