The Innumerable Dead

Surrounded by ghosts

Bone Crypt of the Capuchin Friars, Rome, Italy

Every pro-lifer eventually hears an argument that goes something like this:

You say that fetuses are human beings with rights, but, like, half of them die before they’re born! If abortion is murder, then your God is history’s greatest murderer!

There are several good responses to this argument:

• “For virtually all of human history, something like half of people born died before puberty. Are you saying we should legalize abortion up to the thirty-ninth trimester… or do you think fourth-graders finally earned a right to life because we invented antibiotics?”

• “Just wait until you hear about the death rate for adults—100%!”

• “Why are you bringing up God? All I said was that it should be illegal to commit a premeditated killing of a baby. Keep your creepy religion out of politics, zealot!”

These are all perfectly cromulent replies. Most of them expose the non sequitur: there is no logical connection between a population’s natural death rate and its right not to be killed intentionally. This forces your interlocutor to admit that the miscarriage rate is not the real reason he opposes fetal rights. The focus shifts back where it always needs to be: the human right to live¹ and the fetus’s humanity.²

And yet.

Remember, No Rosaries

The atheist pro-lifer will have no trouble with all this death. People die. Babies die. Lots of ‘em. So what? We humans are beacons of light in a cold, senseless universe. We are here to offer one another a little warmth and kindness while the dark closes in around us. We shouldn’t kill our babies for the same reason we shouldn’t kill any other human. “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” say the Wiccans. “No violence may be employed against a nonaggressor,” agree the libertarians. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,” add the utilitarians. To the atheist pro-lifer, the fact that death is always closing in on all of us is a scandal and a horror, not an excuse.

When pro-lifers are discussing abortion with others, I think we should all play atheists. Abortion is not wrong because God said so; abortion is wrong because it’s murder. We didn’t learn that life begins at conception from the Bible. We learned it from modern embryology, barely a hundred fifty years ago.³ There is even a credible argument that the Bible points away from fetal rights. If that argument is correct, then the Bible is wrong, simple as that.⁴

Pro-lifers in secular countries should never allow themselves to be sidetracked into religious discussion, because the existence of God is a superfluous hypothesis in the pro-life argument. The pro-choicers are the ones trying to make it a religious argument by talking about “personhood” (or, as it used to be called, “ensoulment”). We’re sticking to facts taught in ninth-grade biology texts.

And yet.

Free to Choose

For the pro-lifer who believes in God, the pro-choice argument from fetal death rate does reveal a problem. It’s just not a problem with the pro-life position. It’s a problem with God.

Let us suppose that the purpose of a human life is to know, love, and serve God. He asks us to believe in Him, hope in Him, even worship Him. In short, God puts us on Earth so we can choose Him.⁵

It is obvious that newborns, without exception, are absolutely incapable of free choice. The capacity develops over time, and it isn’t quick. Babies gradually figure out how to select their preference from a range of options (for example, by gobbling the carrot-flavored baby mush while hurling the peas-flavored baby mush across the room), which is a kind of choice, except not really. It’s the kind of choice animals can make: a simple reflexive response to positive or negative stimuli.

Deliberate choice, which seems to be unique to humans, can’t develop until babies learn to deliberate, which is a function of language. Most babies start to develop symbolic language at approximately age 1. Before that milestone, it seems fair to say that they are absolutely incapable of choosing God (or anything else). Before that milestone, it even seems fair to say that infants have not yet come fully into their humanity. They certainly can’t sin. Calling a baby an evildoer is like accusing a walrus of plagiarism.

Therein lies the problem.

Ranks Upon Choirs Upon Legions

For most of human history, infant mortality was very high. In the Roman Empire—one of the most advanced civilizations of the pre-modern world—more than one in three children died in the first year of their lives. Those children never got to know, love, or serve God. Sure, after Rome converted to Christianity, many of these infants were baptized. According to Christian beliefs, baptism creates a new and stronger relationship between the infant and his Creator. However, this relationship, if it exists, is neither consciously experienced nor chosen by the infant. If the purpose of human life is to choose God, or to freely enter some sort of relationship with Him, before God calls you home, then God seems to have pulled the ripcord too early on these kids.

