I. Introduction
I never had to “deconvert” from being pro-choice. There was no moment of crisis, no tearful reckoning in a church pew, no ultrasound that changed everything. From the moment I began building a godless philosophical framework called Agnostic Deism, the logic pointed inexorably toward protecting human life from the zinc spark onward. What started as an attempt to integrate scientific honesty with existential meaning delivered a conclusion that feels more rigorous, not less, than either religious dogma or progressive default positions.
Here is the terrifying claim, stated plainly: the same worldview that rejects cosmic purpose, divine commands, and revealed morality also concludes that elective abortion is the disposal of an inconvenient human life.
I need you to sit with that for a moment. Not because it is comfortable, but because the discomfort it produces in you will tell you something about which tribe you belong to and which assumptions you have never examined.
If you are a religious conservative, this should unsettle you. The position I am about to lay out requires no God, no soul, no scripture, no afterlife. If my godless framework can arrive at protecting the embryo without revelation, what does that say about the necessity of your revelation? What does it say about the real foundations of the pro-life position?
If you are a secular progressive, this should unsettle you more. You have spent decades perfecting a dismissal: pro-life is religious, therefore it can be set aside in a pluralistic society. That dismissal is about to fail. The argument I am making is grounded in laboratory science, standard embryology, and the same philosophical traditions you claim to respect. You will have to engage with it on its merits or admit that your real objection is not intellectual but tribal.
I am not the first to walk this path. Nat Hentoff, the atheist civil libertarian who wrote for The Village Voice for decades, arrived at a pro-life position through his commitment to protecting the vulnerable, not through any encounter with religion. He was a card-carrying member of the ACLU who was essentially exiled from progressive circles for his trouble. Christopher Hitchens, the most combative atheist of the twenty-first century, was never comfortable with the pro-choice consensus. He described the unborn as constituting a separate body and treated the question with a gravity that irritated his allies. Bernard Nathanson co-founded NARAL, helped legalize abortion in the United States, and then over the course of years reversed his position entirely, well before he ever set foot in a church, because the medical evidence, particularly what he observed through ultrasound technology, would not let him maintain the fiction that nothing of moral significance was being destroyed. These are not fringe figures. They are intellectuals of the highest caliber who followed secular reasoning to a conclusion the secular world prefers to ignore.
This is not a position I inherited. It is one I constructed. And the construction left me no intellectually honest escape.
What follows is the argument in full. I will show you the biology first, then the ethics, then the hardest cases. I will steel-man the other side more honestly than most of its own advocates do. I will not pretend that this position is costless. And I will not let you pretend that rejecting it is costless either.
II. The Biological and Metaphysical Ground Zero
Every debate about abortion eventually arrives at the same question: when does a new human life begin? Most answers to this question are either theological assertions dressed up as biology or arbitrary developmental milestones selected for political convenience. What I am about to offer is neither. It is an empirically observable, non-arbitrary biological event that marks the constitution of a new human individual. And it comes with a fluorescent signature you can photograph in a laboratory.
The Zinc Spark
In 2016, a team led by Teresa Woodruff at Northwestern University published research in Scientific Reports documenting something remarkable in human egg activation. At the moment of successful fertilization, when a sperm cell penetrates a human oocyte, the egg releases billions of zinc ions in a coordinated burst. This release produces a flash of fluorescence, a literal spark visible under the right imaging conditions. The phenomenon, first characterized in mouse models and subsequently confirmed in human fertilization, demonstrated that the magnitude of this zinc spark correlates with the quality of the fertilization event and the viability of the resulting embryo. Subsequent work, including research published in Nature Chemistry, confirmed the phenomenon across species and established it as a genuine biological marker of successful fertilization.
This is not a metaphor. It is chemistry. It is a measurable physical event that marks the completion of fertilization with a signal you can detect and record.
Before the zinc spark, what exists are two gametes. Each carries half of a human genome. Neither is an individual organism. A sperm cell is a cell of the father’s body. An egg cell is a cell of the mother’s body. They are biologically analogous to skin cells or blood cells in the sense that they are parts of an existing organism, not organisms in their own right. They have no independent developmental trajectory. Left alone, they will not grow into anything. They will simply die.
After the zinc spark, what exists is something categorically different: a single-celled organism with a complete, unique human genome and an autonomous developmental trajectory. This organism, if uninterrupted, will proceed through every subsequent stage of human development. Embryo. Fetus. Infant. Child. Adolescent. Adult. It will do this not because something is done to it from outside, but because the developmental program is already running. The trajectory is intrinsic.
This is not a disputed point in embryology. Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud’s The Developing Human, the standard embryology textbook used in medical schools worldwide, states the matter plainly: a new human organism with a unique genetic constitution is formed at fertilization. Ronan O’Rahilly, one of the most precise developmental biologists of the twentieth century, was so insistent on this point that he argued the term “pre-embryo,” which had gained some currency in bioethics discussions, was scientifically unjustified and politically motivated. What exists after fertilization is not a “potential human” or a “clump of cells” or a “pre-embryo.” It is a human organism at the earliest stage of its development.
Actual, Not Potential
This distinction matters enormously, and it is where most people’s thinking goes wrong.
The common framing is that an embryo is a “potential person.” On this view, fertilization creates something that might become a person someday, the way an acorn might become an oak tree. The moral weight of the embryo, on this account, is speculative and forward-looking. It does not yet have value; it merely has the possibility of acquiring value later.
The framework of Agnostic Deism rejects this framing entirely. A human embryo is not a potential human. It is a human at an early developmental stage. The acorn analogy fails because an acorn is not a small oak tree. But an embryo is a human organism. It has a complete genome. It has begun its developmental trajectory. It is not waiting to become something; it is already something, and that something is a member of the species Homo sapiens at the youngest point of its existence.
Consider the parallel at other developmental stages. A newborn infant lacks language, abstract reasoning, self-awareness in any robust sense, and the ability to survive without constant care. No one argues that the infant is a “potential person.” We recognize the infant as a person whose capacities have not yet developed. The same infant, at six months of gestation, had even fewer capacities. At three months, fewer still. At one week, fewer still. At the single-cell stage, the fewest of all.
But the question is: at which point in this continuous developmental trajectory did a new kind of entity come into existence? The answer, biologically, is at fertilization. That is when the organism was constituted. Everything after fertilization is development of an already-existing individual, not the creation of a new one.
Twinning and Natural Loss
Two biological objections to the zinc spark threshold arise frequently enough that they must be addressed here.
The first is twinning. In some cases, an embryo splits within the first fourteen days after fertilization, producing identical twins. If the zinc spark marks the creation of an individual, what happens when that individual becomes two? Does twinning prove that no real individual existed at fertilization?
