You're a writer, right? I expect you to understand terms and that there is more than one meaning for certian words. "Miraculous: Highly improbable and extraordinary and bringing very welcome consequences."
Anyone who has studied biology, and the intricate things that happen to bring about the creation of life - through evolution (which is how I believe we all got here) - would agree that that definition fits the bill.
If it's so highly improbable, why are there currently about 7 billion people in the world?
I wrote earlier about how the odds are stacked against pregnancy and live birth for humans, but that only goes to show just how common and un-miraculous human reproduction is. We're at it so frequently that, despite upwards of 50% of all fertilizations failing, we're still wildly overpopulating the planet.
Pregnancy is not miraculous. It's ordinary. It is really not much different from anything else our bodies evolved to do, nor does it set us apart from any other sexually reproducing species.
It's also not easy and not all that safe, either. It does a ton of damage to a woman's body, and the more pregnancies a woman goes through, the more permanent, long-term damage she suffers. Not to mention that every pregnancy is a crap shoot with death for the woman anyway.
You're right that abortion is something women need to and do consider carefully with their doctors. Pregnancy even more so. It's way more dangerous.
Whether the argument is that pregnancy means one is having a precious little baby, or that pregnancy itself is a rare and precious miracle, both are equally empty. On an individual level, no pregnancy is a sure thing. Women who are sexually active are very likely to go through more unsuccessful fertilizations, even with standard birth control, than they will even know ever occurred. But on a species-wide level, babies are as plentiful as dirt.
Ridiculously low probability events happen all the time. In probability theory what matters isn't just the probability of something happening but the expectation value which in this case is the probability of the event times the number of times you try it.
Suppose there was something that had a 1 in a million chance of happening to a given person each day. A person who lives to be 70 lives around 25,000 days. So the expectation value that this event would happen to a given person in their lifetime is 25,000/1,000,000 or about 2.5%, so pretty unlikely.
But with 7,000,000,000 people in the world the expectation value for the number of people this would happen to each day is 7,000,000,000/1,000,000 or 7000 which means that on an average day around 7000 people would have this event happen to them. The unlikely for the individual becomes an everyday event for everybody.
The low probability of the particular paths evolution took to get to our current circumstances aren't terribly relevant. Evolution happens, genetic diversity grows, natural selection culls and something happens to exist at the present time. It happens to be us and we happen to be living our lives.
That's good for us and creates circumstances in which our own low probability events can occur with regularity.
Consider just the genetic possibilities of a single child of two parents. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, each child inherits one of each pair from each parent( leaving aside events like nondisjunction). So each chromosome pair is like two coin flips.
The probability then that a child will receive a particular set of chromosome pairings
is 1 / 2[SUP]46[/SUP] which is approximately 1/70,000,000,000,000. That looks low enough probability to be miraculous. Except that if human fertilization happens, one of these events does happen, some combination occurs.
Be impressed that this whole process can happen if you like, but it took a long time to evolve and from an engineering perspective it stinks. No sane designer would create a system with the risks, flaws, and the damage caused by human pregnancy as a means for bringing about life.
Evolution does not care, biology does not care. And the reality is that human pregnancy is an appalling system for bringing about new life.
But it's what we have. And when we choose to have children it's the system we have to use.
As for the impressiveness of women being able to do it. Women's bodies get pregnant. Their bodies nurture and grow zygotes to fetuses to children. Women can take care of their bodies and take care while pregnant to influence the health of the growing creature.
But it is not their work as human beings.
I have two children. My wife went through a lot to carry and bear them. I have no idea if I could have gone through what she did, but they are the work of biology and she suffered for the haphazardness of that work.
Her paintings and her other art, those are the work of her mind and her hands. She applied thought and skill to those creations. They are her works as a human being.
I am not saying that they are more important or more amazing than our children. They aren't, but as a human being her ability to create art is much more impressive than her ability to bear young which any female mammal can do.