This isn’t just a handful of outliers, either. Ancient infant mortality overall is impossible to compute, since we don’t have census records from the Pharaoh,⁶ but we are certain it was extraordinarily high⁷ compared to today. In many societies, something approaching half of all children were dead less than twelve months after their births.

That is only the beginning of our troubles.

Even without the violence of abortion, approximately 10-20% of known pregnancies end all by themselves, in death by miscarriage. That’s an underestimate of the death toll, because many pregnancies are never known. It takes time after implanting in the uterine wall for a baby to make himself known to a pregnancy test. One careful study of hCG and clinical pregnancies credibly estimated that, even excluding abortions, about one-third of children die between implantation and birth. This estimate implies that only about half of these miscarriages are known. Half the time, a child dies without mom and dad even realizing he was ever there.

But wait! There’s more!

Human life doesn’t start at implantation in the uterine wall. It starts at conception, when sperm and egg kamikaze into one another to create an entirely new organism out of their ruins. The days after conception but before implantation are extremely dangerous for the new child. They are also almost totally invisible to medical science, since we currently lack the ability to detect these very early pregnancies.

Estimates of the pre-implantation death rate have therefore been all over the place. One oft-cited note in The Lancet in 1971 did some back-of-the-envelope math and concluded that about half of all humans conceived die in the tube before implantation.⁸ That figure is probably a little high. That careful study I already mentioned? They re-examined The Lancet note and concluded that, in fact, pre-implantation deaths are probably closer to 10%-40%. So that’s alright, then! Instead of half of all humans dying before the reach the uterine lining, the true number is probably closer to a quarter of our species. Bully!

If we add this all together, we find an unsettling picture of human existence.

In the pre-modern world, about two-thirds of all human beings concieved died before they could say “love you dada.” In the modern world, we’ve accomplished the single greatest medical miracle in the history of the planet: we’ve cut that number down from two-thirds to about… half.

This is a staggering amount of infant death. Those of us who survived, who learned to talk and write and build and love and start the cycle over again, think of ourselves as the human norm. This is perfectly natural. After all, virtually everyone we’ve ever met also survived and learned to talk and write and build and love!

Statistically, though… we are not the norm. Most humans never made it past their first birthdays. If you die at Age 10, it’s considered a horrific tragedy, a life full of promise cut short before it could flower into fullness, and this is true… but it is also true that, if you’ve made it to Age 10, you’ve already experienced vastly more, known vastly more, loved vastly more, than the vast majority of human beings who ever existed. The moral choices of ten-year-olds may seem petty from your perspective,⁹ but they are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the moral choices of the median human being, who died as a baby (or maybe a late-term fetus).

Thanks to modern demographics and embryology, we finally know what previous generations could not: we are surrounded by ghosts. They aren’t even the ghosts of our ancestors. We have a cultural framework for the ancestors. We can cope with them. We are instead surrounded by the ghosts of our siblings and our cousins and our nieces and our nephews. Of our own children, both known and unknown. And they outnumber us.

Again, none of this is a problem for our secular friend. For him, this simply confirms that Darwin is cruel. One of humanity’s gifts is to push back against nature’s cruelty, but the humanist recognizes that defeating death is a slow, nearly impossible task, with vast casualties expected along the way. Certainly nothing about the fetal death rate justifies denying their humanity.

But, since these children are human, the theist must ask… where is their God?

If it is true that God created us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve him in this world—if it is true that He gave us this time on Earth to choose Him—if it is true, as many Christians claim, that baptism by water is the ordinary means of salvation… how can we reconcile that with the fact that God created a world where most people never get the chance in this life to know or love or serve or choose at all?

