Inside of a wonderful, sweeping review of reasons why abortion should always remain legal, Jill of Feministe brings up an issue that’s been on my mind for over a decade.

And then there’s the question that Dianne continually raised over at Vox Nova: If life begins at conception, what are pro-lifers doing about the 70 percent miscarriage rate?

Yes, you read that correctly: If you apply the pro-life definition of pregnancy — which isn’t the one applied by the medical community — the majority of pregnancies never make it to term. Pro-lifers argue that life begins at the point of fertilization, and that as soon as the sperm squirms its way into the egg, a new life has begun and any purposeful termination of that life is murder. The medical community, on the other hand, doesn’t generally weigh in on when life begins, but does say that pregnancy begins at the point of implantation — that is, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining. That’s the first point at which pregnancy can be detected. It’s also an important point because more than half of all fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant. So, if you go with the anti-choice definition of life, more than half of all “unique human beings” never implant, and get naturally flushed out of the woman’s body.

To borrow again from Dianne, if there was a disease that was killing 70 percent of all infants, wouldn’t you be demanding funding to research it? Agitate for a cure?

As far as I can tell, there is not a single organization dedicated to ending pre-implantation “miscarriages.” Not a single pro-life organization lists it as an item on their political agenda.

I know the whole natural vs. purposeful death argument will come in here, but the point still holds: If a disease were killing 70 percent of all Americans, we’d be more worried about that than the murder rate.

And so I submit, once again, that anti-choicers don’t actually believe that an embryo is a human deserving of the same rights that you and I are entitled to. They see embryos as something less than born people. They’ll never admit it, but their actions speak pretty loudly.

Read the quote in context here.

I hadn’t previously heard about Dianne or about the way she’s been carrying the issue to pro-life groups. With, I might add, the predictable results of evasion, denial, quibbling, relativizing, conditionalizing, and generally mealy-mouthing you’d expect from anti-choice, anti-abortion, anti-sex activists who masquerade behind the “pro-life” facade. (Note: honest, conscientiously pro-life, as opposed to “pro-life,” activists would affirmatively engage with Dianne and work with her to, y’know, actually do something about pre- and post-implantation miscarriage and stillbirth. Let alone do anything about post-partum and early childhood life. Instead, not surprisingly, we see the National Right to Life Committee doesn’t support the children’s-life-saving S-CHIP bill.)

Earlier posts on this matter: – Miscarriages of injustice – Just for the record, ok? – In a nutshell, morality of abortion vs. miscarriage – How miscarriage matters in the debate over choice – Pro-life or only anti-abortion? A new test – “Pro-life” choices – Chip, chip, chipping away at reproductive rights