The lack of distress that society feels at the reality of miscarriage seems inconsistent with the pro-life position that tremendous loss of human life is involved.

First of all, the fact that a given category of humans has a high natural death rate is no reason to deny them personhood. The nine-month survival rate of 96-year-olds with leukemia may be similar to the nine-month survival rate of zygotes, but this is no argument for denying human rights to all 96-year-olds with leukemia.¹ In some societies several hundred years ago, most children died before the age of five—but this did not make four-year-olds non-persons.

Second of all, the amount of distress that one feels at another’s death has no bearing on whether or not the latter had intrinsic value. The distress typically depends on the degree of emotional attachment—and, obviously, embryos are at a disadvantage in this department. We Americans pour billions of dollars into expensive cancer treatments to prolong the lives of our grandparents and yet are largely apathetic to the plight of the millions ravaged by tropical diseases in the Third World. There is nothing remarkable about this. I place more emotional value on my mother than I do on a malaria-stricken child in Africa whom I have never met. But this does not mean that I think that the child in Africa has any less intrinsic value as a person than my mother. Because my mother is more emotionally (extrinsically) valuable to me, I would feel much more distress if she died. However, I would never violate the basic human rights of a poor child in Africa, because I recognize that he has every bit as much intrinsic value as my mother. The same goes for embryos, on whom most people understandably place less emotional value than on those born people with whom they have formed social bonds.

Of course, for miscarriages of which she is aware, the mother often feels a considerable sense of emotional loss—again, this is understandable, given that she did form close bonds with the fetus.