How can we call baptism by water a salvific necessity when so few will ever be capable of receiving it? We could convert the entire world to Christianity and we still wouldn’t be able to baptize half the human race! The massa innocens dies in utero, beyond the reach of the baptismal font! Did Christ not come to give everyone a path to salvation?

Stories

Peter Van Inwagen is one of the most interesting philosophers around. For example, he is a Christian materialist, a combination I’ve never heard before or since. Van Inwagen once made an argument about evil that stuck with me:

You can’t actually philosophically show why evil exists—or, at least, doing so seems very, very hard. Even the Bible tells us very little. Job asks God why life is so much like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket of hyena offal, and God says (I’m paraphrasing), “You can’t understand until you can see outside the bucket.” All we can do, Van Inwagen argues, is tell stories about why God might allow evil to exist. These stories must be consistent with the existence of God and the sufferings of the world. They could be true “for all anyone knows,” but we have insufficient data to prove any specific answer correct in any specific case.¹⁰ All theodicy boils down, van Inwagen suggests, to a creative writing exercise.

In that spirit…

Getting a Sense of Perspective

As we’ve seen, humans who get to live “ordinary” human lives on Earth—who are born, grow up, and die—are the exception, not the rule. This casts the urgency of our vocations into sharp relief. We aren’t walking around working a day job and watching Netflix because that’s just how it happens. It usually doesn’t! We are here, on Earth, right now, because God Himself willed us, specifically, to be here, right now. We know our mission here in the Church Militant is special and essential because one-half to two-thirds of our brothers-in-arms weren’t even deployed. We are a skeleton crew who has been asked to run the world and keep humanity going at no better than half-strength.

So how dare we flag in our determination to accomplish that mission? Why do we worry so much about fame, wealth, or the fate of nations? Politics are of literally no consequence to most of the human race. Moreover, how dare we fail to be awed by the fractal frost on the window in the morning, or bowled over by the joy of a night in popping popcorn and watching a mid-tier action story like Revenge of the Sith with the fam? Most human beings never get the chance at popcorn, or frost, or stories.

Ordinary Isn’t Typical

The other half may not get popcorn, but I think we can be confident that whatever the massa innocens¹¹ does get is pretty good. I do not think God would create a whole race of immortal beings, call them “very good,” and then condemn the majority of that race, though perfectly innocent of individual sin, to a bad destiny that they cannot possibly avoid. I suppose I can imagine such a God, but it is not the God we find in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. That guy can be harsh, but he is constantly throwing out lifelines.

Indeed, if it is the case that Christ came to offer salvation to all, then it simply cannot also be the case that visible membership in the Christian Church through baptism is the typical means of salvation. Given high fetal mortality, these claims are incompatible.

I agree with the common statement that baptism is the ordinary means of salvation, but “ordinary,” in this case, must be taken in the same sense as when we say that Congressional Budget Act of 1974 defines the ordinary means for federal appropriations: the CBA is the standard procedure, against which all exceptions are defined… but it hasn’t actually been followed in nearly thirty years.¹² You have to know the CBA to understand the real process, but the real process is dominated by the exceptions and quite often bears little actual resemblance to the CBA.

Likewise, accepting (or rejecting) Christ’s invitation to baptism by water is the ordinary means of determining one’s eternal destiny. However, if Christ is not a liar,¹³ reality must be dominated by the exceptions. Exactly what those exceptions are and how they work is a matter of extensive speculation… but, given conflicting arguments and divine silence on this question, what this speculation amounts to is just more stories.¹⁴

Personally, I suspect that infants who die are gifted with the grace to overcome original sin and make a free choice, like we are. This grace comes through the “living water” that springs from the side of Christ at His death, just as it does for us. However, like the angels in the moment of their creation, I suspect the choice of the infant is instantaneous, is made with complete understanding of the options, and has eternal consequences. (Thus, it is wise to pray for them in that eternal moment.)

Of course, if half of all humans are being exiled from their home country by being hurled off a mile-high cliff, it is reassuring to learn that there is a safety net and a boat to a new land at the bottom of the cliff, but it does not answer the more urgent question: why are they being hurled off a cliff in the first place?

