You don’t actually want every embryo or fetus to have a chance at life.

Just look at the requirements we set for egg donors.

The standards for which bundles of cells will become “acceptable” babies are extremely biased. Now, of course parents who conceive in a traditional way aren’t governed by these standards, but it still sends a strong message about which lives we value.

If someone with ovaries wants to donate their eggs, there’s a long list of attributes that will disqualify them. These standards are set by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the FDA and the CDC:

• being a weight that is too low or too high (as defined by the medically irrelevant BMI)
• having had someone in their immediate family die by suicide
• experiencing irregular (non-monthly) periods
• being over 30 years old (in some cases)
• relying on Medicaid, food stamps, or other financial assistance
• having recent smoking or drug history (including cannabis use)
• being “unhealthy” (which is not easy to define without discrimination and stigma)

Additionally, the egg donor requirements specify that donors must be “well-educated,” have a supportive partner, family, or friend, must be able to access to family medical history up until their grandparents, (which is sometimes a privilege in itself) and must possess the maturity and preparedness needed to engage in the process of helping people conceive.

And that’s not for pregnancy — that’s just for donating an unfertilized egg.

It starts to sound a bit like eugenics. Many people who already have biological children would certainly not pass an egg donor screening.

Gatekeeping who gets to give their eggs away with ableist, classist egg donor requirements is a way of defining which children “should” be born. If we were to require almost all embryos ever created to be carried to term, that would force pregnancy on many people who are technically deemed ‘unfit’ to reproduce.

Even if you personally believe every pregnant person who is over/underweight, mentally ill, homeless, undereducated, all alone, facing poverty or struggling with a substance abuse disorder should carry a fetus to term, the reality is that our systems will often fail those people and the children they bring into the world. And implicit biases, judgement, ignorance, and discrimination will keep pro-life advocates from offering the help needed in order to allow those children to survive.

So, what about adoption then?

Never mind that the adoption industry is riddled with questionable ethics, human trafficking, coercion, racism, homophobia, classism, etc.…the bottom line is that adoption is not an alternative to abortion.

Despite what the media may tell us, adoptions aren’t the beautiful by-products of unwanted teen pregnancies or resentful people who are ‘unfit’ to parent. Even people who would parent if they could are often coerced into putting their children up for adoption.

The people who seek abortions are not would-be parents, they are just people whose reproductive systems functioned.

Wanting a baby to be born and then put up for adoption is to wish trauma upon a child. It doesn’t matter how kind or wonderful their adoptive parents turn out to be. Every adopted child, no matter how old, will experience trauma. Maternal separation, which is naturally part of every adoption, is trauma in itself.

Adoptive parents can never erase or rewrite an adopted child’s history, meaning all the genetic illnesses, generational trauma, and perhaps ‘undesirable’ aspects of personality from their birth family will remain. The adopted child will always be missing something, whether they experience grief for it or not.

Placing a child up for adoption is not “better” than never having the child in the first place. Adoptive parents are not inherently better than birth parents.

Abortion prevention happens long before an embryo ever develops.

You may think you want every fetus to be born, but in a country that does not value every parent and child, you can hardly call that stance pro-life.