The New Yorker’s Dangerous Ambiguity About When Life Begins

Last week, The New Yorker published Apoorva Tadepalli’s essay “The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy.” Pregnancy tests, she writes, draw a “misleading, somewhat arbitrary, binary” between pregnant and not pregnant. “You can be kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant,” she says, “and still test positive.” The essay treats implantation, the human embryo’s attachment to the uterus, after which a home test can detect hCG, as the snapshot from which we merely invent the beginning of pregnancy.

Commentators and readers recoiled from a claim that still sounds like a joke: that a woman can be “a little bit pregnant.” The outrage is reasonable. The idea is not new.