It does not. The fact that a river can fork into two rivers does not mean the river did not exist before the fork. At the zinc spark, one new borrowing from the energetic economy of life begins. If twinning occurs, that borrowing branches into two. Both are now individuals. Both warrant moral protection from the moment of their separate existence. Biological individuation is more complex than the simplest model suggests, but complexity does not negate the reality of what existed before the branching event.
The second objection concerns natural embryonic loss. Estimates suggest that 50 to 70 percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost naturally. If each of these is a human individual, the scale of natural death is staggering.
The framework’s response is direct: a high natural death rate does not justify deliberate killing. Historical infant mortality reached approximately 50 percent in many societies. This never justified infanticide. Many humans die of natural causes at every age. This does not justify murder. The process-oriented Architect designed rules that produce overproduction followed by natural attrition at every level of biology. The framework opposes deliberate human destruction of human individuals. It does not oppose natural processes that the system’s own rules produce. This is the same distinction we draw at every other stage of life.
The Pool and the Spark
Within the interpretive vocabulary of Agnostic Deism, the zinc spark is the moment a new life begins borrowing from the Infinite Pool. The Pool is not a mystical substance. It is energy, thermodynamically measurable and scientifically understood, viewed through the interpretive lens of interconnection and impermanence. All life participates in the same energetic economy, borrowing organized energy temporarily and returning it upon death. Before fertilization, the gametes are part of their parents’ biological systems, extensions of energy already borrowed. At the zinc spark, a new and independent borrowing begins. A distinct organism is now drawing energy from the Pool in its own right, organizing that energy according to its own unique genetic blueprint.
I want to crystallize this into the sharpest possible formulation, because it is the foundation on which everything else rests:
An embryo is not a different kind of thing from you. It is you, earlier.
If that sentence produces resistance, examine the resistance. What is the basis for your objection? If it is that the embryo lacks consciousness, I will address that directly in the next section. If it is that the embryo lacks viability, I would note that viability is a technologically contingent criterion that shifts with medical advances and tells us nothing about the ontological status of the organism. If it is that the embryo “doesn’t look human,” I would suggest that appearance is the least serious basis for moral status that any thinking person could propose.
The biology is not ambiguous. A genetically unique human organism is constituted at fertilization. This is what medical students learn in their first embryology course. The question is not whether this is true. The question is what it demands of us.
III. Deprivation Harm: The Non-Religious Case Against Killing
If you accept the biology of the previous section, you have a human organism. But having a human organism is not, by itself, a moral argument. Plenty of human organisms die naturally, and we do not treat every natural death as a moral catastrophe. The question is: what makes deliberately killing this organism wrong?
The most common answer, and the one that dominates secular ethics, is suffering. Killing is wrong because it causes suffering. On this account, the moral weight of killing depends on the victim’s capacity to experience pain, fear, distress, or loss. Since an early embryo has no nervous system, no brain, no capacity for any experience whatsoever, killing it causes no suffering. Therefore, on a suffering-only account, early abortion is morally weightless.
The framework of Agnostic Deism takes suffering seriously. Suffering-minimization is one of its chosen foundational values. But it also makes an explicit and critical admission: suffering-minimization alone is insufficient as an account of why killing is wrong.
Why Suffering Is Not Enough
Consider a thought experiment. You are asleep. Deeply, dreamlessly asleep. You are experiencing nothing. You have no awareness, no pain, no preferences, no consciousness of any kind. Someone enters the room and kills you painlessly. You never wake up. You never know what happened.
On a suffering-only account, what was wrong with this killing? You experienced no pain. You had no awareness of what was happening. At the moment of your death, your experiential state was indistinguishable from that of the embryo the suffering-only account says may be killed without moral weight.
And yet the wrongness of killing you in your sleep is obvious. Something has been taken from you. Not a moment of suffering, but a future. All the mornings you would have seen. All the conversations you would have had. All the projects you would have completed, the people you would have loved, the experiences you would have accumulated. The wrongness of the killing lies not in what it did to your present experience (which was nothing) but in what it took from your future.
This is deprivation harm.
The Philosophical Foundation
In 1989, the philosopher Don Marquis published a paper in The Journal of Philosophy titled “Why Abortion is Immoral.” It has become one of the most discussed papers in applied ethics of the last four decades, and it is remarkably parallel to the argument I am making here.
Marquis asked a deceptively simple question: what makes killing wrong in general? Not “what makes killing wrong according to God” or “what makes killing wrong according to social convention,” but what is the best secular account of the wrongness of killing?
His answer: killing is wrong because it deprives the victim of a “future like ours.” A future containing experiences, activities, projects, relationships, and all the goods of a continuing life. This deprivation is the primary harm of killing. It is what makes killing a young person worse than killing an elderly person (more future is lost). It is what makes killing wrong even when the victim does not see it coming (the deprivation occurs regardless of awareness). And it is what makes killing wrong even when the victim is not currently conscious (a sleeping person has a future like ours just as surely as a waking one).
Marquis then drew the conclusion that has kept his paper at the center of academic debate for over thirty-five years: since a fetus has a future like ours (if not killed, it will have a life containing experiences, relationships, projects, and enjoyments), killing a fetus deprives it of that future, and therefore abortion is seriously morally wrong.
The structure of the argument is clean:
- What makes killing wrong is the deprivation of a valuable future.
- The fetus has a valuable future (the same kinds of experiences, activities, and relationships that make our futures valuable).
- Therefore, killing the fetus is wrong for the same reason killing an adult is wrong.
Notice what this argument does not require. It does not require God. It does not require a soul. It does not require that the fetus is currently conscious, currently suffering, or currently capable of any experience at all. It requires only that the fetus has a future, and that this future is valuable, and that destroying it constitutes a genuine harm.
The framework of Agnostic Deism arrived at this same conclusion independently, calling it deprivation harm rather than “future like ours.” The convergence is significant. When two independent lines of reasoning, starting from different premises, reach the same conclusion, it is evidence that the conclusion is robust. Marquis started from the question “what makes killing wrong?” and arrived at deprivation harm. I started from the question “what does a coherent ethics of constructed values require?” and arrived at the same place. The Princeton legal philosopher Robert George, working from an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition entirely different from either, reaches the same conclusion about the embryo’s status through yet another independent line of reasoning. Three traditions. Three methods. One conclusion.
The Framework’s Reinforcements
The framework goes further than Marquis in three respects that strengthen the argument.
