Why the “Investigating Miscarriage” Objection is Nonsense

In the Dobbs era, one of the abortion industry’s favorite fearmongering tactics is to claim that every miscarriage will become the subject of a police investigation. “After all,” they reason, “it could have been an abortion! So vote for our abortion-on-demand constitutional amendment, or heartless detectives will swarm every miscarrying woman’s house.”

It is more than a little cynical for pro-abortion advocates to situate themselves on the side of parents who are grieving miscarried children, given that they’ve spent the past several decades dehumanizing those same children as clumps of cells, parasites, etc. Setting that aside, however, the people making this argument just don’t understand how death investigations work.

In the United States, only one in five deaths warrants an investigation by a medical examiner. The vast majority of deaths are natural and unsuspicious. There is no good reason to require an autopsy when a person has clearly died of a heart attack, cancer, or the many frailties of old age. A requirement to investigate all human deaths would overwhelm our law enforcement infrastructure.

So too with miscarriage. Estimates are hard to come by, but according to the Mayo Clinic, at least ten to twenty percent of babies die before the 20th week. In actuarial terms, that’s akin to being in your late 80s or early 90s. Most miscarriages are caused by natural, unavoidable genetic mutations. So the fact that an unborn baby has died is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to open a criminal investigation. There would need to be something more to take that step: for example, a mother’s reasonable suspicion that her partner has poisoned her with an abortion drug, or a corpse recovered from an abortion center with an injury to the base of the skull that is the hallmark of an illegal partial-birth abortion.

Let’s take this a step further and suppose that prenatal death investigations were more common. Would it follow that abortion should be legalized in all circumstances?

An analogy is easy to find: just shift a few months later. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the unexplained death of an infant in the first year after birth, is a horrific tragedy. I cannot begin to imagine how those parents must feel. For the police to get involved while they are in the depths of grief must be a terrible, emotional invasion.

But I have yet to hear a single person come forward to argue that because investigating infant deaths causes undue stress for the parents of babies with SIDS, we ought to legalize infanticide!

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