Delighting in self-negation: the "culture of life"

Updated below with criticism of the anti-pro-life article and my response.

Some of my readers may be aware that I find few things more delicious than a clever reversal where someone accidentally dismantles their own argument. One example is what debaters call a "double turn" ("nuh-uh! My idea won't make a bad thing more likely, it'll make a good thing less likely!"). Another example is what The Anonymous Liberal calls a "Noonan Award" nominee; the person sacrifices an important point to prove a minor one (this is one of my favorites). There are lots of other variants ranging from simple hypocrisy to accidentally poisoning one's own well, and they can all be loads of fun, depending on the circumstances.

For some reason, all of these are pretty frequent among National Review columnists (I don't read it often anymore, but in recent months, Rich Lowry deconstructed most of conservatism, Jonah Goldberg convincingly showed that his "principles" are actually mere tools, and David Frum accidentally ridiculed his own arguments). The phenomenon isn't limited to their pages, though. Rumsfeld, for instance, simultaneously believes that intelligence is the future of the military, controls 80% of the intelligence budget, and that it's not his job to do "intelligent [sic]" work. Scalia and Yoo do the same sort of thing to Originalism all the time, though I haven't blogged about it yet. "Intelligent design" proponents likewise ignore their "theory" when it suits them, such as when they're infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria or try to explain what designed the designer. The most extreme advocates of liberty can find themselves defending child prostitution, a right to drive drunk, and state-sponsored abortions. Some less fun examples are the "traditional values" folks can find themselves defending child molestation, state-sponsored kidnapping, and cancer and the "Patriots" that want to dismantle everything this country stands for. On a less serious note, the makers of the X-Men actually litigated against their characters' interests and won millions of dollars by undermining their own message.

One ideology that seems to get tied up in knots more than most others is "the culture of life." I think part of the reason is that advances in technology and knowledge have made their principles less and less applicable, so they need to broaden the scope of their ideology to cover marginal cases or lose it altogether. Here's a list of 20 great questions that put pro-lifers in uncomfortable positions (with a link to an article filled with real-life situations they create) and here's a spectacular satire from The Onion on the subject. I bring this up because I just found one of the most spectacularly delicious scientific arguments imaginable. Here's the abstract:

Some proponents of the pro-life movement argue against morning after pills, IUDs, and contraceptive pills on grounds of a concern for causing embryonic death. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the pro-life line of argumentation can be extended to the rhythm method of contraception as well. Given certain plausible empirical assumptions, the rhythm method may well be responsible for a much higher number of embryonic deaths than some other contraceptive techniques.

Pure delight.

Randy Alcorn calculates that "even an infinitesimally low portion (say one hundredth of one per cent) of 780 million pill cycles per year globally could represent tens of thousands of unborn children lost to this form of chemical abortion annually"...

[I]f one is willing to make a few relatively innocent assumptions, then the rhythm method may well be responsible for massive embryonic death and the same logic that turned pro-lifers away from morning after pills, IUDs and pill usage, should also make them nervous about the rhythm method...

It seems reasonable to assume that an embryo that results from an "old" ovum (that is waiting at the end of the fertile period) or an "old" sperm (that is still lingering on from before ovulation), and that is trying to implant in a uterine wall that is not at its peak of receptivity, is less viable than an embryo that comes about in the centre interval of the fertile period... So their success rate [with the rhythm method] is due not only to the fact that they manage to avoid conception, but also to the fact that conceived ova have reduced survival chances...

[Our assumptions tell us that] on average, for every pregnancy that results from a conception outside the HF period, there are two to three embryonic deaths... If all of Alcorn’s 780 million pill users were to switch to the rhythm method, then these converts would be causing, in his own words, the deaths not of tens of thousands, but of millions of unborn children...

Making some reasonable assumptions, we can conclude that

a condom user... can count on one embryonic death for each unintended pregnancy. A rhythm method user, however, should count on two to three embryonic deaths for each unintended pregnancy. Assuming a success rate of 95% for condom usage, we can count on an expectation of .5 pregnancies in 10 years. Hence, the expectation of embryonic death is .5 per ten years for a condom user, which is substantially lower than the expectation of two to three embryonic deaths per ten years on the rhythm method [estimated elsewhere in the piece]. Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method.

The last couple of paragraphs address some possible counterarguments. If people don't find this argument at least potentially compelling, though, it shows that the "cornerstone of the argument of the pro-life movement, namely that deaths of early embryos are a matter of grave concern" is bunk. I love it!

Update: The article wasn't very well-recieved in the scientific community, and so I salvaged some of the argument. I'm not prepared to argue that the rhythm method or "natural family planning" (NFP) cause more embryonic deaths than IUDs or the pill, but I have what I think is a very good case for why they might cause more embryonic death than condoms. This was originally written as a response to another internet user here. I've added some modifications so that my readers here can understand my point without necessarily reading the other piece, though it's available in the above link.

Thank you for your thoughtful and well-articulated response.

Regardless of the individual facts of the article (many of which I'm not qualified to comment on), surely you can agree that given the extremely high number of natural embryonic deaths (and the fact that this number rises with age), there are many more fertilizations than births in women using any method. The question is simply how to minimize the number of "wasted" fertilizations to save as many embryos as posssible.

If I grant your contention that older gametes do not produce less viable embryos, then the ratio of fertilizations to deaths is the same for condom users as it is for couples with no contraception and rhythm method users. By happy coincidence, minimizing the number of fertilizations through any of these methods minimizes both embryonic deaths and unwanted pregnancies.

That means that one can simply look up the effectiveness rate for the rhythm method and for condoms; the method most effective at preventing pregnancy is also the method most effective at preventing doomed fertilizations and there is some simple ratio between these (1:1 if 50% of embryos fail to implant).

The numbers I've seen say the following:

1. Perfect NFP use fails between 1 and 9 percent per year, depending on which studies one looks at
   
2. Perfect condom use fails about 3% per year

Let's be slightly generous towards NFP and simplify the issue by saying that the perfect use stats are indistinguishable. One could argue, however, that what matters morally is actual results rather than the ideal results. In that case, various NFP methods fail 14-25% of the time. To keep things simple, let's call NFP failure 20% (the average of 14 and 25 is just under 20). Condoms fail about 14% of the time.

Assuming that my numbers are right so far, and that you're correct that embryos produced by the two methods are equally viable, it appears that typical NFP causes an additional 0.6 unwanted pregnancies per couple per year compared to typical condom use. Then we have to multiply that number times the number of doomed embryos per pregnancy (somewhere between 1 and 50 if between 50% and 98% of embryos are doomed) to find the total number of doomed embryos per couple per year that could have been saved if the couple had used condoms instead of NFP.

If only half of all embryos are doomed, then NFP kills 0.06 embryos per couple per year in a typical setting that would never have been fertilized by condom use.

If 98% of embryos are doomed (as is common in older couples), then NFP kills 3 embryos per couple per year in a typical setting relative to a typical condom user.

75% seems to be the most general figure, so that's 0.18 dead embryos per year, or one dead embryo per five years.

If embryos are human life, then this is the moral equivalent of murdering someone every five years to avoid some latex (up to three murders a year for older couples). That hardly seems ethical.

If reducing embryonic deaths is actually one's goal, he or she should recognize the possibility that NFP isn't the best way of doing it and recognize that these arguments are at least potentially damning. (If one's goal is to promote NFP, they won't matter one way or the other.)

Incidentally, there are several articles that support the aging gametes theory, which would restore much of the credibility of the initial argument.

How are my figures?

Categories: familyvalues, christain, incompetence, abortion, biology, sex, ideology, medical, personal, research