[Image by eiderente from Pixabay]

A while ago Freddie deBoer wrote an essay about he and his wife’s experience of undergoing IVF in the process of trying to conceive. More specifically, he wrote about the unexpected conception of a twin to the one child they were trying to have, and then the death of that twin as a relatively early embryo.

DeBoer is a writer I admire, and the piece is very much worth reading. His article is many things: a forceful and articulate pro-choice polemic; an expression of rage at God from an atheist; and a raw and honest expression of miscarriage grief by someone who believes that the unborn aren’t people with rights and dignity.

Another thing it is an expression of a very familiar thought. The thought goes something like this: how can abortion be wrong when there are so very many miscarriages? 


There are, indeed, very many miscarriages. Somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of recognised pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the real amount of miscarriages is most likely higher than this because many miscarriages occur before pregnancy is even detected. It’s almost certainly not the case that the majority of conceived embryos die before birth: but a very substantial minority do.

Now this can just seem like a non-sequitur. Abortions are intentional killings: miscarriages are not. Killing people doesn’t get less wrong if the death rate from car accidents goes up. People’s right not to be killed doesn’t get weaker if they have an infectious disease. The fact that American Indians have – on average – a ten years lower life expectancy than do white Americans doesn’t mean that killing them is any more permissible. If some subgroup has higher mortality rates than the general population, even much higher mortality rates, then that simply has no implications either way for the permissibility of intentionally killing them. This is what pro-lifers tend to say, and they’re right. 

But the real issue isn’t so the numbers themselves but our reaction to them. What the deBoer piece brings out is that we don’t seem to respond to the massive miscarriage numbers like we would to the mass death of born people.

The standard pro-life position is not just that abortion is wrong. It’s that the unborn are our moral equals. Plenty of things are wrong. Saying something mean to your sister-in-law is wrong. Throwing an empty can of coke into a river is wrong. But if you are my moral equal, that means more than ‘killing you is just as wrong as killing me’: it means ‘you matter just as much as me’. And our attitudes to mass embryo death suggests that we don’t really believe this.

Now it seems totally reasonable to be much more concerned about attempts to deliberately kill people than about stopping them from dying. Muireann has a great blog on this.

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.’

But that still leaves an open question: why don’t people in general grieve miscarriages more?

One part of the answer is, ‘They do’. When Meghan Markle had a miscarriage she wrote about it for the New York Times.

I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.[…] Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few. In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.

The fact is that miscarriage grief is real and often profound. It’s experienced not just by mothers but by fathers, siblings, cousins. Losing a sibling to miscarriage was one of the deep griefs of my own life. 

It is true, though, that these reactions to miscarriage are not universal: and also true that miscarriages tend to be grieved less the earlier they are, and in general grieved less than the deaths of born children. 

One of the reasons for this, I think, is that all else being equal grief is stronger when death is less commonplace. Infant mortality rates of born children used to be massively, massively higher. Studies summarised by Our World in Data suggest that in most pre-industrial societies almost half of children born didn’t make it to adulthood. Of course pre-industrial societies often mourned infant death deeply, but that grief just didn’t have the same kind of social status and recognition then as it does now. In his book Tomorrow’s People, UCL demographer Dr Paul Morland writes that:

Even in the early 1970s infant mortality in Peru was 10 times its current level, while ‘an aid worker who once lived in one of Africa’s poorer countries told me that infant death was so common fifteen or so years ago that an employee of his might not take a day’s leave if it happened to them — it was accepted as part of life, and so less was done to resist it.’ (H/t Ed West)

I’d add that less could be done to resist it. People simply didn’t know how to significantly reduce infant mortality rates, just as we currently lack the scientific knowledge to reduce miscarriage rates. In that environment a certain level of resignation is to be expected.

There is another reason that people, in general, grieve early miscarriage less than infant death. It’s that with miscarriage, they don’t know their children as well.

Even now, with all the incomprehensibly wonderful advances in medical technology that have led to a point where most of us can reasonably expect our babies to live, people do – in general, on average, with all appropriate qualifications – tend to be less deeply shattered by the death of a newborn baby than by the death of a five-year-old. Not always, not everyone. Even bringing up the comparison feels horrible: there’s something cold and inhumane about weighing up two of the most deep and profound kinds of grief that human life has to offer. I make the comparison nonetheless because it reveals something true. As a rule, grief is stronger the better one knows the lost person, and the more time the two of you have spent together.

This is just as true when we think about the grief of adults. Imagine a woman, Charlotte, who was conceived by sperm donation. Charlotte is an only child and has always wanted a sister. In her early thirties she discovers that she has a genetic half-sibling, Alice, who had the same donor father. She’s shocked, apprehensive – but also excited and delighted. She reaches out to Alice to make contact. After a time she receives a reply from Alice’s husband, who tells her that Alice died three weeks ago.

The kind of grief Charlotte would experience in that situation might well be profound. Certainly it would be complicated. But it would be less intense than the grief she would have experienced had she and Alice grown up together. Of course it would be.

How much a being matters and how much we grieve their loss are just two different things. There are so very many factors other than a creature’s intrinsic dignity that can alter the character and depth of our grief for their loss.

When you put these things together, the pattern of grief we see in today’s society regarding embryo death makes much more sense – and that’s before we account for the uncomfortable political incentives that controversy over abortion introduces to the question of talking about miscarriage grief. Pro-choice people, understandably, don’t want to say things that could be weaponised against them by our side of the debate. (Máirtín has an incisive look at that phenomenon here).

Given all that’s been said, the fact that embryo death is so often grieved as deeply as it is points to the equality and dignity of those embryos. Read the last paragraph of deBoer’s piece about the loss of the embryo his doctors called ‘Twin B’.

The battle, in this process, is to protect your heart without covering it in so many layers of ice that you can’t feel anything when the joy comes. You make a plan, a defense plan for your heart, and you try not to swerve. But you do fail. I was over the vanishing twin and then I wasn’t. I was fine and then I found a picture of my sister and myself as a baby, in a shoebox full of yellowing Fotomat prints in a cardboard box that sits on a shelf in my living room. It’s one of many boxes of photos and documents that I’ve always meant to digitize but haven’t, which means that any day they could go up in flames as suddenly and finally as the family those pictures depict did. But life goes on, if we make it go on. Someday I will take our son and place him on my lap and go through those pictures one by one and explain to him why the 1980s came in different colors than the years he will occupy, in a future that is already his and not mine. To see my siblings in golden emulsion like that, though, made me think of what my unborn child might have had in Twin B, a sibling and friend and irreplaceable companion, and for a moment I lost myself in a beautiful and bitter nostalgia, every moment of my youth that was cast in those particular colors that can be seen only by the innocent and the unafraid. For that uncertain moment I thought of all the things a child is – another set of little gloves to fish around for in the pockets of another little coat – and for awhile I let myself hurt, my only swerving, then pushed Twin B out of my mind forever.

DeBoer would dispute the implications I’m drawing from his words, but I think they speak for themselves. The world is tragic, death is inescapable, and different people and societies deal with those facts in different ways. More than that, each individual experience of grief is different in ways that are not always easy to explain or account for.

But grief over embryo death and miscarriage is not set apart from the other types of human grief. It has its own character: and that character speaks not to the moral irrelevance of the unborn but to their dignity and moral equality.

Ben