The March for Life, which is now underway in Washington, D.C., tends to be a festive affair—which is unsurprising, given that it’s dominated by young people (with up to 80 percent of attendees under the age of twenty, according to event director Jeanne Monahan). High schoolers and college students outnumber older adults by a huge margin, and you’re less likely to hear doomsday preaching than upbeat chants and hymns.
But my heart is heavy today as I think of all who should be alive, but are not—the 55 million Americans who, thanks to the legacy of Roe v. Wade, were killed before their birth over the past forty years. National Review‘s Katrina Trinko wrote movingly on this subject earlier in the week:
It’s hard to mourn [the victims of abortion] because we know virtually nothing about them, except they once existed. So much of them remained potential. We don’t know how many of them would have been eager and well-behaved, and how many would been hellions, and how many would have been, like most of us as children, a mixture of earnest affection and efforts and tantrums. . . .
So it’s tough to mourn, because when we mourn, we talk specifics. We talk about how the departed one loved certain things, whether it be cult movies or fashion or basketball. We talk about the memories we have of him or her, of the specific things done in the past. We talk about his personality, his approach to life—whether that be glass half full or half empty—and so much more.
But for these kids, we have none of that. . . . .
And we don’t know how having them around would have changed us. Could they have been friends, spouses, relatives, colleagues who we would have connected with, who would have awakened or encouraged an aspect of our personalities that may now remain dormant? Perhaps.
It’s curious to notice who isn’t there. But it’s even stranger that we spend so little time wondering who they—and we—would have been if they were still with us.
January 25th, 2013 | 4:59 pm
For those who believe that life (personhood) begins at conception, it is a startling fact that an estimated 60%-80% of lives end within a few days of conception, before implantation. There is a high rate of loss of chemical pregnancies as well—pregnancies shortly after implantation. A woman who miscarries this early may very well not even know that a pregnancy occurred. The miscarriage rate for all pregnancies (chemical and clinical) is 10% to 25%. Assuming no woman ever procured an abortion, if we took the low estimate for early embryo loss (60%) and the low estimate for miscarriage (10%), then for every 100 persons conceived, 40 make it to implantation, and 36 make it to birth. In other words, the best estimate I can come up with (and I would welcome a better source of estimates if anyone has one) is that if somehow abortions could be completely prohibited, 64% of all people conceived would die. (And we are not counting things like embryos created and discarded in fertility clinics.) And yet we do not mourn these losses, or speculate what these people would have been like, or miss them terribly, or even have a prayer to say for them.
Let me make it absolutely clear. If life (personhood) begins at conception, then the fact that a huge percentage of the unborn die of natural causes in no way justifies abortion. It does, however, raise the question of why we speculate about, and mourn the loss of, aborted babies without giving a single thought, or saying a single prayer—for the millions upon millions of babies who die without our ever knowing of their existence.
January 25th, 2013 | 5:17 pm
David, that’s silly. We mourn them because they were killed intentionally and much further along in their development. Simply put, we know of the existence of those aborted, so we mourn them. The fact that millions whose existence we do not know of get less attention is common sense and does not raise any questions.
January 25th, 2013 | 5:20 pm
Thank you for this post and its remembrance of those victims whose beauty and gifts are known to God alone.
I just returned from the March for Life and found it full of joy and good spirit, with one disgraceful exception: ‘createdequal.net,’ an anti-abortion group that set up along Constitution Avenue a huge jumbotron (at least 12’ diagonally) that repeatedly showed images of aborted children.
My wife and I were with our sons and were appalled. The marchers are just about the last group who need to be reminded of abortion’s violence. And, how does a parent keep one’s young children from seeing such gruesomeness? I can’t believe that our sons (all aged ten and under) had to see those images at their ages. That jumbotron was about the farthest thing from the “contemplative outlook” on life that John Paul II commended in Evangelium vitae (#83).
If such activists think that they need such imagery to advance the cause among friends, then they have lost any sense of perspective and betray their own lack of confidence. With friends like these…
I hope that the March’s organizers find some way of banning such visual violence next year. It does nothing to honor the 55 million little ones who have been aborted in the U.S. The pro-life movement deserves better, especially for its youngest and most impressionable members.
January 26th, 2013 | 2:46 am
David Nickol: Fr. Neahaus, in the print edition of FIRST THINGS, a few years back, pointed out the fallacy of those who argue that, because so many pregnancies fail, this somehow implies that they’re not really deserving of our protection, by pointing out that in premodern times, the infant and child mortality rate was very high, but no one would argue that these infants and children are not human persons. (I’m paraphrasing his point).
You seem to be aware of this, based on your final argument. But your last point, is just as irrelevant to the human personhood of the unborn.