First, the Developmental Trajectory Principle. The most common objection to Marquis comes from philosophers who challenge the identity claim: is the embryo really the same individual as the adult who would have enjoyed that future? The philosopher Jeff McMahan, in his influential book The Ethics of Killing, argues that you are identical to the mind that inhabits your body, and since the early embryo has no mind, you were never the embryo. Therefore the embryo’s future is not your future, and killing it does not deprive you of anything. The philosopher David Boonin, in A Defense of Abortion, makes a related argument: the embryo at fertilization lacks sufficient psychological continuity with the future person to be the same individual who would enjoy that future.
These are serious objections and I want to engage them honestly rather than dismiss them.
McMahan and Boonin are making a specific philosophical claim: that personal identity tracks the mind, not the organism. On their view, you came into existence when your mind came into existence (roughly when your brain developed the capacity for some form of experience), not when your organism came into existence (at fertilization). Before that point, the organism existed, but you did not.
The framework’s response operates on two levels.
At the first level, the response is biological. The organism’s physical continuity from fertilization to adulthood is unbroken. There is no point in the developmental trajectory at which one entity is replaced by a different entity. The genome is the same. The developmental process is continuous. There is no discontinuity, no gap, no moment at which organism A ceases and organism B begins. McMahan’s position requires us to believe that the organism that exists at fertilization is not the same entity as the person reading this sentence. The framework finds this implausible. We do not assess a sleeping person’s moral status by noting that their mind is currently offline. We do not assess a patient under general anesthesia as a different entity from the person who walked into the operating room. The organism persists through changes in mental state, including the change from “no mental state at all” to “rich conscious experience.”
At the second level, the response is philosophical. The disagreement between the framework and McMahan is not ultimately a factual dispute about when the mind begins. It is a foundational choice about what moral status tracks. McMahan chooses the mind. The framework chooses the organism. Neither can prove the other wrong in the way you prove a mathematical theorem. But the framework’s choice produces consequences that are both more consistent and more palatable than McMahan’s. If moral status tracks the mind, and if the mind requires some threshold of psychological capacity, then the question immediately arises: what threshold? And whatever threshold you set, you must explain why a being just below that threshold has no moral status while a being just above it has full moral status. The framework avoids this problem entirely by attaching moral status to the organism from its biological origin. There is no threshold to set. There is no arbitrary line to draw. There is a biological event (the zinc spark) that marks the beginning of a new organism, and moral status begins there.
More importantly, the framework’s choice avoids the most troubling consequence of McMahan’s: the inability to explain why infanticide is wrong without additional ad hoc commitments. If moral status tracks the mind, and if newborn infants lack the self-awareness and future-directed preferences that McMahan considers constitutive of the morally relevant mind, then newborns are in the same moral category as late-term fetuses. McMahan attempts to resolve this through what he calls “the time-relative interest account,” but the framework finds this resolution less clean and less principled than simply grounding moral status in the organism from the zinc spark.
The work of Derek Parfit on personal identity further complicates McMahan’s sharp claim. Parfit demonstrated in Reasons and Persons that the question “am I the same person as X?” may not have a determinate answer, and that what matters morally may not be strict identity but rather continuity and connectedness, which can come in degrees and can be physical as well as psychological. If Parfit is right, then the unbroken physical continuity of the organism from fertilization to adulthood carries moral weight even on views that do not require strict identity. McMahan’s confident assertion that “you were never the embryo” is less defensible than it first appears.
Second, the Open Future Principle. The philosopher Joel Feinberg introduced this concept in 1980 to argue that children have “rights-in-trust,” rights that protect their future autonomy and preserve the widest possible range of life options. Parents and society should not make irreversible decisions on behalf of children that needlessly close down their future.
The framework takes Feinberg’s principle and applies it to its logical maximum. If narrowing a child’s future options through genetic selection warrants moral scrutiny (which most progressives accept), then what about annihilating that child’s future entirely? Abortion is not a narrowing of the open future. It is the total and permanent elimination of all future options whatsoever. It is the most extreme possible violation of the Open Future Principle. If the principle has any force at all, it has its maximum force here.
Third, the internal consistency test. The framework already applies deprivation harm logic in other contexts without controversy. When it discusses death in its section on the Annihilation of the Ego, it describes death as “the loss of all individual data,” framing it as genuine loss, not a neutral event. When it discusses life extension, it explicitly states: “We do not believe death is good. Death is the annihilation of a conscious being, the loss of all their experiences, relationships, and potential. This is a harm, not a benefit.” When it applies the Open Future Principle to genetic engineering, it treats the narrowing of a child’s future options as a harm worth taking seriously.
The framework already believes that death is a deprivation. It already believes that future experience has value. It already believes that eliminating someone’s future is a harm, not a neutral event. The only question is whether these beliefs apply to the youngest members of the species.
If they do not, the framework must explain what property is acquired between fertilization and birth that transforms the elimination of a future from a morally neutral event into a profound harm. I have never found a satisfying answer. The capacity for suffering? Then killing in painless sleep is not wrong. The capacity for self-awareness? Then Peter Singer is right that infanticide is permissible, because newborns lack self-awareness too. Viability? Then the moral status of the organism depends on the state of neonatal technology in the nearest hospital, which is absurd. Some arbitrary developmental milestone? Then the framework is drawing lines for political convenience, not philosophical coherence.
If death is the annihilation of all experience, as the framework already holds, then abortion is that annihilation at its earliest point. The harm is the same in kind. Only the stage differs.
The Contraception Distinction
Before proceeding, I must address the obvious objection: if deprivation harm is real, does contraception also deprive a future person of existence?
No. And the zinc spark is precisely what makes this clear.
Before fertilization, there is no individual. There is no “someone” to deprive. A sperm cell and an egg cell are gametes, cells belonging to their respective parents. They have no developmental trajectory of their own. No organism has been constituted. No borrowing from the Pool has begun. Preventing their union does not destroy an existing individual; it prevents one from coming into existence.
After fertilization, there is an individual. A genetically unique human organism with its own genome, its own developmental program, and its own trajectory. Destroying this individual deprives it of its future.
The distinction is between preventing the creation of an individual (no harm, because there is no subject to be harmed) and destroying an individual that already exists (deprivation harm, because a subject with a future is eliminated). Contraception does the former. Abortion does the latter. They are not on a continuum. They are categorically different acts separated by the zinc spark.
IV. The Bodily Autonomy Conflict
If the argument so far is correct, then a human embryo is a human individual with a future, and destroying it constitutes a genuine harm. But this is not the end of the analysis. It is only the beginning of the hardest part.
Because even if the embryo is a human individual, it exists inside another human individual. It depends on her body for survival. And she may not want it there.
The bodily autonomy argument for abortion is powerful, and I will not pretend otherwise. If this article is to have any credibility, it must engage with the strongest version of this argument, not a caricature.
