…Her own miscarriage. She acknowledges a major point here:
The more I considered it, the more I became convinced that the silence around miscarriage was connected to feminism’s work around abortion. How could I grieve a thing that didn’t exist? If a fetus is not meaningfully alive, if it is just a collection of cells – the cornerstone claim of the pro-choice movement – what does it mean to miscarry one?
…but this appears to never sink into her consciousness. It’s as if that idea is the swimming pool, but she just sits on the edge, never taking a dive in to embrace the reality that if we abort a collection of cells in utero, we cannot mourn the loss of a son or daughter, also in utero.
Oddly, I also think that the abortion culture creates an expectation that we don’t have children when we don’t want to, and we do have children at the precise moment we decide we are ready. Perhaps the result is the kind devastation she experiences at her own miscarriage. It’s as if she blames herself for not being able to sustain the pregnancy, not realizing this was never within her personal sphere of power.
She also only mourns the child she wanted, not the one she aborted. Another inconsistency that the article never grapples with.








She raises an nteresting question. I think the pro-choice answer has to be the following: the clump of cells has value if and only if the mother assigns it value. An abortion is a trivial event because the mother assigns little or no value to the fetus. A miscarriage is a grievous event because the mother assigns great value to the fetus.
Which of course is a terrifyingly illiberal idea, that one human’s value resides in the will and heart of another human.