The Embryos That Do Not Become Babies
by Paul VanRaden
2023
Pregnancies
About 3.6
million babies are born, about 4 million unborn babies are aborted by nature or
by God, and almost 1 million more are aborted by the combined decisions of
patients and doctors in the United States each year (Table 1). Half or more of
fertilized eggs are lost naturally either before or after pregnancy is detected
(Jarvis, 2016). Abortions by choice are estimated to be 930,000 by the
Guttmacher Institute (Jones et al., 2022) from national data and 630,000 by the
Centers for Disease Control using data from most states. Thus, more fertilized
embryos are aborted naturally than are born, and > 4 times more unborn
babies are aborted by God than by patients and their doctors. Modern technology
now gives humans much more control over when and how many pregnancies should
begin (Daniels and Abma, 2018). Most families and 65% of reproductive age women
now prefer to plan their births at the times they prefer instead of having more
children than they can support.
Table 1. Births, abortions, and birth control in the United
States.
Category |
Number |
Source |
Year |
Comment |
Births |
3,610,000 |
CDC |
2020 |
National data |
Abortions by choice |
930,000 |
Jones et al. |
2020 |
National |
|
630,000 |
CDC |
2019 |
Most states |
Abortions by nature |
4,000,000 |
Jarvis |
2016 |
National |
Lost before
pregnancy test |
1,600,000 |
Jarvis |
2016 |
National |
Lost after
pregnancy test |
2,400,000 |
Jarvis |
2016 |
National |
Reproductive age women |
72,000,000 |
CDC |
2017 |
National |
Birth control - total |
65% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
% of 72 million |
Birth control pills |
12.6% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
Ages 15-49 |
Intra-uterine device or implant |
10.3% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
Ages 15-49 |
Female sterilization |
18.6% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
Ages 15-49 |
Male condoms |
8.7% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
Ages 15-49 |
Male sterilization |
5.9% |
Daniels & Abma |
2018 |
Ages 15-49 |
Life reproduces
at higher rates than resources can support. “The power of population is so
superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that
premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race” (Malthus,
1798). In nature and in human reproduction, many babies do not survive to
become adults, many conceived embryos are not born alive, and many more male
and female gametes (sperm and eggs) are produced than ever combine to become
the next generation of life. Human babies require 10 to 20 years of parental
support to mature. Embryos not likely to reach maturity are spontaneously
aborted as early as possible so that parents and society devote their resources
to raising a healthier next generation.
Major
chromosome abnormalities happen very often, but most of the resulting embryos
are aborted naturally. From 1-9% of sperm and about 20% of eggs (increasing
with maternal age) are aneuploid with a wrong number of chromosomes (Martin,
2008; Pacchierotti et al., 2007). The 20-30% of
embryos with too many or too few chromosomes are nearly all lost after
fertilization and before birth. The main exceptions where aneuploid embryos
survive are 0.14% of babies with Down syndrome (3 copies of chromosome 21) and
0.15% of babies with Klinefelter syndrome (2 copies of X plus 1 Y chromosome)
which usually causes male appearance but infertility (Groth et al., 2013).
Missing or extra copies of sex chromosomes are usually not fatal because only 1
copy of X is activated and because the Y contains few genes.
To be
recognized by their mother, embryos need to grow fast. If the embryo grows too
slowly and produces too little human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) in the first weeks,
the mother will begin a new period and reproductive cycle instead of becoming
pregnant. The embryo, even if alive, will be lost. Similar processes happen in
all species of mammals. Many mammal species such as dogs, cats, and pigs have
several newborns at the same time. In such species, if too few embryos are
alive the mother will abort them and instead begin a new cycle. Pregnancy is a
big investment and usually goes to term only for healthy embryos and in many
species only for a minimum number of healthy embryos. In nature, embryos with
genetic defects, unhealthy, or simply that grow too slow are often aborted.
Nature usually decides that an adult female’s health and resources are much
more important than beginning a potential new, short, unproductive life.
Abortions
“Abortion
presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the
citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey
arrogated that authority. The Court overrules those decisions and returns that
authority to the people and their elected representatives” (Alito et al.,
2022). A very similar statement can be made about religion.
Religion
presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the
citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting religion. The first
amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” but
obviously that does not apply to the citizens of each State and their elected
representatives within their States. Thus, each State may enforce or ban the
practice of religion within their borders and the U.S. Congress may not
interfere with those State decisions. The 10th amendment says that
such moral questions “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the
people.”
The Supreme
Court that established the right to abortion was much more respected than the
2022 court that overturned their decision. The 7 Justices that approved the
1973 decision were all confirmed by very large majorities of Senators, those
Senators represented very large majorities of the U.S. population, and the
Justices were nominated by Presidents of both parties who had each won the
popular vote. By contrast, several Justices that overturned the right in 2022
were confirmed by very small majorities of Senators, those Senators represented
a minority of the U.S. population because more were from smaller States, and
those Justices were nominated only by Republican Presidents who mostly had lost
the popular vote (Table 2).
