The NY Times on Miscarriage and Abortion

One of their worst opinion pieces to date

I read a lot of social commentary, and I try not to go after other people in my own writing, even though I am sometimes tempted. I read the New York Times, and so I experience this temptation often. Today I am succumbing.

If you can access it, I encourage you to read this piece, “Why Do We Talk About Miscarriage Differently Than Abortion?”

The authors—two law professors—try to confront a significant weakness in the abortion-rights movement. Namely, that people believe and feel that the involuntary loss of a pregnancy is in fact the unwanted death of a child. They write, “Decades ago, the anti-abortion movement realized that it could weaponize grief after pregnancy loss to suggest the callousness of abortion and to promote the concept of fetal personhood.” However, they continue, “Denying fetal attachment, implicitly or explicitly, makes abortion-rights supporters look unfeeling and doctrinaire. It also alienates the countless people who grieve after pregnancy loss and still very much support abortion rights.”

The solution is to recognize that “attachment is entirely subjective,” especially since “Fetal value erases the pregnant person’s perspective.” You should read that statement again. And one more time.

The authors go on to argue that one can acknowledge the real grief of miscarriage and also affirm the right to abortion by locating the value of the unborn in the pregnant woman’s experience of the pregnancy: “If we ground fetal value in the pregnant woman’s attachment, and commit to defending her conception of the pregnancy, we can recognize loss without threatening abortion rights.”

Two quick points:

First, the authors are simply arguing to talk about abortion in the way that pro-life people already do. That is, people who oppose abortion will say that the moral status of the unborn child has become a matter of perspective.

Second, note the use of the word “value,” which is being used as a noun, but in fact should be used as a verb. They are saying that the pregnant woman values her fetus, and therefore it has value. Or, that the pregnant woman does not value her fetus, and therefore it does not have value. When stated as a verb, it becomes readily apparent how unsatisfactory this argument really is—not to mention that is fails at its objective. Parents who are grieving a miscarriage are experiencing the otherness and inherent worth of the child they have lost; it won’t do to say to them that their grief is actually because of their attachment. (I mean, I guess a Buddhist could argue that.) We should be attentive to these sorts of details. The moral concept of value, with its undertones of money and the power of will, is different than other conceptions of moral status.

Anyway, if you know me, then you know that I am morally, and so legally, skeptical about abortion, but that I always take seriously any arguments for its moral justifiability and for its legality. I maintain that the most compelling arguments for abortion rights are the ones that admit that abortion is the taking of human life (I have little use for “personhood”) and simply insist that certain circumstances make killing justifiable.