Two years ago at this time, I was joyfully expecting my first baby. What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t until mid-March, was that my baby girl passed away in my womb, near the end of the first trimester. When I thought I was growing life, my womb carried a corpse instead.
It was, and remains, one of the most devastating losses of my life.
So began the painful process of telling the family and friends who knew early, all of whom expressed the appropriate platitudes: I’m so sorry for your loss. And they genuinely were.
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Before I go any further, I want to make clear that I have friends and family members who are pro-choice, and I love them deeply. I have deep respect for the way we are able to have civil conversations about an emotionally charged issue like abortion, and not dismiss each other as one-dimensional strawmen. That’s a lost art in political discourse today.
I believe these friends and relatives have intentions that come from a compassionate place. Their approach is one of sensitivity rather than callousness. They are, more often than not, mothers themselves.
If nothing else, we agree that the subject of abortion is a very serious one, and the decision to terminate a pregnancy shouldn’t be made flippantly. We find common ground in wanting to build a better world for babies and their mothers.
It’s not these friends and relatives who caused me further grief.
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Frankly, there were some people whose condolences for my loss greatly confused me at first, and later made me very upset. In their post-Roe social media posts that obnoxiously referred to embryos and fetuses as “clumps of cells” and “parasites,” to hear “I’m sorry for your loss” when I shared about my daughter felt disingenuous at best.
What was it they were sorry for, exactly: sorry that I was sad? Sorry that I lost “something,” even if it wasn’t a real baby – even though a blood test at 10 weeks told us we were having a girl?
The reasons that many women struggle to cope with miscarriage are many. In my experience, the way society dehumanizes the unborn is a big one. If the life that is lost doesn’t “count,” it’s hard not to feel stupid for grieving.
That, other than the loss itself, was the hardest thing for me to cope with. The knowledge that, for many, my daughter was nothing more than a “clump of cells.” And I’m somehow irrational for treating her as anything else.
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There are many aspects of the abortion debate that are real and important. But in 2025, I’m not sure why we are still debating whether an embryo counts as a human life. Look at any embryology textbook: human life begins at conception. That life contains unique human DNA. Every biological marker of that human, from sex to eye color, has already been determined. This is science, not a religious belief.
The debate about human autonomy is more pertinent to the issue of “abortion rights” than anything else: is a woman morally bound to provide care to the life she created through her own actions (or after a rape)? Is consent to sex consent to all its potential consequences?
There are other ethical questions that matter. Should women have a legal right to abortion for any reason, from medical complications to not being happy about the baby’s sex? Are we ever going to talk about how abortion rhetoric enables eugenics?
It is these questions that are moral and philosophical, and worthwhile to debate: not whether the fetus is actually human. To suggest otherwise is not only wrong scientifically; it’s a slap in the face to every mother who’s held the remains of her child in her hands, or searched in vain for them in the toilet. It’s a form of gaslighting.
Our grief is real, as were the children we lost. Both deserve to be taken seriously.
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