The Contemplative Pyramid, Inverted

We, the living, are necessary. Humans are an embodied, animal species. God Himself cannot change that without destroying what makes us human. Therefore, if none of us were in the world, there would be no more adults, no more massa innocens, no more humans at all.

Yet, here in the living world, we find that some of the best and happiest of us are among those who deliberately withdraw from the world, into celibacy or even into the contemplative life. People like Mother Teresa, St Francis of Assisi, and St. Benedict, did great good in the world (St. Benedict arguably saved Europe). However, they did that as an afterthought, because their hearts were fixed firmly on finding and resting in God.

In the Catholic tradition, at least, there is no doubt that (all else being equal) the contemplative life is simply superior to the active life. The most important person on Earth today—the one who has accomplished more good for more people than any other single human—is probably some anonymous Carmelite nun, living in complete silence, never to be known in the world, but moving mountains with her prayers.

Actives are necessary, of course, or there wouldn’t be babies, or civilization, or any food for the contemplatives to eat. However, the contemplative has found a pearl of greater price, and so pays out her life drawing closer to Him. The contemplatives are an example to us all. Their sufferings are great, because they sacrifice so much, but the joy they sometimes obtain is our clearest preview of Heaven.

The relationship between “contemplatives” and “actives” is sometimes visualized as a pyramid: a tiny pinnacle of pure contemplatives supported by a huge base of pure actives.¹⁵ For each individual Catholic living in a cloister devoted entirely to prayer, there’s something like ten thousand Catholics outside the cloister. I don’t know what the figures are in other Christian denominations, to say nothing of other religions, but I imagine the ratio is pretty steep everywhere.

However, what if we’ve got it backwards?

If God created the human race and made it very good, and if the contemplative life spent seeking God is the best life, then would it not make sense for God to call the majority of humanity to that high destiny? Furthermore, if one is called to contemplate the Lord, would it not be easier to do so if one were already with him in Heaven right away? An efficient way of to accomplish this would be killing the majority of humans before they learn to walk.

Of course, God would need some people to survive infancy and live out the active life, because otherwise the human race would cease to exist. He would also probably need to send a few contemplatives to Earth to teach us actives what life is all about. This would be very hard for those contemplatives. Life on Earth is hard and sad, and God is veiled from this world, so the contemplative who wants to see Him must work very hard at it. Perhaps God only inflicts this fate on those necessary to His plan, and keeps everyone else—the majority of humanity—close to His bosom, awaiting the Last Day and the renewal of all things.

Perhaps half the human race isn’t being hurled off a cliff after all. Perhaps half the human race is jumping for a chance to return to their true home country. Perhaps they are being called there for important work: supporting we few, the living, through prayer.

Perhaps it is not we actives carrying a handful of contemplatives on our back.

Perhaps a great invisible host of contemplatives is carrying us.

All just a story, of course—but a story consistent with what we know, true “for all anyone knows.”

The Road More Traveled

Of course, none of this would make abortion okay. Quite the contrary: if the relatively small number of humans sent into this suffering world were only sent here because each of them is somehow vital to the fate of humanity, then tearing some of those small humans limb from limb (or poisoning them, or suffocating them, or starving them) turns out to be not just barbaric, but self-destructive. We’re killing our own reinforcements!

Abortion is, by a wide margin, the leading cause of death in the United States, beating out heart disease and cancer by a healthy margin. If you combined every single mass shooting in the United States in the past sixty years, and added up all the casualties (adults and children combined), the total dead would be less than one day of U.S. abortion deaths. I know people who nominally oppose abortion (“I’m personally opposed, but it’s not the government’s place to decide for someone else”) who look at me like I’m an insane evildoer when I suggest that perhaps it’s a bad idea for the government to mandate car seats so much longer than it did thirty or forty years ago. (Car seat laws, estimating generously, save ~400 children per year. Abortion kills approximately two thousand times more children.) It is shocking to contemplate the magnitude of the crime we have inflicted upon ourselves. Most don’t. From observation, it seems to me that many can’t.