The Strongest Case: Thomson’s Violinist
In 1971, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson published “A Defense of Abortion” in Philosophy and Public Affairs. It remains the most famous philosophical defense of abortion rights ever written. Thomson made a strategic concession that changed the terms of the debate: she granted, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a full person with a right to life. And then she argued that even so, the woman’s right to bodily autonomy means she is not obligated to sustain it.
Her thought experiment is famous. You wake up one morning and find yourself connected to an unconscious violinist. He has a fatal kidney ailment. The Society of Music Lovers has kidnapped you and plugged your circulatory system into his so that your kidneys can extract poisons from his blood. If you disconnect, he dies. If you stay connected for nine months, he recovers.
Thomson asks: are you morally obligated to stay connected? Most people’s intuition is no. You were kidnapped. You did not consent. Your body is being used against your will. Disconnecting is not murder; it is the withdrawal of extraordinary bodily support that no one is obligated to provide.
The parallel to pregnancy is intentional. Thomson argues that even if the fetus is a person, the woman is not obligated to provide her body as life support. Abortion is not killing; it is disconnecting. And disconnecting, even when it results in death, is within the woman’s rights.
This argument is powerful. I want to name exactly why.
It bypasses the entire “when does life begin” debate. It concedes personhood and still reaches the pro-choice conclusion. It appeals to a principle, bodily sovereignty, that most people hold deeply and intuitively. And it locates the moral weight on the woman’s side of the equation in a way that demands serious engagement.
I take it seriously. And I think it fails. But it fails in ways that require careful explanation, not dismissal.
Where the Analogy Breaks
Thomson’s violinist scenario is engineered to produce a specific intuitive response, and it does so by building in features that do not characterize most pregnancies. Understanding where the analogy diverges from reality is essential.
First, the violinist scenario involves kidnapping. You were connected without your consent, by force, by a third party. This maps cleanly onto one specific case: pregnancy resulting from rape. In that case, Thomson’s analogy is at its strongest, and I will address it separately below. But most pregnancies, including most unwanted pregnancies, are not the result of rape. They are the result of consensual sex, an act that carries a known risk of pregnancy.
I want to be careful here. Consenting to sex is not consenting to pregnancy. That distinction is valid. But it is also, in the framework’s analysis, not the operative question. The operative question is not whether the woman consented to pregnancy. The operative question is whether her lack of consent to pregnancy justifies the destruction of a human individual who now exists. The framework’s answer is no, because the deprivation harm to the embryo outweighs the imposition on the woman regardless of how the pregnancy arose. The consent question affects the solidarity obligation (how much support the community owes the woman), not the permissibility of destruction (whether the embryo may be killed). This will become clearer in the graduated analysis below.
Second, the violinist is a stranger. You have no relationship to him, no connection, no history, no causal role in his condition. The embryo, by contrast, is the woman’s biological offspring. The woman (and her partner) are the direct causal agents of the embryo’s existence. They created the situation of dependence. The moral weight of allowing a stranger to die by withdrawing extraordinary support may differ from the moral weight of destroying your own offspring after creating the conditions of its dependence. Thomson’s scenario is designed to make the dependent party as alien as possible. Reality is more complicated.
Third, the violinist will die regardless. He has a fatal kidney ailment. You are merely postponing his death. The embryo, by contrast, is not dying. It is developing normally. If left uninterfered with, it will not die; it will be born. Abortion is not the withdrawal of extraordinary support from a dying patient. It is the active termination of a healthy developmental process. The violinist scenario frames the act as “letting die.” The biological reality of abortion is closer to “killing.” This distinction carries moral weight that Thomson’s analogy is constructed to suppress.
Fourth, and this is where the framework’s analysis cuts deepest, the relative magnitudes of deprivation are wildly asymmetric. The violinist is an adult who has already lived a full life. His death, while tragic, deprives him of whatever remaining years he might have had. The embryo is at the very beginning of its existence. Its destruction deprives it of everything: every experience, every relationship, every moment of consciousness, every choice, every year of an entire human life. The total deprivation inflicted by abortion is not comparable to the total deprivation inflicted by disconnecting from the violinist. It is categorically greater.
Thomson’s Rights-Based Reframing
Thomson, however, is more sophisticated than the simple “killing versus letting die” distinction captures. Her deeper argument is about the structure of rights: she claims that the right to life does not include the right to use another person’s body, and that withdrawing bodily support is therefore not a violation of the right to life even if death results. On this view, the embryo may have a right to life, but that right does not extend to the right to occupy and use the woman’s body without her consent.
This is a genuinely powerful philosophical move, and I want to name its force before explaining why the framework rejects it.
Thomson is correct that rights have limits. Your right to life does not entitle you to my kidney, my bone marrow, or my blood, even if you will die without them. We do not legally compel organ donation. We do not legally compel blood transfusion. The right to life is not a right to be given whatever you need to survive.
But the framework identifies a crucial asymmetry that Thomson’s rights analysis obscures. In the organ donation case, the cost of not donating is the continuation of an existing medical condition in the recipient. The recipient was already dying. You are declining to intervene. In the abortion case, the cost of “disconnecting” is the total annihilation of a human being who was not dying and would not have died without your intervention. The embryo is not suffering from a fatal ailment that the woman’s body happens to be able to treat. The embryo is developing normally. The woman’s body is its natural environment, not an extraordinary medical intervention. Removing it does not “fail to save” it. It destroys it.
The magnitude of what is at stake changes the rights calculus. A right to bodily autonomy that is exercised at the cost of another person’s entire existence is being exercised at a qualitatively different price than a right to bodily autonomy that is exercised at the cost of declining to donate an organ to a stranger who is already ill. Thomson’s framework treats these as equivalent exercises of the same right. The framework of Agnostic Deism holds that they are not.
The Severity Spectrum: What Pregnancy Actually Costs
I have argued that the embryo’s claim to continued existence outweighs the woman’s claim to bodily sovereignty. But I will not make this argument without confronting what “outweighs” actually means in concrete human terms.
Pregnancy is not a uniform experience. Characterizing it simply as “temporary” or “nine months of inconvenience” is dishonest, and any argument that relies on such minimization deserves to be dismissed.
The reality is a spectrum. Some pregnancies are relatively uncomplicated. Others are devastating. The data demands acknowledgment.
The World Health Organization reports that approximately 287,000 women died from pregnancy-related causes in 2020. In the United States, the CDC has recorded maternal mortality rates ranging from approximately 23 to 33 deaths per 100,000 live births in recent years, a rate that has been increasing rather than declining, with Black women dying at roughly three times the rate of white women. These are not negligible numbers. Pregnancy can kill.
