blog has a lot of lengthy, interesting posts.
I think he goes interestingly wrong in this digression in a post on Schiavo:
“Let me make an analogy. The reasoned, absolute pro-life position holds, for example, that personhood begins, from a moral and, those who reason thus hope, one day from a legal perspective, when sperm meets egg. The reasoning is impeccable, in that this is a bright-line test that works: an event actually happens, on one side of which there is an entity with a full complement of genes and the natural ability, in the proper environment, to develop into a full-grown baby. It is, as Ramesh Ponnuru likes to say, exactly what a human being looks like at that stage of development.
“But it is also a biological fact that our reproductive system disposes of such human beings willy-nilly. The death rate is, I think, something like 30%. If we are really supposed to believe that these entities are morally no different than other humans, then that loss is an enormous tragedy, far greater, numerically, than the losses due to abortion. Does it make a moral difference that these losses are natural — that they are part of how we are designed? The rights-based account of why abortion is wrong would suggest that it does not: death is death, and if we’re on the side of life then just as we have an obligation not to take life we have an obligation to try to save it. If that means redesigning how human reproduction works, I should think the moral case would favor such an effort.
“Hopefully, my readers would agree with me that such a conclusion is absurd. . . .”
This reader agrees that the conclusion is absurd, but also thinks that it is not entailed by a pro-life position. There is a difference between acts and omissions, between acts intended to end human lives and acts (or non-acts) that merely allow human lives to end. (That’s one reason the debate about Schiavo has so often turned on the question of whether removing the tube amounts to “killing” or “letting die.”)
Let me make another analogy. There have, I assume, been times and places where infant mortality rates have been as high as 30 percent; but few people would conclude that infanticide would therefore have been morally defensible in those circumstances. For that matter, I imagine that a lot of 91-year-olds don’t make it to 92; that doesn’t make it morally defensible to kill 91-year-olds.
It is a good thing when medical (and other) advances lower the infant mortality rate and the miscarriage rate and extend the lifespan. But nobody is under the same moral obligation to work to lower the infant mortality rate that he is to refrain from killing infants, nor under the same moral obligation to extend the lifespan as to refrain from killing the elderly. I wouldn’t concede that the rate of spontaneous abortion–whatever that rate is (and keeping in mind that embryo-like growths that are not human organisms should not be counted in the total)–should have any bearing at all in moral judgments about abortion and related matters.