Not only is it not immoral, but it used to be far, far more common, back before the days of modern medicine. It was almost expected, at times, to have one or two pregnancies end in a miscarriage or stillbirth. (And a good many women were lucky if they themselves survived giving birth!)
Queen Anne of Great Britain was pregnant 17 times, despite that, most ended as miscarriages, or stillbirths. Only 5 survived, and of those, 4 died as infants, and the one who didn’t, Prince William, died when he was 11. And even then, he was frail and sickly.
The whole idea is tragic enough, without being labeled “immoral”. :rolleyes:
I support the right to choose an abortion (with typical term-based and medical caveats) and don’t consider abortion murder or manslaughter. So obviously I don’t consider an unwanted miscarriage to be manslaughter either.
But I sort of see the OP’s point that this reveals a bit of cognitive dissonance in the views of some “life-begins-at-conception” advocates, at least in cases where a woman is aware that she’s medically very prone to miscarriage.
If you really believe that a fertilized ovum is just as much a full human person and has just as many rights as a born baby, then deliberately bringing a fertilized ovum into a uterine environment where you know it is extremely unlikely to survive obviously counts as deliberately endangering a child. Failure to provide appropriate resources to meet a child’s basic needs, including the need for physical safety, may not be manslaughter but it’s definitely child neglect and/or child endangerment, which qualify as forms of child abuse.
Poor and dysfunctional parents who get hit with child neglect and child endangerment charges are often critiqued on the grounds that “they shouldn’t have children if they can’t care for them properly”. Well, if you believe that conceiving a fertilized ovum is exactly the same thing as “having a child”, and you know that your biology for whatever reasons makes you very prone to miscarriage, then arguably you are fundamentally incapable of caring for that child properly because your body is almost certainly going to kill it. In such a situation, is it moral for you to keep on deliberately having children in an environment so fatally dangerous to them?
Mind you, I personally don’t view conception or early pregnancy as morally identical to “having children”, so I don’t have a problem with it. But for someone who does claim to believe that life with full human rights begins at the moment of conception, I think they’re being somewhat inconsistent if they don’t see any ethical problem with a miscarriage-prone woman deliberately having and then (inadvertently but predictably) killing lots of children, just in hopes of someday maybe lucking into a child that she’ll manage not to kill.
(Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, people who claim to believe that life with full human rights begins at the moment of conception often are somewhat inconsistent in their attitudes toward the rights and importance of most “pre-born humans”.)
I don’t think that really follows. The objection to having children you can’t care for is that they suffer. Even if you believe a fertilIzed ovum is a person, there isn’t any suffering going on in an early miscarriage. If you believe baby goes straight to heaven, well, that’s no sin.
I am not a doctor, parent, husband or woman. This is something I’ve heard, but have no cite to back it up.
The average (fertile, sexually active, would-like-to-get-pregnant) woman is “pregnant” a few dozen times in her life, in that she’s got a fertilized egg she’s carrying, but her body spontaneously aborts it within the first week or two and she never knows she was pregnant that time. That’s just what happens, it’s stupid and cruel to assign some degree of morality to it. Miscarriages farther down the time frame? Same thing. It just wasn’t her time, and it has no bearing on the next time at all.
Well, that’s far from the only reason that parents get penalized for having children that they can’t (or don’t) care for.
You can be liable to child neglect/endangerment charges, or worse, for deliberately putting your child in a dangerous environment that kills them, even if their death is quick and painless with zero suffering.
In the case of a born child, though, that would not be a valid defense. “Your Honor, I know I deliberately placed my beloved child in a highly unsafe environment that I couldn’t remove him from and that ended up killing him, but at least there was no suffering involved.” Um, nope.
Presumably, in that scenario it wasn’t an absolute requirement for life that the child be placed in that environment. If a couple had a baby that needed surgery to live, but then that surgery went wrong and the child died, that’s not murder.
In trying to think up a scenario where it potentially becomes a moral issue, all that came to mind is a hypothetical woman who keeps getting pregnant on purpose but who also keeps using drugs or engaging in similarly risky activities that end up causing her to miscarry, after which she blithely gets pregnant again with no intention of modifying her behavior.
AFAICT nobody is saying that any of these scenarios from any viewpoint hypothesized here would actually count as murder.
The question is, can a case be made that such a scenario is immoral in some way? Personally, I don’t believe that conceiving multiple times, even if you’re well aware that because of your medical issues your embryo/fetus will almost certainly miscarry, is immoral in any way.
But if you’re somebody who believes that it’s immoral for people to have children that they can’t or won’t care for properly, and you also believe that a pregnant woman “has a child” from the very instant of conception, then I don’t see how you can logically avoid the conclusion that it’s immoral for a woman to deliberately conceive children that she knows her body will almost certainly kill.
If you don’t actually believe that an embryo/fetus has exactly the same full personhood status and rights as a born child, of course, then the logical inconsistency goes away.
Look, I don’t think it’s immoral, either, but I don’t think it’s hypocritical to think "if a child is created in my body and dies of natural causes without suffering, it’s a beautiful miracle, and no sin occurs, but if someone fails to protect a living child from a preventable cause of death, that is a sin. " I mean, it’s not my worldview, but I honestly find it no less consistent than “it’s immoral to have a child you know will die”. I mean, all of us are a child someone had, knowing we will die. That doesn’t make our moms culpable for our deaths.
Well, ISTM that to get that reasoning over the line into the non-hypocrisy zone, it requires not looking too hard at the convenient passive voice of “a child is created in my body”.
A couple who conceive via unprotected consensual sex with the conscious goal of parenthood have deliberately chosen to create that child (using “child” for embryo, in the hypothetical viewpoint of somebody who believes that there’s no difference morally between the personhood/rights of a fertilized egg and those of a born child).
If they did so knowing full well that the child will almost certainly die in utero due to clearly identified and predictable medical problems, I don’t see how you can argue—from that viewpoint, at least—that they’re not to some extent morally responsible for the child’s death (though not, of course, to the extent of murder). That death was entirely foreseeable and preventable by not conceiving the child in the first place.
Or here’s a further exploration of the question: If the couple know that it will be far less risky for the child if they use in vitro fertilization and a surrogate, rather than the almost certain death from natural conception and pregnancy due to the mother’s medical issues, would it be immoral of them to try for a natural pregnancy anyhow rather than going the surrogacy route? (Again, from the viewpoint of the same “fertilized-egg-is-fully-a-person” ethical stance.)
I would not consider that unethical, even if the embryo is a “child”. They aren’t causing any suffering, and they aren’t killing it . . .they are giving it a chance at life.
I suppose relating to my earlier comment, if the woman was drinking lots of alcohol during pregnancy (assuming we attribute this even partly to morality rather than wholly to addiction) and she miscarried some of her pregnancies while others resulted in children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, we might look askance at her not taking steps to avoid further pregnancies.