However, looked at from a wider perspective, abortion does not change the human reality all that much. In the U.S., we currently abort about one-fifth of all known pregnancies.¹⁶ This raises the mortality rate for human beings under the age of one from around half to around two-thirds—which is where it has been for most of human history anyway. (Of course, in the long run, the death rate remains 100% for us all.)

I take some comfort in the thought that, when a child is ripped violently from his mother’s womb, he does not journey to the afterlife alone. He finds himself on a road surrounded by friends, clapping and leaping and shouting hallelujahs, processing ahead in a host larger than the living human race.

Let it be far from the hearts of the faithful that all the little children, of whom so great a multitude die every day, should perish without the merciful God, who wishes no one to perish, having provided them also with some means of salvation.

—Pope Innocent III, late 1201¹⁷

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NEXT VOYAGE: Today’s piece was planned for January 22, as my annual commemoration of Roe v. Wade, but it was delayed because I underestimated the complexity of my thesis. I still plan to publish a Worthy Reads post ASAP, but, obviously, with an article that took a week too long to write, I’m a bit backed up at the moment.

1. …including the relationship of that right to other rights. If you are putting my life in danger—even unintentionally—does my right to life override yours? Or, if your continued life would make my life less pleasant, can I kill you to prevent that?

(If so, how much less pleasant? My-unchosen-obligations-to-you-would-ruin-my-career unpleasant, or you-smack-your-lips-when-you-eat unpleasant?)

2. Pro tip: your pro-choice interlocutor will ordinarily do everything in his power to draw you away from these central issues. The pro-lifer’s most important discussion skill is the ability to gently but swiftly dismiss the red herrings, bringing the conversation back to the human right to live and the fetus’s humanity. It doesn’t matter if you would “win” on the red herring, because it’s irrelevant. Your opponent is winning as long as you’re wasting energy on irrelevant points.

3. It is not a coincidence that previously-lax abortion laws suddenly became much stricter about a hundred fifty years ago.

4. To be clear, I don’t think the argument is correct. But if it were ever somehow proved correct, I would not stop being pro-life. I would stop being Christian.

5. Of course, there are many sectarian disputes about the details. Some hold that humans play no actual role in this choosing. They say that some of us are, in effect, compelled to choose God.

Others deny the reality of choice at all, insisting that all of us (perhaps even God) are simply acting out the pre-written script that was determined, for all time, by the initial conditions of the cosmos, à la the One Small Piece Of Fairy Cake theory of existence. Nevertheless, most theists either agree with what I wrote, or with something quite close to it.

There are others who do not, of course. Theism concludes that there is at least one God, but that does not, by itself, tell you anything about His nature. Deists believe in God, but don’t believe He’s paying all that much attention to us, and tend to take a similar attitude toward Him. Satanists, the real ones, believe in God but reject worshipping Him. Even for people with these beliefs, though, there is a similar set of problems.

6. Also, infant mortality varied a lot between different times and places, of course!

7. Article is paywalled, but shows prehistoric mortality among various Neanderthal sites. The average neonatal mortality rate (which includes at least some late-term fetuses) was 40%, although, in fairness, it was as low as 15% at some sites. (Table 4, page 129)

8. This was Roberts & Lowe’s Where Have All The Conceptions Gone? Actually, what they estimated was that 80% of pregnancies end in fetal loss, without paying much attention to the details of when they are lost. If we accept their estimate that 80% of unborn babies overall die, and Jarvis’s estimate in Early Embryo Mortality in Natural Human Reproduction that ~30% of them die between implantation and birth, then Roberts & Lowes are implying that ~50% of them die before implantation. If I’ve misinterpreted Roberts & Lowes, I apologize.

9. I presume that you, dear reader, are older than ten. This seems like a pretty safe presumption, but if there are any precocious tweens out there who’ve chosen to read De Civ: hello and congratulations! In addition to surviving the great filter of infancy, you are also developing great taste!

