An op-ed in the New York Times last week asked the question, “Why Do We Talk About Miscarriage Differently From Abortion?” aimed at legitimizing elective abortion by comparing it to miscarriage.

The immediate answer to this question is obvious to those of us considering it sincerely rather than using it merely as a means of justifying elective abortion. A miscarriage takes place when an unborn child dies spontaneously, whereas abortion directly and intentionally kills an unborn child.

The reason for the attempted conflation is likewise obvious. The authors label both miscarriage and abortion different forms of “pregnancy loss” in an effort to imply that, for various reasons, some pregnancies just don’t happen to work out, thus obfuscating the essential difference between a child’s spontaneous death and a child’s death brought about on purpose by someone’s active choice to kill him. (A related issue is abortion supporters’ recent promotion of the lie that D&C procedures — used both in elective abortions and to treat women after they’ve suffered a miscarriage — will no longer be allowed in cases of miscarriage once pro-life laws are in place. In fact, no pro-life law in the country prevents doctors from using a D&C procedure to remove a child who has died due to miscarriage; what’s disallowed is using a D&C to intentionally kill a living unborn child.)

Though the authors evidently posed this question in an effort to justify elective abortion, it’s actually a fair question considered from another angle. Why does our culture speak about miscarriage and abortion differently when it comes to the matter of recognizing what — or, rather, who — is lost in both instances? When parents suffer a miscarriage, they are likely to receive a great deal of sympathy; most people recognize with sadness the loss of the unborn child who parents never got to meet. But when a woman has an abortion, we are meant to pretend that she’s doing nothing more than eliminating a “clump of cells” or a “parasite,” or making a routine health-care decision that has nothing to do with any loss of human life. In this way, our society’s acceptance of elective abortion has actually undermined our ability to recognize and mourn the loss of miscarriage, because abortion promotes the notion that a pregnant woman isn’t a mother at all necessarily and that the human life growing inside her might not be that valuable after all.