For the
example of Justice Neil Gorsuch, the 45 Senators who voted against his
nomination represented 59 million more voters than the 54 Senators that voted
to confirm him. That fact can be checked by matching the Senate
roll call with the state population count, and such simple math should be
published with every Senate vote to remind us how unbalanced and undemocratic
Senate voting is. The President who nominated Justices
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett lost the popular vote in November 2016 by 3
million voters and the President who nominated Roberts and Alito also lost the
popular vote in his first election. In March 2016, Republican Senators chosen
by a minority of the U.S. population blocked any nomination from the popularly
elected Democratic President, and in September 2020 Republican Senators quickly
confirmed the nominee of a Republican President who had lost the popular vote
in the previous election, lost the election 2 months later, and then fought to
illegally overturn that election. During the nomination hearings, several
Justices also lied about their intent to overturn the 1973 decision.
Most
Americans may view the Supreme Court’s Dobbs vs. Jackson decision as
egregiously wrong. Justices confirmed by Senators representing a minority of
the population and nominated by Presidents who lost the popular vote now
overturn decisions made by previous Justices nominated and confirmed by
majority winners. Now, when politicians threaten a pregnant woman’s life, she
cannot even appeal their decisions to the Supreme Court because an “attempt to
weigh the relative importance of the interests of the fetus and the mother” was
declared by Alito et al. (2022) to be no longer any business of the Supreme
Court, nor any business of the mother, but only the business of politicians.
Table 2. United States Supreme Court Justices that voted to
approve or overturn access to abortion.
Justices |
Senate vote to confirm
that Justice |
Year confirmed |
Nominating President’s
party |
President won the popular
vote? |
Senators represented a
popular majority? |
Approved in 1973: |
|
|
|
|
|
74-3 |
1969 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Harry Blackmun |
94-0 |
1970 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
William
Brennan |
?-? |
1957 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
William
Douglas |
62-4 |
1939 |
Democrat |
Yes |
Yes |
Potter
Stewart |
70-17 |
1959 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
Thurgood
Marshall |
69-11 |
1967 |
Democrat |
Yes |
Yes |
Lewis
Powell |
89-1 |
1971 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Overturned in 2022: |
|
|
|
|
|
Samuel Alito |
58-42 |
2006 |
Republican |
Yes1 |
Yes |
Clarence Thomas |
52-48 |
1991 |
Republican |
Yes |
Yes |
Brett Kavanaugh |
50-48 |
2018 |
Republican |
No |
No |
Neil Gorsuch |
54-45 |
2017 |
Republican |
No |
No |
Amy Coney Barrett |
52-48 |
2020 |
Republican |
No |
No |
John Roberts |
78-22 |
2005 |
Republican |
Yes1 |
Yes |
1President
did not win popular vote in first term but did in second term when these
Justices were nominated.
The belief
that one-celled embryos have rights is a religious belief not based on science
or logic. Religious leaders and politicians may believe that an embryo has a
soul created by God that they must protect, but a woman may believe that that
embryos or politicians should not control or risk her life. Do embryos created
in a laboratory or frozen embryos also have rights?
U.S. fertility clinics have performed > 1 million in vitro fertilizations
(IVF) to help people have about 400,000 babies that they otherwise could not
conceive. Can politicians have you fined or arrested for not implanting an
embryo that you froze? If you abort or do not implant a defective embryo that
God would have aborted a few weeks or months later, can politicians charge you
with murder? Do embryos in a laboratory that were donated, or IVF, or frozen
have a right to life? And if so, whose uterus do they have a right to enter and
live in?
Politicians
can now force you to ignore your own religious belief and instead accept their
religious belief. Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett, and
Roberts said in 2022 that local, state, or national politicians may impose
their religious beliefs on everyone else. The Justices after further studying
genetics, biology, and the laws of nature could change their minds, like the
Justices who overturned their own decision in West Virginia Bd. of
Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624.
Justice Thomas understands genetics and wrote the
excellent opinion in Myriad Genetics case that was very helpful to my own
research on defective embryos. The current Justices could reverse course and
quickly restore the Roe vs. Wade decision. If not, they eventually will retire or
die of old age over the next 50 years and will be replaced by new Justices more
like Burger, Blackmun, Brennan, Douglas, Stewart, Marshall, and Powell, who
better understood the laws of nature, the rights of women, and limited government
control over women.
The first amendment
to the U.S. Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion” was overturned in the 2022 Dobbs vs. Jackson
decision. Congress may now make a law respecting the establishment of the
religion that an embryo has a right to end or risk its mother’s life, but a
pregnant woman has no right to end the life even of a defective embryo that has
no chance to become a child. If Congress makes a law establishing that embryos
have more rights than women, you should challenge such a law in court using the
simple text of the first amendment.
