Fetal Life Has Value, Yes — But Not Equal to the Woman Carrying It

Sorry, but it’s not even a close call

Tim Wise
6 min readMay 9, 2022

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Image: Phil Pasquini, Shutterstock, standard license, purchased by author

Perhaps my title here strikes you as harsh and the subtitle as mere hyperbole.

But they are neither.

And if you think about it logically, you’ll know that I’m right. A brief story will illustrate the point.

My wife and I have two daughters, both of whom are adults now.

Neither pregnancy was easy (and anyone who says a pregnancy was easy is probably a man), but the first one was especially stressful.

Throughout the first two trimesters, my wife had breakthrough bleeding.

She also, at one point, had a kidney stone.

Then her labor lasted around 14 hours, our daughter resisting birth for as long as possible before a C-section became the best available option.

During most of that time, my wife experienced a piercing headache from the epidural, making whatever numbing effect it was intended to have seem pretty worthless by comparison.

Finally, though, our daughter was born.

When I saw her for the first time, I was overcome with the most profound full-body joy I had ever, to that point, experienced.

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)