Beyond mortality, the CDC tracks severe maternal morbidity, serious complications affecting approximately 50,000 to 60,000 women per year in the United States alone. These include preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, hemorrhage, emergency hysterectomy, and intensive care admission. Some of these complications produce permanent effects: chronic pain, pelvic floor damage, lasting cardiovascular changes, organ damage.
Psychological consequences are also real. Approximately 10 to 20 percent of women experience postpartum depression. For women carrying unwanted pregnancies, rates of psychological distress are higher. The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal research project led by Diana Greene Foster at the University of California, San Francisco, tracked women who sought abortions over a decade. Women who were denied abortions and carried pregnancies to term were more likely to experience economic hardship, to remain in contact with abusive partners, and to suffer adverse health outcomes than women who received the abortions they sought. Two women in the denied group died from pregnancy-related causes; none died in the received group. The study’s methodology has faced some critique, but its core findings have not been overturned by subsequent research, and the economic effects in particular proved persistent over time.
I cite this data not because it refutes the pro-life position, but because any pro-life position that ignores it is morally bankrupt. If I am going to argue that a woman should continue a pregnancy she does not want, I must look squarely at what I am asking of her. Anything less is cowardice dressed as principle.
The Framework’s Graduated Analysis
The framework does not treat all circumstances identically. It distinguishes cases along the severity spectrum, and this graduated analysis is essential to its honesty.
Life-threatening pregnancy. Where pregnancy poses a genuine, immediate threat to the life of the woman, a tragic conflict arises between two lives. Two human individuals, each with a future, each with a claim to continued existence. The framework recognizes the exception. The principle of self-preservation, itself grounded in the value of continued existence, may apply. This is recognized with grief, not satisfaction. Two lives are in genuine conflict. One may be lost. The tragedy is irreducible.
Pregnancy threatening severe permanent harm. Where pregnancy will cause severe permanent disability or lasting physical damage but is not immediately life-threatening, the conflict remains tragic. The framework maintains its position: the deprivation harm of destroying the embryo (total, irreversible loss of an entire life) remains the greater harm. But it acknowledges the cost is high, and the solidarity obligation on the wider community is correspondingly greater. A society may not impose this burden and then abandon the woman who bears it.
Pregnancy resulting from sexual assault. I will not pretend this case is easy. It is agonizing. The woman bears no moral responsibility for the pregnancy. The violation of her autonomy is profound and ongoing. Every day of that pregnancy is a continuation of an assault she did not choose and cannot undo.
And yet. The embryo is not the assailant. It is a distinct human individual who did not choose the circumstances of its creation. Its destruction does not undo the assault. It adds the loss of a human life to an already horrific situation.
The framework maintains its position here, and I understand if you find this hard to accept. What the framework demands in return is the maximum solidarity obligation. A society that would require a woman to carry a pregnancy resulting from assault must provide comprehensive material, medical, psychological, and social support, including robust systems for adoption if the woman does not wish to raise the child. A society that fails to provide such support while prohibiting abortion in these circumstances has committed a moral atrocity of its own. It has imposed the heaviest possible burden and then walked away.
Elective abortion as birth control. Here the framework’s objection reaches its maximum force, and I will not soften it.
Where abortion is sought not because of medical danger, not because of assault, not because of severe hardship, but because the pregnancy is unwanted and inconvenient, the framework identifies this plainly: it is the disposal of an inconvenient human life.
The individual destroyed has committed no offense. It poses no threat to the woman’s life. It has no voice in the decision. Its entire future, every experience and relationship and choice of a full human life, is annihilated because its existence is unwanted.
Contraception exists to prevent the creation of individuals. It is not merely permitted under this framework; it is strongly supported. The zinc spark has not occurred. No individual exists. No borrowing from the Pool has begun. Prevention is categorically different from destruction.
But when contraception fails or is not used, and an individual comes into existence, that individual cannot be treated as disposable. Using abortion in place of contraception treats an already-existing human being as refuse. The framework does not equivocate on this point, and neither do I.
The Chosen Hierarchy
I want to state the framework’s resolution plainly, because obfuscation here would be dishonest.
The conflict is between two morally significant claims. The woman’s bodily autonomy is real. The embryo’s claim to continued existence is real. Neither can be dismissed.
The framework resolves the conflict by examining the nature and magnitude of each claim.
The embryo’s claim is to its very existence. Without continued life, no rights are possible, no experiences are possible, no future is possible. Existence is not one right among many. It is the precondition for all other rights and experiences. It is the foundation without which nothing else can be built.
The woman’s claim is to sovereignty over her body during the period of pregnancy. This claim is significant. It involves real physical burden, real risk, real psychological weight, and in some cases real suffering. But it is finite. Pregnancy ends. The woman’s future continues. Her agency continues. Her personhood continues. Her capacity for all other experiences and rights continues.
Where one claim is to existence itself and the other is to bodily sovereignty over a finite period, the framework holds that existence takes precedence. The deprivation inflicted by death is total and irreversible. The imposition of pregnancy, though sometimes severe and sometimes resulting in lasting consequences, does not eliminate the woman’s future, agency, or personhood.
There is no resolution of this conflict that does not impose a cost on someone. The framework holds that the cost of allowing the embryo’s destruction (the permanent elimination of an entire human life) is greater than the cost of requiring the pregnancy to continue (a finite, though sometimes severe, burden on the woman).
The severity of the circumstances determines the weight of the solidarity obligation, not the permissibility of destruction. The harder the case, the greater the community’s duty to support the woman. Not the greater the permission to destroy the embryo.
I want to leave this section with the formulation that captures the framework’s position most honestly:
A society that bans abortion while failing to support mothers has committed moral fraud. But a society that permits elective abortion has committed a deeper one: treating persons as disposable.
V. Why This Terrifies Both Sides
I chose the title of this article deliberately, and I owe the reader an honest accounting of what, exactly, should terrify them. The terror is not rhetorical. It is structural. This argument, if taken seriously, destabilizes the foundational assumptions of both camps in ways that neither camp is equipped to handle.
The Terror for Religious Conservatives
You and I share a conclusion. We agree that the deliberate destruction of a human embryo is a serious moral wrong. But we agree on almost nothing else, and the distance between our premises should prompt a question you may never have seriously entertained: what is actually doing the work in your argument?
If the theology is doing the work, then my framework should not be able to reach the same conclusion without it. But it does. Every link in the argumentative chain is forged from biology, philosophy, and constructed ethics. God is not in the chain. The soul is not in the chain. Scripture is not in the chain. The embryo is a human individual from the zinc spark. Its destruction constitutes deprivation harm. The developmental trajectory makes it the same entity as the adult it will become. The Open Future Principle opposes the maximal elimination of a non-consenting individual’s future options. Bodily autonomy is real but subordinate to the right to continued existence, because existence is the precondition for all other rights.
