The Scourge of Our Time

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.

…

Since it must be treated from conception as a person, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2270, 2274

In this paper, Toby Ord advances a strong reductio ad absurdum of the standard pro-life position that life begins at conception. I’ve heard versions of this argument before, but hadn’t seen it laid out so clearly.

Here’s the argument:

1. The majority (~62%) of embryos die within a few weeks of conception (mostly from failure to implant in the lining of the uterus wall). A mother of three children could be expected to also have had five spontaneous abortions.
2. The Catholic Church promotes the premise that an embryo at conception has the same moral worth as a developed human. On this view, more than 60% of the world population dies in their first month of life, making this a more deadly condition than anything else in human history. Saving even 5% of embryos would save more lives than a cure for cancer.

3. Given the 200 million lives per year at stake, those that think life begins at conception should be directing massive amounts of resources towards ending spontaneous abortion and see it as the Scourge of our time.

Here are two graphs of the US survival curve: first, as we ordinarily see it, and second, as the pro-lifer is obligated to see it:

This is of course a really hard bullet for the pro-life camp to bite. If you’re like me, you see spontaneous abortions as morally neutral. Most of the time they happen before a pregnancy has been detected, leaving the mother unaware that anything even happened. It’s hard then to make a distinction between the enormous amount of spontaneous abortions naturally occurring and the comparatively minuscule number of intentional abortions.

I have previously had mixed feelings about abortion (after all, if our moral decision making ultimately comes down to trying to maximize some complicated expected value, it will likely be blind to whether is a real living being or just a “potential” living being), but this argument pretty much clinches the deal for me.