January 26th, 2013 | 2:51 am
Let me clarify my last point. If so many are sad about aborted fetuses, but don’t give a “single thought” to those that die naturally, this in no way implies that the unborn are not human persons, or that those who are prolife, “really” know that the unborn are not persons. I don’t know if Mr. Nickol is implying these things or not, but if they don’t mourn them, well, they, (we) should mourn them, since they all have a right to life.
January 26th, 2013 | 12:08 pm
I don’t know if Mr. Nickol is implying these things or not . . .
Bret Lythgoe,
I don’t know how I can say it in any stronger terms:
January 26th, 2013 | 12:54 pm
Excellent point, Bret. To the extent that we fail to consider those lost unknowingly through natural death, that is our shame, but it is not useful information for forming ethical judgments.
But JohnO is also correct. It is not in itself a failing that we more greatly decry the deliberate killing of those who are known to exist, than the natural loss of someone of whose existence we only do not, but cannot, know. Mourning rightly responds more to a sense of loss, than to simply a theoretical knowledge that something bad happens. This is also the fallacy of those who claim pro-lifers are inconsistent if they don’t hold full funerals with every miscarriage. Funerals are about honoring the loss of someone you knew and had the opportunity to love in more than theory, not philosophical statements about the value of people you never even got to meet.
January 26th, 2013 | 8:09 pm
David Nickol:
As any woman who has experienced a known miscarriage (including myself) can tell you, OF COURSE we mourn those losses. But intentional ending of a presumably healthy baby’s life is something altogether different. It’s hard to fathom exactly what kind of point you were attempting to make in your comment. I can tell you that if there was anything I could have done to prevent my miscarriage I would have done so. Abortion is a completely different matter. Yes, many early pregnancies end in miscarriage. Sometimes the mother is aware of that and sometimes she is not. Frankly, your comment leaves the impression that you don’t understand the moral distinction. At all.
January 26th, 2013 | 10:08 pm
Thanks so much for this Anna….it’s really inspiring what’s gone on today in Washington in the March for Life Rally! I’d like to reference a book we should all read – “Far From the Tree: Paents, Children and the Search for Identity’ – that was reviewed by Mark Stoeltje of San Antonio who is a writer executive director of the Clubhouse, a nonprofit center serving adults with severe mental illness.
The book was written by Andrew Solomon who discusses families raising children with ‘horizontal identites’ – traits they don’t share with their parents involving mental and physical disabilities, children conceived in rape and those who turn to crime. The book addresses transgenderism,the lonliness of being a prodigy, deaf culture and dwarfism. This man spent 10 years researching this and he tells us the majority of the parents interviewed exude incredible hope and courage – not in spite of the challenges they face but because of them. One comment by a parent of a Downs Syndrome child:
Every single trait that I wasn’t good at, I’ve had to develop because of him – I was living superficially and attached to my ego and my stuff and myimage – but how canI be judmental of anything now?’
A comment made by another Downs Syndrome parent: ‘It was like buying a ticket to Spain and ending up in Alaska’ – it’s a whole different country raising a little like this.’
January 26th, 2013 | 10:46 pm
David Nickol,
Every woman I know who has had a miscarriage and known it, even at a very early stage, has mourned the life of that child. Even women I’ve known who might argue for abortion rights have, on losing their own unborn children to miscarriage, experienced great grief. Even women I’ve known who didn’t believe that the unborn child, in the abstract, was more than a “potential life” have — maybe inexplicably to themselves — grieved their pregnancy losses *as if a person had died,* as if what had happened to them were something beyond the mere disappointment of hope. And their friends, including me, have grieved with them. When I’m at Mass, my intentions always include those dead who have no one to pray for them, and I mean this to include *all* the dead, not merely those who were born before they died.
It seems to me, then, that people certainly do remember, and mourn, and pray for, unborn children who die of natural causes, perhaps especially if such a child is their own child, or their grandchild, or otherwise part of their family. This seems completely right and natural to me: we grieve our relatives who die and, to a certain extent, we grieve those of our friends as well. We can’t grieve people we don’t know, at least not in the same way, though again we can always pray for them.
As for miscarriages that happen so early that the pregnancy hasn’t been detected — well, I can’t say for certain that that hasn’t happened to me, though I’m not aware of its ever having happened. Again, I guess these would be “the dead who have no one to pray for them.” Or would have no one, if no one were praying. At any rate, that even the mother isn’t aware of them yet doesn’t make them not human.
January 26th, 2013 | 10:50 pm
But this whole species of grief — grief for natural deaths — falls in a different arena, it seems to me, from the grief we experience when someone is murdered. When those twenty children were murdered in Connecticut, it was a national outrage in a way that the deaths of twenty children from cancer or heart defects would not have been. Natural death is a tragedy, but often enough it’s a private, family one, not something people stand around holding placards on city streets to mark. People largely don’t react to natural death as something society should do something about. Murder, on the other hand, especially legally sanctioned murder of innocent people, is and should be a matter for public outrage. I simply don’t see that pro-life people are being inconsistent in not demonstrating against miscarriage as well.