Which suggests that the real foundations of the pro-life position are not theological at all. They are biological: a new organism begins at fertilization. They are philosophical: destroying that organism deprives it of its future. They are ethical: the magnitude of that deprivation outweighs competing claims in all but the most extreme circumstances. The theology is scaffolding. Remove it and the structure still stands.
This carries a practical implication that should alarm religious conservatives as much as it empowers them. If the pro-life position does not require God, then it cannot be quarantined as a private religious conviction. It enters the public square on the same terms as any other secular ethical argument. It demands engagement on its merits, not deference to its provenance. This is good news for the pro-life movement. But it also means that religious conservatives can no longer claim ownership of the position. They did not discover it through revelation. They arrived at a correct conclusion through a tradition that happens to encode some genuine moral insights alongside a great deal of unverifiable metaphysics. The insights are separable from the metaphysics. And once separated, they belong to everyone.
There is a further discomfort. If the pro-life conclusion can be reached without religion, then the religious pro-life advocate must ask what role religion actually plays in their moral reasoning. Is it a source of genuine insight? Or is it a confidence-granting mechanism that allows them to hold positions they could not otherwise defend? If the latter, then the entire apparatus of divine authority, of “thus saith the Lord,” of scripture as moral bedrock, is not grounding the position. It is decorating it. And decoration, however comforting, is not foundation.
I am not suggesting that religious pro-life advocates abandon their faith. I am suggesting that they recognize the actual foundations of their strongest arguments and stop hiding those foundations behind theological assertions that repel the very people they need to persuade. The pro-life case is strongest when it speaks in the language of biology and philosophy. It is weakest when it speaks in the language of revelation. The religious right has, for decades, made the weakest version of their strongest argument.
The Terror for Secular Progressives
The standard progressive dismissal of anti-abortion arguments follows a well-rehearsed script: the pro-life position is religious in origin, therefore it is a private conviction, therefore it has no place in public policy, therefore we can set it aside without engaging its substance. This script has been so successful, so thoroughly internalized, that many progressives have never actually encountered a pro-life argument they needed to defeat on its merits. They have only encountered arguments they could dismiss on their provenance.
That dismissal fails here. Completely.
This argument is not religious. It invokes no God, no soul, no scripture, no afterlife, no divine command. It is grounded in a peer-reviewed study from Northwestern University (the zinc spark), standard medical embryology (the constitution of a new organism at fertilization), and one of the most discussed papers in academic philosophy of the last forty years (Don Marquis’s “Why Abortion is Immoral,” published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989). These are not fringe sources. They are the mainstream of their respective disciplines.
This argument is not patriarchal. The logic is identical regardless of who states it. It depends on the biological status of the embryo, the philosophical concept of deprivation harm, and the ethical principle of the Open Future. None of these are gendered. The framework demands more robust material and social support for women than most pro-choice platforms bother to propose.
This argument is not irrational or emotional. It is the product of chosen ethical foundations applied through binding internal logic. The foundations are the genuine choice points. Once you accept them, the conclusions follow with the same necessity that mathematical conclusions follow from axioms. You can reject the foundations. But if you accept them (suffering-minimization, deprivation harm, the developmental trajectory, the Open Future Principle), you cannot rationally reject the anti-abortion conclusion. It is entailed. The word “entailed” matters here. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. It is a matter of logical structure.
So what is the progressive’s actual objection?
I suspect, for many, the real objection is tribal. The pro-life position is coded as belonging to the political right, to evangelicals, to the kind of people progressives define themselves against. Gallup and Pew Research Center data consistently show that attitudes toward abortion do not map neatly onto religious and secular categories, or onto left and right categories, in the way the cultural narrative assumes. Significant numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans describe themselves as pro-life or express serious moral discomfort with abortion, particularly after the first trimester. The tribal narrative is a simplification that obscures the genuine moral complexity most people feel when they think about this issue honestly, away from the pressure of their peer group.
There is a deeper terror still, and it comes from the logical structure of the competing positions.
The philosopher Peter Singer is the world’s most prominent utilitarian ethicist. He is a hero of the progressive intellectual tradition, a champion of animal rights, a rigorous and fearless thinker who follows his premises wherever they lead. Singer holds that moral status depends on sentience and psychological capacities: self-awareness, the ability to have preferences about the future, the capacity for suffering. On this account, an early embryo has no moral status because it has none of these properties. No sentience. No interests. No preferences. Therefore, no moral weight.
But Singer has the honesty to follow this logic to its terminus. If moral status depends on psychological capacities, and if newborn infants lack the self-awareness, rationality, and future-directed preferences that (on Singer’s account) generate a right to life, then infanticide is in principle permissible in some circumstances. Singer has said this explicitly. He has been excoriated for it, protested against, denounced, and vilified. But he has never retracted it. Because he cannot. It follows from his premises with the same logical necessity I have been describing. If consciousness is the sole criterion for moral status, and if newborns lack the relevant consciousness, then the conclusion is unavoidable.
Most progressives recoil from Singer’s conclusion about infanticide. They insist that killing a newborn is obviously, viscerally, undeniably wrong. And they are right. It is wrong. But the question they must answer is: why is it wrong on their account? If moral status depends on current psychological capacities, the newborn has almost none. It is not self-aware. It has no concept of its own future. It has no preferences that would be frustrated by death. It is, on the consciousness-only metric, barely distinguishable from the late-term fetus that most progressives believe may be aborted.
The framework of Agnostic Deism has an answer. Killing the newborn is wrong because it constitutes deprivation harm. The newborn has a future of experiences, relationships, consciousness, and agency that will be annihilated by its death. The wrongness of killing lies not in the victim’s current mental states but in what is taken from them. And this answer applies with equal force at every stage of development, from the zinc spark forward.
The consciousness-only account cannot explain why infanticide is wrong without either smuggling in deprivation harm (thereby conceding the framework’s central argument) or drawing an arbitrary line between late-term fetuses (may be killed) and newborns (may not be killed) that has no principled basis. The birth canal is not a moral threshold. The moment of first breath is not a philosophical transformation. The same individual exists on both sides of delivery, with the same future, the same developmental trajectory, the same moral claim. If you accept that killing the newborn is wrong because of what you would be taking from it, you have accepted deprivation harm. And deprivation harm does not wait for birth to begin operating.
This is the trap. The progressive who rejects the framework’s position must either follow Singer into accepting infanticide (which almost no one is willing to do), draw an arbitrary developmental line that cannot be principled (which is intellectually dishonest), or accept deprivation harm as a genuine form of injury (which leads directly to the framework’s anti-abortion conclusion). There is no fourth option that is both logically consistent and morally palatable.
