In a nutshell, morality of abortion vs. miscarriage

In comments Amanda Marcotte's post on Pandagon about Emergency Contraception and the myth that it's actually an abortion pill, Jesurgislac (who also has a livejournal blog) has an excellent reply to a frequent pro-life anti-abortion responsibility dodge. Elsewhere in comments to the same post an anti-choicer named Murcie asked "Now, tell me: how does the consideration of spontaneous abortion impact the morality of abortion, any more than the reality of random death impacts the morality of murder?"

Here's Jesurgislac's answer:

If anti-choicers believe (as they claim) that every fertilized egg is a human being, and that having an abortion is as much murder as killing a toddler would be, it follows that they believe that half of all the human beings in the world die before they are born, and that these deaths are exactly as tragic as the death of a toddler would be. To someone who genuinely believes what anti-choicers claim they believe, spontaneous abortions would be the most serious health crisis of all: far more serious than the (relatively) trivial number of fetuses that die by induced miscarriage.

But then, if anti-choicers really believed that abortion is terrible and needs to be stopped, they would be investing their efforts in means of ensuring women neither conceive accidentally (since accidental conceptions are the most likely to be aborted) and will be able to support an unplanned child, no matter what her life circumstances (the most common reason given for having an abortion). They’d be working on a universal program to bring contraception, including the morning-after pill, to the world (never mind the women of the US) and they’d be working on social programs to prevent women from needing to abort a child they would have kept because they can’t afford to support another child.

But they don’t. So we know they don’t. Their claim to believe that life starts at conception is a self-serving lie, which ought not to be taken seriously in any serious discussion.

The comment appeared here.

Making the differences and similarities as clear as humanly possible is critical not just for questions of morality but also questions of politics: using the anti-choicer's (newest) definition of life beginning at the instant of fusion between sperm and egg then at least by some estimates 90% of all human "lives" end somewhere between conception and birth. Again, using their line of reasoning (not mine), tens of millions of full-fledged American citizens die unremarked every year.

And I do mean tens of millions. Using statistics of live births in the U.S. from 2004, arithmetic says there were as many as 36 million post-conception/pre-birth citizens died that year compared to 4 million who made it to term. If they really believed their own life-of-a-toddler equivalency rhetoric they're not merely monsters, they're ogres.

But they're not ogres, of course, and they don't act, because they don't believe their own rhetoric. The whole begins-at-conception thing is a story, a myth, a lie they've latched on to because, while they really don't give a shit about unborn life they really *do* give a shit about micromanaging what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Which makes them mere run-of-the-mill, morally bankrupt assholes.