Responding to the implications of "spontaneous abortion"--a challenging argument against "life at conception" in journal article: "The Scourge"

[Arandur]

I recently came across a bioethics journal article from 2008 called “The Scourge.” It argues a reductio ad absurdum approach to the idea that life begins at conception/fertilization. It was posted on a Pro-Life FB group that I am privy to; the poster was very disturbed by it.

The argument is actually much more thorough and better thought out than I had expected. I have a number of thoughts on it, as I don’t think he’s accurate on many premises and some of his terms, and several of his conclusions I think don’t quite follow, usually being excessive. However, even though I have problems with his argument, I do feel some of it has enough force to weaken the persuasive value of our common insistence that life begins at conception.

Thought I’d run this by the great people here. I’d like to reserve my thoughts for a little while so as not to unduly influence anyone else’s who is reading this type of argument for the first time.

The argument relates primarily to the topic of life at conception/fertilization, embryo loss/spontaneous abortion and the magnitude of that occurrence; and the moral implications of these. For people of faith, it may also relate to the point of ensoulment and the problem of natural evil.

Please review the article here: amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/scourge.pdf
And the authors responses to feedback here: amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/scourge-response.pdf

 

[JimG]

Both of those links seem to go to the response document rather than the original article. However, I have read the original article before.

Two things:

1. The claimed incidence of spontaneous abortion has no bearing at all on when a new individual of the human species has its beginning. A new and distinct individual of the human species has its beginning at conception. That’s simply the biology of it.
2. I have yet to figure out how the actual claimed incidence of spontaneous abortion is determined, except by guesswork. To know how many spontaneous failures of a zygote to implant occurred in a given population of women in a given period of time would require examination of the menstrual flow of every member of such population every single month over an extended period. I have even read through scholarly journal articles trying to find out how this data is supposed to be known, but no methodology has been mentioned. I’m not disputing the data—yet. I’m simply saying that I’ve never seen any detailed methodology as to how the data was obtained and verified.

And one other thing: how does the occurrence of a natural evil give us the right to engage in the deliberate taking of human life? It’s like saying that the existence of tornados as a natural force gives humans the right to engage deliberately in destruction of property and human life on a similar scale.

 

[anruari]

Ok… so the thrust of the argument is that since many tiny infants die naturally before they even implant give us the right to kill them?

Well everyone dies eventually… does that give me the right to take an M16 and go on a shooting spree in a mall?

To try to draw this conconclusion requires an insane twisting of logic.

The teaching of the church is clear:
Human Life is sacred from the moment of conception (i.e. fertilization) to natural death.

Whether that natural death takes place 120 seconds later or 120 years does not matter, and nor does it change the sanctity of that life.

 

[PietroPaolo]

Ok… so the thrust of the argument is that since many tiny infants die naturally before they even implant give us the right to kill them?

Well everyone dies eventually… does that give me the right to take an M16 and go on a shooting spree in a mall?

To try to draw this conconclusion requires an insane twisting of logic.

The teaching of the church is clear:
Human Life is sacred from the moment of conception (i.e. fertilization) to natural death.

Whether that natural death takes place 120 seconds later or 120 years does not matter, and nor does it change the sanctity of that life.

Exactly. Old and sick people die of natural causes everyday, that doesn’t mean euthanasia is a-okay. It isn’t a matter of when someone dies, its a matter of the intentional taking of innocent life by another human. 100% of all people will die. We can’t therefore decide to kill anyone whenever it is convenient for us. Bottom line - we don’t get to “play God.”

 

[Elizium23]

In locales where infant mortality is unusually high, does this give us the right to kill infants there too?

 

[Arandur]

Both of those links seem to go to the response document rather than the original article. However, I have read the original article before.

Sorry. I did link to the original article on the words “The Scourge” in the OP. Here it is again, though: amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/scourge.pdf

Two things:

1. The claimed incidence of spontaneous abortion has no bearing at all on when a new individual of the human species has its beginning. A new and distinct individual of the human species has its beginning at conception. That’s simply the biology of it.

