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.
God believes in abortion, and he aborts about 4 million unborn babies in the United States each year to protect the health and the life of their mothers.
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
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.