Shots Across The Bow

Continuing the discussion on cloning

Continuing the discussion on cloning Once again, linked via Charles Murtaugh we find this quote:

One interesting aside: Gazzaniga points out that perhaps half of all normally fertilized eggs spontaneously abort, and he suggests, "It is hard to believe that under any religious belief system people would grieve and hold funerals for these natural events."

There are two very large problems with this statement.
First, a miscarriage can be emotionally devastating to the parents, even if it occurs early in the pregnancy. No, most do not hold funerals, but most do grieve. I think he is trying to refer to those miscarriages which occur before the woman realizes she is pregnant. Certainly, a woman will not grieve over the loss of a baby she never knew she was carrying. But this is a result of her ignorance, not from some dismissal of the fetus as a person. If she knew she had miscarried, she would react. To get a feel for this visceral reaction, imagine counseling a grieving woman who just miscarried by telling her that the fetus wasn't really a person yet, that all she lost was a bit of tissue.
You might want to step back as you do it though.

The second, and more devastating flaw in this position is that it assumes that if something happens naturally, causing it to occur artificially is OK. This is clearly not the case. People die all the time, but causing them to die is wrong. People catch diseases all the time; deliberately infecting them is wrong. Monuments wear out and collapse on their own, but blowing them up is wrong. A sand castle built too close to the high tide line will be erased by the natural action of the waves, but deliberately kicking it to pieces is wrong. You cannot use a naturally occuring process to justify an intentional intervention. What makes this argument even worse is what is left out. The "half of all normally fertilized eggs spontaneously abort" is an unfounded claim. A quick survey of the literature available on the web puts the figure at anywhere between 20% and 50%. The truth is we don't know how many blastocysts fail to implant, or are rejected after implantation. Nor do we have enough data to make a reasonable estimate of losses prior to recognized pregnancy. We do know that spontaneous abortions occur in approximately 15-20% of all recognized pregnancies. WE also know that, according to the Merck Manual:

In up to 60% of spontaneous abortions, the fetus is absent or grossly malformed, and in 25 to 60%, it has chromosomal abnormalities incompatible with life; thus spontaneous abortion in > 90% of cases may be a natural rejection of a maldeveloping fetus.

In other words, over 90% of the time, the spontaneous abortion is the bodies way of ejecting a non viable fetus. This simply does not apply when considering whether or not it is ethical to remove/alter/harvest a viable fetus. In one case, you have a dead end, with no potential; in the other, you have a living, developing organism.

Posted by Rich at April 26, 2002 3:40 AM