1. I have yet to figure out how the actual claimed incidence of spontaneous abortion is determined, except by guesswork. To know how many spontaneous failures of a zygote to implant occurred in a given population of women in a given period of time would require examination of the menstrual flow of every member of such population every single month over an extended period. I have even read through scholarly journal articles trying to find out how this data is supposed to be known, but no methodology has been mentioned. I’m not disputing the data—yet. I’m simply saying that I’ve never seen any detailed methodology as to how the data was obtained and verified.

And one other thing: how does the occurrence of a natural evil give us the right to engage in the deliberate taking of human life? It’s like saying that the existence of tornados as a natural force gives humans the right to engage deliberately in destruction of property and human life on a similar scale.

These are some of the things I focused on initially, but they are mostly side points to the actual argument.

1. Yes, statistics don’t determine the reality. They do imply some conclusions, however, like determining that there is a very high level of human mortality that we don’t even think about.
2. I, too, have been growing increasingly skeptical of the claims of spontaneous abortion, because I can’t seem to find any real discussions on how that was determined, nor methodology to review, and I haven’t been able to conceive of a way to study it. I’m no doctor, but I’m not wholly ignorant in these areas: I have a B.S. in Biology and heavy emphases through that and minors on lab work and experimental design.
3. Natural evil. This is I think one of the places the conclusions derived are wrong. However, I want to get to that more later.

Ok… so the thrust of the argument is that since many tiny infants die naturally before they even implant give us the right to kill them?

Well everyone dies eventually… does that give me the right to take an M16 and go on a shooting spree in a mall?

To try to draw this conconclusion requires an insane twisting of logic.

The teaching of the church is clear:
Human Life is sacred from the moment of conception (i.e. fertilization) to natural death.

Whether that natural death takes place 120 seconds later or 120 years does not matter, and nor does it change the sanctity of that life.

I went here, too, when reading this. This is going beyond the author’s conclusion, but it is arguing from his conclusion to his implied motives, and taking his alternative to “The Claim” to its own reductio ad absurdum. It works to show that an implied alternative view is also absurd, and to continue to refute abortion, but it it also both relies on an implication (and thus a straw man) and avoids confronting the author’s Conclusion.

I think the two most challenging things to deal with in this argument are thus:

1. Assuming the statistics are true, and assuming that life (and ensoulment) occurs at the moment of fertilization, perhaps half of all humans die before birth. This proves nothing about the reality of it, but merely demonstrates what could be a very disturbing fact to come to grips with.
2. That mortality, and the disturbing scale of it, does seem to imply some response. I do think the author falsely imputes a moral obligation to address it, getting natural evil and moral evil (and moral obligations to respond thereto) confused, but I think it is still accurate to state that limiting natural evil is a meritorious good (even if its not a moral obligation). If so, that implies that it would be good to do something about it.

It is this startling problem of the scale of natural evil that I think is the hardest thing to respond to. I agree with you that we can’t use it to justify abortion or euthanasia, but this article isn’t stating that. I would like to focus on this scale of natural evil and what, if anything, we should do about it–whether as an obligation (which I don’t think we have) or as a good worthy of pursuing apart from obligation (which I do think may be the case).

 

[donna369]

i agree the with the two above.
first off, how can they possibly know how many spontaneous abortions occur n a given time. especially when many of these occur before implantation? the author needs to support these stats, not just repeat them.
how does the natural death of a human life make willful killing acceptable?
i believe in what the church teaches; life begins at conception and is sacred.

 

[SonCatcher]

People die “unexpectedly” at every age, from one day to one hundred years.

 

[JP2Admirer]

Prima facie, this seems an insurmountable argument for those of us who hold that an embryo deserves the full moral protection of an adult human. While this is the first I’ve seen this argument, so I have yet to study or fully ruminate on it, my first reactions are as follows:

How do we detect that spontaneous abortions occur? I say that because I offer the following scenario. Let’s assume the Scourge is true, but that it strikes ubiquitously with little in the way of prevention or detection. We would indeed be under obligation to try to stop it, if we could. However, because when it strikes is virtually undetectable, it would be impossible to stop and a waste of time to try. I would say the same holds true for spontaneous abortion.

Second, the author misses the distinction between passive an active. Again, assuming the Scourge is real, the authors argument is akin to stating that because the Scourge takes innocent life, anyone who wants to kill can do so licitly because the Scourge does so.

