Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, “will be a thing of the past,” according to Carmel Harrington, a sleep researcher at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Australia. A press release describes her new study, out this month, as a “game-changing” effort and a “world-first breakthrough” that could prevent future deaths from the tragic illness. Celebrations quickly spread on social media: “THEY FOUND THE CAUSE OF SIDS. Excuse me while I cry for all the parents,” one viral tweet declared. “Closest thing to a miracle in a long time,” said another. The press soon picked up the story. On Friday, a segment on Good Morning America touted Harrington’s “very, very important study” of SIDS, while a story in the New York Post promised that her data would “bring closure to countless parents who have endured the nightmare of losing a child.”

Rarely is a medical research finding a "breakthrough." But this one - discovering a biomarker in blood that indicates babies' risk for SIDS - qualifies. https://t.co/EKZBlFvxTx

— Nancy Lapid (@NancyLapid) May 13, 2022

Sadly, these claims are quite absurd. The original research paper, published on May 6, described a small-scale but interesting project: Harrington and her colleagues measured activity levels of a protein called butyrylcholinesterase in dried blood collected from about 600 babies shortly after birth, including 26 who died from SIDS and 30 who went on to die from a different condition during their first two years of life. On average, those who died from SIDS had somewhat less butyrylcholinesterase activity in their blood than healthy newborns did. According to the study’s authors, this suggests that, with further work, the protein “could potentially be used as a biomarker to identify and prevent future SIDS deaths.” If that qualifies as a scientific “miracle,” the bar is inches from the ground.

Even after decades of research, SIDS remains “unexpected, dramatic, and devastating,” as three prominent doctors put it in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial published over the weekend. If researchers had really pinpointed a biological cause for these deaths—as some press reports have claimed—it would salve parents’ anxiety and might lead to future treatments. But one need only read the new paper in its entirety to see they haven’t reached this goal.

At best, the study represents an incremental advance. This is not meant to be an insult; science works in increments. But the numbers don’t suggest that a screening test for SIDS is really in the works, let alone one that will quickly end the scourge of infant deaths. The authors report that protein-activity levels were measured in a range of 1.7 to 23.3 units per milligram for healthy newborns, and from 2.9 to 10.8 for those who died of SIDS. Though the group averages were different overall (7.7 versus 5.6), individual values still overlapped a great deal. In other words, a low protein-activity level at birth could be found in a baby who might end up dying from SIDS, as well as one who would go on to live a healthy life.

I reached out to Harrington and her co-author Karen Waters, a professor of child and adolescent health at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, to ask about this issue, among others. Measuring the protein “will not work as a universal screening test, for precisely the reasons that you have highlighted,” Waters told me via email. Harrington said that their “finding represents the possibility for the future identification of infants at risk for SIDS” and that the study identifies “a measurable biochemical marker (not cause)” of the condition.

The confusing and controversial status of SIDS as a formal diagnosis adds to the uncertainty. SIDS is considered a “diagnosis of exclusion,” which means that it applies only when other causes have been carefully ruled out, and also that it is likely to comprise a number of different conditions. Some forensic pathologists have abandoned the diagnosis entirely on account of this ambiguity, James Gill, the chief medical examiner of Connecticut, told me. The authors of this month’s study did not have access to autopsy details for any of their subjects, and relied in most cases on a coroner’s assessment that SIDS had been the cause of death.

Even if it were possible to develop a screening test for SIDS, we might not want to use it. As a hospital pathologist myself—which is to say, as a doctor who specializes in diagnostic testing—I know that every form of screening makes mistakes. Sometimes, the benefits from these tools are worth the harm of an occasional error. Cervical-cancer screening, for example, greatly reduces deaths even though pap smears regularly lead to unhelpful results. But a wonky SIDS test would have catastrophic ill effects. A false positive result would terrify new parents. A false negative could lead them to abandon safe-sleeping practices—or far worse, make them seem at fault if SIDS did strike. Even true results might not be much help, because early-detection tests are only as good as the treatments we use in response to them. An aggressive campaign by pediatricians to promote safer sleep practices has caused the number of SIDS deaths to plummet since the 1990s. That campaign’s advice is already given out to everyone, and would not change on the basis of a blood test.

[Read: Get ready for a wave of missed infections]

Given that no further interventions would be available for infants flagged as high-risk by a screening test for SIDS, I asked the authors whether it makes sense to measure babies in this way. Waters responded by citing the “fundamental principle” that you should not screen newborns for disease unless you can “affect the outcome for the child.” Harrington has suggested in an interview that the researchers “don’t know the shape of what the intervention will be at this stage.”

If the study’s findings were ambiguous, and its implications dubious, why did the research get so much attention in the media? Many outlets seemed impressed by its connection to The Lancet, founded in 1823, and one the world’s most prestigious medical journals. The SIDS paper did not actually appear in The Lancet, but rather in a lesser-known periodical called eBioMedicine, which happens to be published under The Lancet’s umbrella brand (along with more than 20 other journals). Media coverage glossed over that distinction, though, or ignored it altogether. (Good Morning America managed to combine the two journals’ names into a fictional publication called “eLancet.”) These errors are understandable; prominent Lancet branding on eBioMedicine’s website and web address make it easy to get confused, and journal editors sometimes take advantage of academic prestige to court media attention.

The study’s tenuous connection to The Lancet was just one small part of its appeal. More significant was Harrington’s own story: She’d lost her son to SIDS 29 years ago, and then watched as a friend lost a baby to the same ailment a few years later. Harrington spent the intervening decades trying to discover a way to prevent this tragedy for others. “I made a solemn resolution there and then to leave no stone unturned in my quest to solve the mystery of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” she wrote in a request to crowdfund her research that was first posted in August 2018. Before the study was published this month, the campaign hadn’t received a contribution since 2019; now donations have been pouring in. As of yesterday, the campaign had raised about $50,000, mostly in small increments. “Since we have published our research, I have continued to be overwhelmed by the generosity of the community,” Harrington told me.