The IVF Test
There is one more consistency test that terrifies both sides, and it concerns a practice that rarely enters the abortion debate: in vitro fertilization.
Standard IVF practice routinely creates more embryos than are implanted. Surplus embryos are frozen, donated, used in research, or discarded. If the zinc spark marks the constitution of a human individual, then IVF clinics are routinely creating human individuals and then destroying them.
For the religious conservative who opposes abortion but supports IVF without qualification: you are inconsistent. The same individual you claim to protect in the womb is routinely created and discarded in the fertility clinic. If the embryo has moral status, it has moral status regardless of where it was conceived.
For the secular progressive who supports IVF and believes the discarded embryos are morally weightless: you must explain what changes between the fertility clinic and the womb that transforms the destruction of the same kind of entity from a neutral act into a contested one. If an embryo in a petri dish has no moral status, on what basis does it acquire moral status when it implants in a uterus? Location is not a moral property.
The framework’s position is consistent: it does not oppose IVF itself, but it opposes practices within IVF that involve the deliberate creation and destruction of embryos. Methods that modify without destroying, that create only embryos intended for implantation, that donate surplus embryos to other families rather than discarding them, are compatible with the framework. The routine creation of surplus embryos with the foreknowledge that most will be discarded is not.
This is not a comfortable position. It constrains IVF in ways that reduce efficiency and increase cost. The framework acknowledges this cost honestly and insists that solidarity demands we bear it collectively: invest in embryo-protective methods, fund research into techniques that achieve high success rates without surplus creation, and do not force infertile couples to bear the entire cost of a constraint the community has imposed.
But the principle holds. If the embryo is a human individual, it is a human individual everywhere. The fertility clinic is not a moral-status-free zone.
Species-Partiality: The Honest Acknowledgment
Before proceeding to the conclusion, I owe the reader a piece of honesty that most pro-life advocates, secular or religious, prefer to suppress. The framework demands transparency about its own tensions, and this is the most significant one.
The framework’s protection of human embryos creates a human-specific moral category. I am extending to a single-celled human organism a level of moral protection that I do not extend to a chimpanzee embryo, despite the fact that the chimpanzee embryo is also a genetically unique individual on a developmental trajectory toward consciousness. I am not extending it to a gorilla embryo, a dolphin embryo, or an elephant embryo, all of which will develop into creatures with rich emotional lives, complex social bonds, and cognitive capacities that in some respects rival those of human children.
I will not pretend this is anything other than what it is: pragmatic species-partiality. I am partial to my own species. And I must either justify that partiality honestly or abandon it.
Here is the justification, stated without evasion.
First, I operate within a human moral and legal community. Ethics are constructed by and for moral agents. I am a human moral agent constructing human ethics. The prohibition against murder, the most fundamental moral and legal norm in every human society that has ever existed, is a human-specific norm. It prohibits the deliberate killing of human beings. It does not prohibit the deliberate killing of chimpanzees. One may argue that it should, and the framework’s commitment to suffering-minimization takes animal welfare seriously. But the existing moral and legal architecture within which I operate already draws a species line around the prohibition of killing. My extension of that prohibition to human embryos is continuous with that existing norm, not a departure from it.
Second, there is a practical scope problem that honesty requires me to name. If I extend embryo-level protection to every fertilized egg of every species, I have created a moral framework that is not merely demanding but literally impossible to implement. Every frog pond in spring contains thousands of fertilized eggs. Every coral spawning event produces millions. The framework would collapse under the weight of obligations no moral agent could fulfill. This is not a principled argument for the moral irrelevance of non-human embryos. It is an honest acknowledgment that a framework must be livable to be meaningful, and that extending zinc-spark-level protection across the entire animal kingdom is not livable.
Third, and most importantly, the framework is transparent about what species-partiality is and what it is not.
It is not a claim of cosmic significance. The framework’s Contingency Principle stands unreduced. Humans are not the point of existence. We are not the goal of evolution. We are not the intended audience of the Architect. Had we never existed, another species would eventually have evolved reflective cognition and built its own moral frameworks and made its own egoistic errors. We are lottery winners who mistake our ticket for destiny. Nothing about our species-partial moral protection implies that we matter more to the universe than any other configuration of organized matter.
It is not a claim that non-human animals do not matter. The framework infers consciousness in other animals through biological continuity, scales that inference with neural similarity, and extends moral consideration accordingly. The suffering of a chimpanzee matters. The suffering of a dog matters. The suffering of any creature with the neural architecture to experience pain matters. Species-partiality in the protection of embryos does not reduce obligations toward other species. It adds a layer of protection for human organisms. Addition, not subtraction.
It is a chosen commitment, honestly labeled. Like every other ethical foundation in the framework, species-partiality is constructed, not discovered. It is continuous with how every human moral and legal system has ever operated. It is defensible on practical and communitarian grounds. And it is held without pretending it has cosmic validation.
The progressive reader may object that this is inconsistent with the framework’s anti-anthropocentrism. The objection has force, and I want to engage it directly rather than deflect it.
The framework is anti-anthropocentric about cosmic significance. We are not special in the eyes of the universe. We are not the point. We are contingent, temporary, replaceable. But the framework is species-partial about moral protection, because moral protection is constructed within communities, and we are members of a human community. These are different claims operating in different domains. Cosmic significance is a metaphysical claim about our place in the universe. Moral protection is a practical commitment about how we treat each other within our species. Rejecting the first does not require rejecting the second, any more than recognizing that your family is not cosmically significant requires you to stop feeding your children.
I state this tension openly because hiding it would violate the framework’s commitment to epistemic honesty. Species-partiality is real. It is defensible. It is honestly acknowledged. And it does not undermine the argument that human embryos warrant protection within human moral communities, any more than the existence of national borders undermines the argument that citizens within those borders have obligations to each other.
The Deeper Discomfort
Beneath the specific terrors I have outlined for each side lies a shared discomfort that neither side wants to confront.
For the religious conservative, the discomfort is that your strongest moral conclusion does not need your strongest metaphysical commitments. The pro-life position survives the death of God. If it survives, then what role is God actually playing in your moral reasoning? Confidence-granting? Community-signaling? Emotional ballast? These are not trivial functions. But they are not foundations. And mistaking them for foundations has allowed the pro-choice movement to dismiss the entire pro-life project as theocracy for half a century.
For the secular progressive, the discomfort is that your commitment to following evidence and argument wherever they lead has a boundary, and you have just hit it. The evidence (a genetically unique human organism constituted at fertilization, documented by laboratory science and standard embryology) and the argument (deprivation harm, the developmental trajectory, the Open Future Principle, the consistency test against Singer’s infanticide conclusion) lead to a place you do not want to go. The question is whether your commitment to intellectual honesty is real or merely decorative. If it is real, you must engage this argument on its merits. If it is decorative, you must admit that your ethical positions are, at bottom, tribal preferences rationalized after the fact, which is exactly what you accuse the religious right of doing.