The whole idea that spontaneous abortion occurs does seem to cheapen human life. As others have stated, where they come up with these numbers is important. It almost seems too convenient to the death culture crowd. Something smells funny here.

 

[JP2Admirer]

Another thought: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, floods, hurricanes, etc., kill people all the time. Are we under moral obligation to stop them? Perhaps, but it’s futile to try because they can’t be stopped. Of course, the scale for these is much smaller, but moral obligation breaks down when something simply cannot be stopped.

 

[QuasiCatholic]

This still doesn’t help with statistics but it does give you a sense of why the spontaneous abortion numbers are so high. It also cuts into life at conception a little – although not in any way that has an obvious practical application – because it points out that you can “conceive” and still get something with funky DNA that isn’t actually a functional human.

…

The term conception is when the sperm and egg combine in that precious magic moment. This does not mean that you are pregnant. If you took a home or blood pregnancy test at this moment, you would not find any hCG – the chemical that indicates you are indeed pregnant – in your body. Conception simply is the fertilizing of the ovum after ovulation.

…

Once an ovum and sperm have combined to yield an entire blue print for a new person, it has a huge task to accomplish. It has to have combined all the genetic material correctly without fail or fault. There can be no blips or broken combinations. If there is, the fertilized egg will stop dividing before it ever leaves the fallopian tube. This happens most often. There is either too much genetic material (trisomy) or too little (missing chromosomes). Sometimes the chromosomes break and reattach in the wrong place or there is some other defect in DNA that stops the blastocyst from dividing after 3-5 days. This why when women undergo IVF they wait 3-5 to watch the embryos grow and see which ones are actually dividing still.

Let’s say that the new little embryo has perfect DNA and is dividing as all good newly formed babies should, it should exit the fallopian tube and enter the uterus in about 6 days after ovulation occurred. Now the little ball of cells is looking for a place to land, which leads us to the discussion about implantation and what it means.

Once the embryo has reached the uterus, you are about half way through the two week wait. Your body is making tons of progesterone that will make the lining of your uterus sticky. This stops the egg from rolling once it hits the uterine cavity. Implantation can happen as soon as the blastocyst getting the uterus at 6 days after ovulation and anytime up to 12 days past ovulation. The normal time of implantation is between 8-10 days past ovulation.

The embryo will be stopped by the sticky chemicals on the uterine lining and will hatch out of its shell. Once it hatches it secretes chemicals that allow it to digest the lining and burrow into it. At this moment, hCG is produced and you are now officially pregnant.

Even though the embryo has begun the implantation process and is secreting the chemical hCG, it does not mean things are perfect. Implantation can be tricky for many reasons. If the embryo implants too soon, it could be too close to or in the fallopian tube. If the embryo implants too late, it may not secrete enough hCG to stop your period from coming. The embryo can also not implant deep enough to support the building of the placenta. One can easily see that it still can mean that your period will show up on time even if implantation has started. There is nothing anyone can do and most likely you will never even know you were pregnant. Many doctors refer to this as a chemical pregnancy as the embryonic tissue never developed, only the pregnancy hormone was released.

 

[eyesopening]

Here’s something worth thinking about. Here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s say someone came up with a very convincing argument that life did in fact not begin at conception but later during the pregnancy (or even at birth). Lets say that this argument was so persuasive that every single Catholic on the planet was convinced (even the Pope). Well, that’s too bad, because it is not the people in the Catholic Church that define teaching on faith or morals, it is the Holy Spirit. The Church’s teachings CANNOT change. In this hypothetical situation people would attempt to change the Church’s teachings but by some miracle it would never become official.

Something like this did in fact happen once upon a time. I’m afraid I can’t remember which pope this was, but I’m sure some of you know the story. An apostate (or perhaps heretical; I get them mixed up) Cardinal conspired with a monarch to assassinate the then current Pope for the purpose of then procuring the Papacy for himself (apparently he was a shoe in). His promise to the Monarch was to change some teaching of the Church that they disagreed with. Upon becoming the new Pope this evil Cardinal suddenly had a change of heart and informed his former co-conspirator that as Bishop of Rome he simply could not bring himself to change this teaching. (If anyone can tell me more info on this situation I’d appreciate the help.)

