All lives matter, even the briefest of them

The New Yorker, one of the nation’s most established literary magazines, recently published a piece on the “ambiguity” of at-home pregnancy tests.

“You can be kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant, and still test positive for pregnancy,” writes Apoorva Tadepalli.

I read the article with curiosity, looking for a sensible explanation. Instead, I found a secular attempt to confuse the question of when life begins. Abortion and IVF are never mentioned, but the underlying message is clear: Early life doesn’t count.

Tadepalli concedes that a positive result comes directly from rising hCG levels, an indication of early pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reports that rising hCG is nearly always evidence of pregnancy in premenopausal women, even if that pregnancy ends before it can be seen on an ultrasound.

“Pregnancy tests,” Tadepalli writes, “capture a moment in time at which an embryo has implanted and is interacting with the uterus in some way.”

What is an embryo but a human being “interacting with the uterus”? That’s the most obvious definition of “pregnant,” yet Tadepalli doesn’t want to name it.

Her examples of “a little bit pregnant” include chemical pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, and soon-to-be or recently miscarried pregnancies. 

You might also test positive, she writes, “if you have a fetus inside you that’s dead but not coming out.” Every one of these examples is a pregnancy. A positive test in each case is incredibly accurate.

Her real complaint is that a positive test doesn’t always result in a live birth, and for that reason alone she calls the results “misleading.” 

“Most pregnancies are not viable,” she writes, minimizing the painful reality of early loss. 

Chemical pregnancies are merely “genetic errors,” and early miscarriages are often just “errors.” In other words, they’re nothing to cry about.

By her logic, you’d need a live birth to conclude you were ever pregnant with a baby. An embryo doesn’t merit the title unless it “sticks.”

But every zygote, embryo, fetus, and newborn (and adult for that matter) is exactly the same thing: a human being with a distinct DNA code. That individual may appear for as briefly as a day or two, but he or she is not a figment of anyone’s imagination. If a woman has a living embryo in her body for any amount of time, a human being has been there, and she is pregnant.

Tadepalli suggests the faint line shared excitedly in social media pregnancy announcements is poor evidence of actual news. 

“One data point can never tell the whole story,” she writes. “A test can only detect a pregnancy, not a baby.”

She claims this is why people film their reactions but save the videos to post later: They don’t believe there’s a baby yet.

Watch those viral clips, and the reality of that life is instantaneous. There are tears, disbelief, prayers of gratitude, and an entire life imagined in the split second a man or woman becomes a parent. The axis of the world shifts the moment you know your child exists—no matter how small they are. 

To Tadepalli, this miraculous moment is just one step in “rul[ing] out all other possibilities, gradually honing in on a most likely outcome.” Don’t get too excited. It’s just your hCG levels.

Surely she understands the reason people wait: to spare themselves public grief if the baby dies. When a woman miscarries, we don’t say she “lost a pregnancy.” We say she lost a baby, and we all know why.

Ask a mother grieving a chemical pregnancy whether it counted.

“I felt utter despair at the future that had just come crashing down around us,” said one mother.

“I felt sad. I felt alone, and I felt like I shouldn’t be feeling any of it,” wrote another.

Their grief is for a uniquely crafted human being who once lived, however briefly, and whom they loved, imagined, and now mourn. No one weeps like that over a “clump of cells.”

In the end, Tadepalli admits the tests aren’t ambiguous after all. Every positive result is accurate, but a pregnancy may not continue, she writes, for a variety of reasons, including biology, environment, chemicals, disease, and “a woman's choice.”

That was a lot of words to get to the main point at the very end: pregnancies aren’t babies, and the value of a pregnancy is subjective. That is a deadly lie.

Pregnancy tests aren’t ambiguous. They are simply inconvenient for those whose ideological priorities center on dehumanizing the unborn.