And for both sides, there is this: once you accept the foundations (that suffering-minimization matters, that deprivation harm is genuine, that a human organism exists from fertilization, that the developmental trajectory makes the embryo the same individual as the adult it will become, that the Open Future Principle opposes the maximal elimination of future options for a non-consenting being), the anti-abortion conclusion is not an additional free choice. It is rationally binding. You can reject the foundations. Someone who does so is not cosmically wrong. They simply value differently. But you cannot accept the foundations and reject the conclusion. That is not a difference of values. That is a failure of logic.
The framework calls its ethical foundations “chosen” because they are. No cosmic authority mandates them. But “chosen” does not mean “arbitrary,” and it certainly does not mean “optional once accepted.” A chosen axiom in mathematics still entails its theorems. A chosen foundation in ethics still entails its conclusions. The choice is free. What follows from the choice is not.
VI. Conclusion: The Cost of Honesty
I have argued that a new human individual exists from the zinc spark. I have argued that destroying this individual constitutes deprivation harm. I have argued that the developmental trajectory makes the embryo the same individual as the person it will become. I have argued that the Open Future Principle, applied consistently, opposes the total elimination of a non-consenting individual’s future. I have argued that bodily autonomy is real but subordinate to the right to continued existence. I have acknowledged the full severity spectrum of pregnancy. I have addressed the hardest cases. And I have acknowledged species-partiality without disguise.
Now I must address what this position costs, because a moral position that does not acknowledge its costs is not a moral position. It is propaganda.
What the Framework Demands
If we are going to insist that women carry pregnancies they did not want, we must be willing to bear the cost of that insistence collectively. The framework’s commitment to solidarity is not a decorative addendum to its anti-abortion position. It is a structural requirement without which the position collapses into cruelty.
The Turnaway Study documents what happens when women are denied abortions in a society that offers inadequate support: economic hardship, continued contact with abusive partners, adverse health outcomes, and in the most devastating cases, death from pregnancy-related causes. These outcomes are not abstractions. They are the empirical reality of what it means to require a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term without robust systems of support.
I cite this data not because it undermines the pro-life position, but because it defines the solidarity obligation that the pro-life position creates. If you believe, as I do, that the embryo’s right to continued existence outweighs the woman’s claim to terminate the pregnancy, then you have created an obligation. You have imposed a burden. And the question becomes: who bears it?
If the answer is “the woman alone,” then you have not constructed a moral position. You have constructed a punishment. You have told a woman that she must bear the physical, economic, psychological, and social costs of continuing a pregnancy, and then you have walked away. This is not pro-life. This is pro-birth. And it is morally bankrupt.
The framework demands more. Much more.
Consider what genuine solidarity looks like in practice. It is not hypothetical. Scandinavian countries provide concrete models. Universal healthcare that covers all pregnancy-related costs, including complications. Paid parental leave of sufficient duration and generosity that no woman is forced to choose between economic survival and carrying a pregnancy. Subsidized childcare that allows mothers to maintain employment and education. Housing support that prevents the homelessness and instability documented in the Turnaway Study. Mental health services available without stigma or financial barrier. Robust, well-funded adoption systems that provide genuine alternatives for women who do not wish to raise children, with support for birth mothers that does not end at the moment of relinquishment.
These are not utopian fantasies. They are existing policies in functioning democracies. They cost money. They require political will. And they are, under this framework, non-negotiable.
A society that prohibits abortion while refusing to fund universal healthcare has failed the solidarity test. A society that prohibits abortion while opposing paid parental leave has failed the solidarity test. A society that prohibits abortion while cutting social services for low-income mothers has failed the solidarity test. A society that prohibits abortion while stigmatizing single motherhood has failed the solidarity test. A society that prohibits abortion while maintaining a foster care system that warehouses children in institutional neglect has failed the solidarity test.
I am explicit about this because the mainstream pro-life movement, particularly in the United States, has been catastrophically dishonest on this point. It has fought aggressively for legal restrictions on abortion while fighting equally aggressively against the social programs that would make those restrictions livable. It has insisted that women carry pregnancies to term while opposing the economic support systems that would allow them to do so without falling into poverty. It has claimed to value human life from conception while demonstrating, through its policy priorities, that its concern for that life diminishes sharply at the moment of birth.
This is not pro-life. This is forced birth subsidized by the suffering of women and children. And the framework condemns it as vehemently as it condemns elective abortion.
The framework’s position is not “ban abortion.” The framework’s position is “protect human life from the zinc spark AND build the solidarity infrastructure that makes that protection livable.” The conjunction is not optional. It is structural. You do not get to impose the burden without bearing the cost. A framework that demands both is coherent. A movement that demands one while opposing the other is not.
The Hardest Admission
I want to end with a confession that frameworks are not supposed to make.
This position is hard. It is hard not because the logic is uncertain, but because the logic leads to places where human suffering is real and irreducible. There are cases, particularly pregnancies resulting from sexual assault and pregnancies threatening severe permanent harm, where the framework’s position imposes a burden that I cannot call anything other than agonizing. I hold the position because I believe the deprivation harm of destroying the embryo is the greater harm, because I believe the developmental trajectory makes the embryo the same individual who will one day have a life worth protecting, because I believe the Open Future Principle forbids the total annihilation of a non-consenting individual’s future. But I hold it with the full weight of what it asks.
I do not hold it triumphantly. I hold it the way you hold something that is both true and terrible.
Any moral framework that never produces discomfort in its adherents is not a moral framework. It is a mirror, reflecting back only what its holder already wanted to believe. The test of a framework’s seriousness is whether it can survive its own most difficult applications. Whether it can look at the hardest case and say: this is what I believe, and here is the cost, and I will not pretend the cost is zero.
This framework survives that test. Barely, painfully, honestly. But it survives.
The Final Turn
In this bleak and beautiful landscape, where the Architect has initialized the system and walked away, where the cosmos is indifferent to our suffering and our flourishing alike, where we are temporary patterns of organized energy borrowing briefly from an infinite current, morality is not given to us. It is built by us. We are the sole architects of our values, constructing without blueprints from above.
And the values we have constructed, the foundations we have chosen, lead here: to the recognition that a new human life begins at the zinc spark, that destroying it is a harm of the highest magnitude, that the vulnerable deserve protection not because the cosmos demands it but because we do, and that the cost of that protection must be borne collectively through a solidarity so robust that no woman is left to carry the burden alone.
The Architect does not care. That is exactly why we must.
Agnostic Deism 
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