The point is, a similar miracle would occur with the abortion issue even IF every last Catholic (including the Pope) were convinced that life does not begin with conception.

 

[THP]

Both of those links seem to go to the response document rather than the original article. However, I have read the original article before.

1. I have yet to figure out how the actual claimed incidence of spontaneous abortion is determined, except by guesswork. To know how many spontaneous failures of a zygote to implant occurred in a given population of women in a given period of time would require examination of the menstrual flow of every member of such population every single month over an extended period. I have even read through scholarly journal articles trying to find out how this data is supposed to be known, but no methodology has been mentioned. I’m not disputing the data—yet. I’m simply saying that I’ve never seen any detailed methodology as to how the data was obtained and verified.

Its obviously very easy to calculate the number of clinically evident early pregnancy losses. That incidence is about 12-15 percent before 8 weeks gestation.

The difficulty is calculating the incidence of conceptions that fail to implant and implantations that miscarry prior to clinically evident pregnancy.

Lost implantations are easy to calculate: Instead of examining menstrual flow you can look at a surrogate marker which is urinary HCG. Even back in the 80s and 90s when these were done the test was very sensitive. In what I think is the best study they took 221 couples with no history of infertility who were trying to conceive and collected daily urine samples for 6 months. They followed the HCG levels if they were positive. They counted it as positive if it was above a certain level for at least 3 consecutive days. This cannot be detected until implantation has occurred. This was compared with a control of sterilized women to subtract out any possible background HCG. They found that 22% of conceptions miscarried prior to clinically evident pregnancy.

So - 22% plus 15% is 37% plus about 3% after 8 weeks is 40% of conceptions lost.

You also have to add in the preimplantation losses which I don’t really understand how they calculate. It is based on IVF techniques that look at abnormal blastocysts conceived in-vitro. They can determine the rate of implantation failure during IVF. I’m not exactly sure how they can extrapolate this to a normally fertile woman but they say its about 30%. This is where the 60-70% of conceptions are lost and only 30% result in live birth.

Its actually more complicated because it depends on a number of other factors as well and what proportion of the population is conceiving. For example, we know that the miscarriage rate of clinically detected pregnancies in women over 40 is near 50%. So if a greater proportion of the population conceiving is over 40 that rate will go up.

 

[THP]

As a side, none of what I posted really matters, especially the concern for ensoulment because we have no idea when that occurs. I think the concepts of mono-zygotic twinning and chimeras are even more problematic when it comes to defining being “human”. The Church takes the wise and conservative approach that it obviously happens sometime between conception and birth so it makes sense to be on the safe side and treat all conceptions has unique individuals worth of dignity.

 

[QuasiCatholic]

Well, that’s too bad, because it is not the people in the Catholic Church that define teaching on faith or morals, it is the Holy Spirit. The Church’s teachings CANNOT change.

The human ovum wasn’t discovered until 1827, and wasn’t even really imagined until the late 1600s, so I think it’s safe to say that for most of its existence the Church didn’t teach that life began at “conception” in the way we now think of it.

Are we sure a) that it’s unchangeable dogma and b) that whatever Latin term was used to create that dogma actually translates into the modern, scientific definition of “conception”?

How did the church define when life began before it even understood how life began?

 

[THP]

Sorry. I did link to the original article on the words “The Scourge” in the OP. Here it is again, though: amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/scourge.pdf

I think the two most challenging things to deal with in this argument are thus:

1. Assuming the statistics are true, and assuming that life (and ensoulment) occurs at the moment of fertilization, perhaps half of all humans die before birth. This proves nothing about the reality of it, but merely demonstrates what could be a very disturbing fact to come to grips with.
2. That mortality, and the disturbing scale of it, does seem to imply some response. I do think the author falsely imputes a moral obligation to address it, getting natural evil and moral evil (and moral obligations to respond thereto) confused, but I think it is still accurate to state that limiting natural evil is a meritorious good (even if its not a moral obligation). If so, that implies that it would be good to do something about it.