10. He later extended this idea to the problem of divine hiddenness, which is actually where I first encountered it. In case links break, the first paper is called “The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,” and the second one—the one I actually read—is called “What is the Problem of the Hiddenness of God?”

11. While editing, I noticed that I use this Latin phrase several times. As far as I know, I’m the first to use it, so you can’t find out what it means by Googling it, which isn’t fair to most of you who don’t speak Latin!

Massa innocens means “mass of innocents.” Compare massa damnata, a well-worn phrase that refers to the hypothesis that the vast majority of humanity is condemned to Hell for their sins.

Note, however, that I do not present the massa innocens as a hypothesis. The massa innocens is a demonstrable fact. There are a lot of them, and they are provably innocent of any personal fault. Their eternal destiny is a matter of hypothesis, but their existence is not.

12. The CBA has only been fully and correctly followed, with all twelve appropriations bills passed on schedule, four times: 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997. It hasn’t even been attempted in recent memory.

13. Mk 10:14, Mk 10:45, Lk 19:10, Jn 12:47. Not to mention the Apostles, given 1 Tim 2:4 and 2 Pet 3:9.

14. If we assume that the forms of baptism known to us are the only means of erasing the injury of original sin, then various medieval hypotheses about the destiny of the infants do logically follow from that assumption. The most important of these was the so-called “limbo of infants,” wherein infants who die without baptism theoretically enjoy full and complete natural happiness for all eternity but are deprived of the greater ecstasy of the Beatific Vision of God (but do not suffer from this privation).

This hypothesis cannot be ruled out. It’s not even a bad outcome! The massa innocens, on this theory, spends all eternity happier than anyone on Earth has ever been or ever could be, which sounds a lot like Heaven. Perhaps this would count as salvation, in which case Jesus’s promise to offer salvation to all would still be fulfilled. However, the limbo hypothesis is built entirely on the assumption that we every form of baptism has been revealed to us, and that assumption is unwarranted. Moreover, given Jesus’s words, actions, and penchant for making surprising exceptions to what the Apostles understood as absolute rules, it seems improbable.

It is worth recalling, too, that the medievals had no concept of how many people die in utero. For the medievals, this was an edge case. Following Aristotelian biology, it was believed that early pregnancies were just an undifferentiated clump of vegetative flesh gradually congealing into a human organism with a human soul, so miscarriages before somewhere around the sixth to twelfth week of pregnancy weren’t even human yet. (Thanks to modern science, we now know the human organism begins at some point during conception.) After the sixth week LMP, miscarriage rates fall sharply, which means medievals regarded most miscarriages as non-human. Moreover, given the state of medieval medicine, many pregnancies that ended in miscarriage were never detected as pregnancies. As a result, the medievals would have believed the limbo of the infants applied to only a fairly small fraction of the human race—perhaps 5% or 10%, at most.

Not 50%.

15. Some people fall in between, of course, in the pyramid’s middle layers. Avowed celibates (both clergy and lay) are a good example.

16. This varies a lot worldwide, in the U.K., the abortion rate is quickly rising. Nearly a third of Britain’s children are now intentionally killed in utero. Meanwhile, in Ireland, before the 2018 vote that legalized abortion nationwide, fewer than one-tenth of pregnancies ended in abortion, even after accounting for mothers who traveled to the U.K. to get abortions, or who procured abortifacient drugs on their own.

17. This is from Pope Innocent’s letter Maiores Ecclesiae causas, addressed to the Archbishop of Arles, some time in late 1201.

Innocent is arguing—correctly—for the validity of baptizing infants, and the importance of doing so whenever possible. However, the Pope’s argument applies just as well to the fetuses for whom baptism is never even possible..

Links: Latin (start with “Absit enim, ut universi parvuli pereant…”) | English translation by GPT.

This passage is quoted in part at Denzinger 780, and is cited by the Vatican in 2007’s The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die Without Being Raptured.