1-Child Policy
About 12
million babies were born, about 15 million embryos were aborted by nature, and
about 10 million unborn babies were aborted in China each year to comply with
the government’s 1-child policy While it was in effect from 1980-2014, the
Chinese government also forced >300 million women to use intrauterine
devices (IUDs) for birth control and > 100 million other women to be
sterilized. For the crime of having a second child without a permit, mothers
were legally forced to be sterilized unless they could convince their husband
to be sterilized instead. Millions of women also had forced abortions for the
crime of getting pregnant a second time. The parents who had more than 1 child
also had to pay large fines that were used by the government to provide better
health care and retirement for parents with only 1 child.
Of the 10
million annual abortions in China, about 1 million more unborn girls than boys
were aborted each year because parents wanted to have a son instead who might
earn more to better support them in their old age. Many other parents abandoned
or murdered their newborn girls in hopes of having 1 son in the future. Many
abandoned girls were taken to orphanages and about 100,000 were adopted by
families outside of China. Other Chinese parents adopted the extra girls until
1991 when the government made adoption illegal for Chinese parents who wanted
to exceed the 1-child limit. Many other parents used fertility treatments to
conceive twins because the government’s 1-child policy did not penalize parents
for having twins. A 2-child policy was implemented from 2015-2021, but since
then China now encourages more children because the population has begun to shrink and more future taxpayers are need to support
previous generations as they retire.
God
God believes
in abortion. Each year, to protect the health and the life of their mothers,
God or nature aborts about 4 million unborn babies in the United States, about
15 million in China, and about 160 million in the world population of 8 billion
people.
God-fearing
Christian Republican governments sometimes believe in total control over
women’s reproduction and ban abortion at any stage and may also ban some birth
control methods to preserve the souls of embryos.
Godless
Communist governments sometimes believe in total control over women’s
reproduction and ban carrying a second embryo to term. Such governments may
also sterilize women against their will or force them to use birth control.
Malthus
might be surprised that birth control is now so important and might also wonder
if more governments should allow women to decide how many and which embryos to
gestate to become children.
References
Malthus,
T.R. 1798. An
Essay on the Principle of Population - Wikipedia
Jarvis,
2016. Misjudging
early embryo mortality in natural... | F1000Research
Daniels,
Kimberly, and Joyce C. Abma. 2018. Current
Contraceptive Status Among Women Aged 15–49: United States, 2015–2017.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jones,
Rachel K., Marielle Kirstein, and Jesse Philbin. 2022. Abortion incidence
and service availability in the United States, 2020. Perspectives on Sexual
and Reproductive Health.
Groth, K.A.,
A. Skakkebæk, C. Høst, C.H. Gravholt, and A. Bojesen. 2013. Klinefelter
Syndrome—A Clinical Update. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology &
Metabolism, 98:20–30.
Lee, Amy,
and Ann A. Kiessling. 2017. Early human
embryos are naturally aneuploid—can that be corrected? J. Assist. Reprod.
Genet. 34:15–21.
Martin, R.H.
2008. Meiotic errors in
human oogenesis and spermatogenesis. Reprod BioMed Online. 16:523–531.
Pacchierotti, I.-D. Adler, U. Eichenlaub-Ritter, J.B. Mailhes.
2007. Gender
effects on the incidence of aneuploidy in mammalian germ cells.
Environmental Research 104:46-69.
Alito, S.
2022. 19-1392
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (06/24/2022) (supremecourt.gov)
2020
election: America’s anti-democratic Senate, by the numbers - Vox
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL33225.pdf
Supreme Court Justice confirmations
Abortion
in Muslim Countries 2023 (worldpopulationreview.com)
Essers et
al. 2023. Prevalence of chromosomal
alterations in first-trimester spontaneous pregnancy loss - PubMed (nih.gov)
Blue et al.,
2019. Genetic abnormalities
and pregnancy loss - PubMed (nih.gov)
VanRaden references on abortions in cattle:
VanRaden,
P.M., and Miller, R.H. Effects
of nonadditive genetic interactions, inbreeding, and recessive defects on
embryo and fetal loss by seventy days. J. Dairy Sci. 89(7):2716–2721. 2006.
VanRaden,
P.M., Olson, K.M., Null, D.J., and Hutchison, J.L. Harmful
recessive effects on fertility detected by absence of homozygous haplotypes.
J. Dairy Sci. 94(12):6153–6161. 2011.
Adams, H.A.,
Sonstegard, T.S., VanRaden, P.M., Null, D.J., Van Tassell, C.P., Larkin, D.M.,
and Lewin, H.A. Identification of a nonsense mutation in APAF1 that is likely
causal for a decrease in reproductive efficiency in Holstein dairy cattle.
J. Dairy Sci. 99(8):6693–6701. 2016.
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