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"The argument of potentiality is the strongest argument voiced against my position," admits Sass:

... but generally in life — in our personal life as well as in our societal life — we do not honor all potentialities. ... The pro-life people who are really big on the concept of persons having to be legally protected from the moment of conception on — they've never made a strong claim about the extremely high natural abortion rate of fertilized eggs. Pro-lifers have never asked for billions of dollars allocated to address this very great dilemma they are facing. ¹⁶

"If you ask me what percentage of fertilized eggs go through full prenatal development," says embryologist Grobstein, "I'd say there is very high wastage in the human species. Under the most favorable medical circumstances, no more than one out of three make it through the entire period and are born alive. The assumption is that the other two-thirds have their own internal reason for failing to develop; genetic abnormalities are probably responsible for a considerable part of the wastage." ¹³ "Spontaneous terminations in early pregnancy are often as high as 65 percent," agrees Austin, "most occurring unnoticed." ²

And since most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried, "development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and an egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg — despite the fact that it's only potentially a baby — why isn't it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?" ¹⁹ Of course we've already seen where that line of reasoning will lead.

Under normal circumstances, of course, unfertilized eggs and sperm cells do not spontaneously replicate themselves and begin to form a new human being. But statistically speaking, a fertilized egg is not particularly likely to get very far, either. Gardner suggests that "it may help to remember that potential here is very tenuous and dependent upon the influence of many extrinsic factors." ¹¹

Even supposing we were somehow able to figure out a way of saving every human zygote, we would then have to deal with a worldwide birth rate more than double what it is now. Since the population is now slightly over five billion, and doubling approximately every twenty years, the rate to double world population would be cut in half, to ten years. That comes to ten billion people in ten years, and twenty billion in twenty years. By which point, of course, the original "rescued" zygotes will all have reached reproductive age, halving the doubling rate to five years ... (Even a female rabbit, with her vaunted reproductive ability, will reabsorb the embryos back into her body if there's not enough food available to feed a litter of kittens.)

If you think perhaps that people wouldn't really go to such extremes, consider the Tennessee court which, in September of 1989, ruled that "seven frozen embryos at the center of a bitter divorce suit are children, that they are 'human beings existing as embryos.'" ¹¹ Ehrenreich comments ironically: "If you think about it deeply, you'll realize, as I did, that the judge in Tennessee ... really blew it. Those poor embryos, after all, suffered the trauma of prenatal divorce, and all the judge could say was that they were 'unique,' 'differentiated,' and had a right to be born. But what about their other rights? Like the right to an attorney or a womb of their choice?" ⁸

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