January 26th, 2013 | 10:56 pm
Hi Pentemom, thank you. I think you’re right that the deliberate killing of those we know will cause us more mourning than of the natural deaths of those we cannot know about. I also agree with you concerning the purpose of funerals.
January 26th, 2013 | 11:00 pm
Hi David Nickol, thanks for the clarification. I think that pentemom has provided an excellent answer to the question you raise in your last sentence, on your first comment.
January 27th, 2013 | 12:34 am
Mr Nickol,
As a woman who was aware of her recurrent early pregnancy losses, I agree with your comment. I later delivered a baby (early) with a lethal abnormality and I did not find the grief process to be particularly different.
I appreciate your comment and agree with you.
I also find statistics about how many more people the US would have without abortion disturbing- many abortions are to women who go on to have subsequent pregnancies and research strongly suggests that the total number of children a woman has doesn’t change due to abortion any more than it changes due to miscarriage.
January 27th, 2013 | 10:36 am
Frankly, your comment leaves the impression that you don’t understand the moral distinction. At all.
CV,
I am sorry to hear of the loss you suffered. I think one of the side benefits of the pro-life movement’s emphasis on the humanity of the unborn is greater sensitivity to the feelings of mothers (and fathers) who lose a child through miscarriage.
There are obvious differences between an unborn infant dying of natural causes and being deliberately killed. However, I am not sure what the “moral distinction” you cite refers to in terms of the unborn themselves. They are not moral agents. If life (personhood) begins at conception, an unborn child who dies of natural causes, no matter how early, is no less of a person than an unborn child who dies by induced abortion. There is occasional talk of declaring the victims of abortion to be martyrs, as if somehow they did something of merit that the unborn who died of natural causes did not. But this makes no sense.
For those who oppose abortion, there may be value in calling attention to the magnitude of the issue by speculating how the world might be different if these children had been born. But I am struck by how easily changing just a few words in Katrina Trinko’s article could transform it into a piece about the unborn who died of natural causes without even the mothers being aware of their existence. Are they so unworthy of attention and discussion?
January 27th, 2013 | 11:13 am
I think that pentemom has provided an excellent answer to the question you raise in your last sentence, on your first comment.
Bret Lythgoe,
I liked pentamom’s observation, “To the extent that we fail to consider those lost unknowingly through natural death, that is our shame . . . .” And I agree that the magnitude of death of the unborn by natural causes has no bearing whatsoever on the ethics of abortion. I also appreciated Sally Thomas’s concept of “the dead who have no one to pray for them.” I appreciate Twin Mom’s support and comments, and I think there is actually a lot of agreement on this issue.
I remember my mother told me, long ago, but also long after it happened, that she once thought she might have had a very early miscarriage. She called our parish priest and asked him what she should do with the tiny mass that might possibly have been a very early embryo. He told her to flush it down the toilet. I was shocked, and it seemed clear to me from the way she told the story that it still upset her years after it happened.
January 27th, 2013 | 2:03 pm
We don’t mourn their loss of life, their lost opportunities. We mourn that their lives were not able to touch us and compel us to love. We mourn that we committed horrors against them. Mortal life isn’t the end.
January 27th, 2013 | 3:29 pm
David Nickol issues a challenge to those of us who revere the lives of unborn children. Once again he reveals an inconsistency in an aspect of Catholic thinking and practice and calls us to give an account of ourselves.
Human persons in early stages of development whose lives are lost to early miscarriage are actually (and horribly now that I think about it) discarded as “medical waste.” Am I correct that we treat worn American flags with more respect?
I am truly saddened and, like Mr. Nickol, shocked. I cannot explain my complete neglect or my failure to understand the importance of this issue
Sally Rogers’ prayer for “the dead who have no one to pray for them” will be my prayer after today.
January 27th, 2013 | 6:08 pm
Hi David Nickol, thanks for your comments. I’ve always been impressed with the intelligence and moral insight that you bring to these threads (even when I disagree). I’m sorry to hear about what your mother went through. The priest’s instruction was stunningly insensitive and unkind. Even if he was well intentioned, he showed a great lack of empathy, and concern. perhaps someone could retort that burying the embryo in the ground is no better, but he/she would be wrong. We associate toliets with waste,things to be rid of that we dislike.
January 28th, 2013 | 5:16 pm
Perhaps there ought to be a separate discussion on unwanted and aborted children..but the reason I posted my piece about the book written addressing ‘different’ children was to highlight the plight of the unwanted Downs Syndrome babies and those found to have handicaps before birth.
Down’s is a chromosomal disorder – but not a life-threatening condition….as are several others that babies are found to have before birth. Today, over 90 per cent of babies found to have Down’s in antenatal tests are routinely aborted…..this is outrageous.
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