My point in the previous post is simply this: Our rude and dim new friend, like many who argue for the criminalization of abortion, insists that we are in a crisis. And yet our rude and dim new friend does not behave as though he himself is living in the context of such a crisis.
It is therefore reasonable to conclude that our RADNF is talking out of his backside.
The claim of a context of crisis rests on the belief that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception. If one truly believes this, then one faces two vast and shocking crises that must both, by virtue of their enormity and gravity, trump nearly every other moral concern.
And yet our RADNF only seems to recognize the existence of one of these. He’s upset about medical abortion, but not about natural abortion. And natural abortion — miscarriage — claims the lives of even more fully human persons every year.
Each year in the United States there are about 6 million known pregnancies. According to the Mayo Clinic:
About 15 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is probably much higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn’t even know she’s pregnant.
So that’s 1.2 million people — fully human persons — who die every year in miscarriages, not including the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more such fully human persons who die without anyone ever even knowing they had been conceived.
Let’s just focus on the 1.2 million people there that we know about for certain. That makes miscarriage the largest single cause of mortality in our nation. Not cardiovascular disease. Not cancer. Those are the No. 2 and No. 3 causes of death in the U.S., but miscarriage is a bigger killer than both of those combined. (The stats there are from the CDC’s page on deaths and mortality — a page that, like every other public statistic on mortality you will ever hear, refuses to count the unborn as fully human persons.)
If you truly believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, then you must also believe that miscarriage is the No. 1 health crisis in the United States. You should, at a minimum, be calling for private or public funding for research into this pandemic catastrophe.
Yet no one is doing that. At all. This massive crisis is a necessary and inescapable conclusion from the premise that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, yet those who claim to believe that premise have not bothered to reach this conclusion.
Why not?
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