It is this startling problem of the scale of natural evil that I think is the hardest thing to respond to. I agree with you that we can’t use it to justify abortion or euthanasia, but this article isn’t stating that. I would like to focus on this scale of natural evil and what, if anything, we should do about it–whether as an obligation (which I don’t think we have) or as a good worthy of pursuing apart from obligation (which I do think may be the case).

I didn’t read the article so maybe you can explain this. What is it disturbing? What is a natural miscarriage considered a “natural evil”? Is it even bad?

Sure, if we can increase pregnancy rates or stop tsunamis that would be good, but is the tsunami and miscarriage evil?

 

[eyesopening]

The human ovum wasn’t discovered until 1827, and wasn’t even really imagined until the late 1600s, so I think it’s safe to say that for most of its existence the Church didn’t teach that life began at “conception” in the way we now think of it.

Are we sure a) that it’s unchangeable dogma and b) that whatever Latin term was used to create that dogma actually translates into the modern, scientific definition of “conception”?

How did the church define when life began before it even understood how life began?

I prefer not to respond. I hate the “devil’s advocate” approach. Unsubscribing.

 

[SonCatcher]

Its obviously very easy to calculate the number of clinically evident early pregnancy losses. That incidence is about 12-15 percent before 8 weeks gestation.

The difficulty is calculating the incidence of conceptions that fail to implant and implantations that miscarry prior to clinically evident pregnancy.

Lost implantations are easy to calculate: Instead of examining menstrual flow you can look at a surrogate marker which is urinary HCG. Even back in the 80s and 90s when these were done the test was very sensitive. In what I think is the best study they took 221 couples with no history of infertility who were trying to conceive and collected daily urine samples for 6 months. They followed the HCG levels if they were positive. They counted it as positive if it was above a certain level for at least 3 consecutive days. This cannot be detected until implantation has occurred. This was compared with a control of sterilized women to subtract out any possible background HCG. They found that 22% of conceptions miscarried prior to clinically evident pregnancy.

So - 22% plus 15% is 37% plus about 3% after 8 weeks is 40% of conceptions lost.

You also have to add in the preimplantation losses which I don’t really understand how they calculate. It is based on IVF techniques that look at abnormal blastocysts conceived in-vitro. They can determine the rate of implantation failure during IVF. I’m not exactly sure how they can extrapolate this to a normally fertile woman but they say its about 30%. This is where the 60-70% of conceptions are lost and only 30% result in live birth.

Its actually more complicated because it depends on a number of other factors as well and what proportion of the population is conceiving. For example, we know that the miscarriage rate of clinically detected pregnancies in women over 40 is near 50%. So if a greater proportion of the population conceiving is over 40 that rate will go up.

May I ask the source of the studies for the 12-15% and the 22% numbers?

The reason I ask is that the only such study I have ever seen involved women who were coming off of hormonal birth control. Since hormonal birth control is widely known to induce fertility problems even after it is discontinued, that study could not truly be considered to be of healthy couples due to that defect.

 

[SonCatcher]

I didn’t read the article so maybe you can explain this. What is it disturbing? What is a natural miscarriage considered a “natural evil”? Is it even bad?

Sure, if we can increase pregnancy rates or stop tsunamis that would be good, but is the tsunami and miscarriage evil?

I think the thing that disturbs the OP is that the writer of the article used the phenomenon of spontaneous abortion to support his a priori conclusion that life begins at some later time.

 

[SonCatcher]

The human ovum wasn’t discovered until 1827, and wasn’t even really imagined until the late 1600s, so I think it’s safe to say that for most of its existence the Church didn’t teach that life began at “conception” in the way we now think of it.

Are we sure a) that it’s unchangeable dogma and b) that whatever Latin term was used to create that dogma actually translates into the modern, scientific definition of “conception”?

How did the church define when life began before it even understood how life began?

The Church’s teaching was given by the revelation of the Holy Spirit. It is not at all dependent upon biology.

Ever since the beginning, contraception and abortion have been judged immoral. The debate about ensoulment raged for most of that time from shortly after insemination to quickening and back. Despite that debate, the teaching on abortion has remained constant: never permissible, even if ensoulment might not yet have occurred.