There’s no shame in soliciting funds for a good cause, and Harrington’s scrappy effort to keep her research going could be seen to merit praise. But Harrington herself has linked improbable claims about the science to overt requests for money: “To get us there, we need a lot of funding,” she told an interviewer, moments after saying that she “knows” that SIDS will be eradicated in “three to five years’ time.” (The hospital, which manages the endeavor’s charitable account, lent credence to this accelerated time frame in its press release.) An article from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted Harrington making a plea for further backing: “We know what we have to do. It’s just actually getting the funding for it.” But the story, like numerous others, did not provide any appraisal of the research from independent experts, which would have helped inform potential donors. Harrington, in her email to me, reiterated her claim that screening tests and interventions “could be 3-5 years away” with appropriate funding.

Many outlets also neglected to mention the study’s known limitations, as described in the paper. In that context, the authors acknowledge that they examined relatively few subjects, and that the tested blood was more than two years old. Their results could, therefore, turn out quite differently if the technique were put into widespread practice. “There is a lot more work to be done before this can be heralded as a solution,” Waters told me in her email. “As we said in the paper, it offers new directions for research in the field.” Harrington told me that “this finding is only one bit of the puzzle and there is so much more to learn.”

Harrington’s personal accomplishments cannot be dismissed, even if new tests and treatments seem further away than she claims. Most of us never generate a speck of new scientific knowledge. To come back from tragedy, toil for decades, and then produce a promising approach for closer study … well, that may not be miraculous, but it matters all the same.

When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known?

Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature.

In her final months, Carson, age 56, sickened from cancer treatments and in constant pain, still had a couple of remaining projects in mind. One of these was what she called the “wonder book.” By that point, Carson had already written four best-selling books, most famously Silent Spring, which documented the dangers of pesticides, including DDT, and is now widely credited with catalyzing the modern environmental movement. Yet Carson felt she had one more thing to say. The “wonder book”—published posthumously as The Sense of Wonder—was based on a lyrical essay about the importance of cultivating wonder in children. Perhaps because of her early experience, Carson placed great faith in this emotional response that, once found, could serve as “an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial.” Wonder led to a sense of the beautiful, which led to the pursuit of knowledge about the object that triggered the feeling in the first place. Children possessed this “clear-eyed vision” innately, but it had to be kept alive. Adults could awaken this quality in themselves too. With enough attention, she argued, anyone could “feel the rain on [their] face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations, from sea to air to earth.”

[Read: Swimming in the wild will change you]

Why did Carson feel so strongly the need to proselytize the wonders of wonder? Perhaps she sensed that, without it, an emotional connection with nature would be impossible; without it, the environmental movement had no hope. “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe,” she once said, “the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.” Today, we remember Carson for her crusading spirit and moral clarity; we cite Silent Spring as an example of a political book that spurred public outrage and prodded the government toward action. However, we far less frequently remember Carson for this other thing she spent her whole life doing: helping the public cultivate a sense of awe about nature. To see this facet of her sensibility most clearly, we need to return to her first three books—The Sea Trilogy.

It was April 1936. Dust storms thundered across the plains of Texas and Oklahoma, Nazi Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland a month earlier, and the Spanish Civil War would soon erupt. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Carson had just turned in a draft of her latest essay, titled “The World of Waters.” Her assignment at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries had been to write an introduction for a government brochure on fish. The year before, she had helped write a radio series informally dubbed “seven-minute fish tales,” a deceptively difficult job that had confounded other employees who either knew hard science or knew how to write but couldn’t merge the two. Rachel Carson, it turned out, could. As her supervisor, Elmer Higgins, read the draft, Carson sat quietly in his cramped office and nervously awaited his verdict. “I don’t think it will do,” she later recalled him saying when he looked up again, with a “twinkle in his eye.” These pages were not suitable for a government brochure on fish, he continued. No. This was literature. He passed the pages back to her and said, “Better try again. But send this one to The Atlantic.”

A version of that essay was published in this magazine a year later, titled “Undersea.” The editor who accepted Carson’s essay praised it for illuminating science “in such a way as to fire the imagination of the layman.” Lively, lyrical, and exactingly researched, the essay showcased what would soon be recognized as her signature style to a national audience. Here was her abiding emphasis on ecology and life cycles—and her commitment to making the reader feel something. She strove to educate, and to astonish. She deftly manipulated sound, rhythm, and atmosphere. Life on the ocean floor was described as in a moody noir, bathed in perpetual “bluish twilight” where “swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks.” The mid-ocean lulled with its “lilt of the long, slow swells,” while at the shore, the aptly accented “foam and surge of the tide” beat relentlessly upon its sturdy little inhabitants. Determined to avoid what she later called the “human bias” of popular science writing, Carson sought to portray the world of waters solely from a creaturely perspective, urging readers to “shed [their] human perceptions.”

Stacks of whitetip sharks at Roca Partida, Revillagigedo Islands, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)

By Carson’s own estimation, from the publication of “Undersea,” “everything else followed.” Her career as a poet of the sea unfurled. Carson went on to write three best-selling books about the sea: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), adapted from “Undersea”; The Sea Around Us (1951); and The Edge of the Sea (1955). These three books make up her Sea Trilogy, recently reissued by Library of America. Under the Sea-Wind was, Carson thought, her “first real act of literary creation.” It stands out in her body of work for its genre-breaking creative daring—reading more like an adventure novel than a book of science. Written from a close-third-person omniscient point of view, interweaving the perspectives of different (named) animal characters, it animates the life stories of Rynchops the skimmer, the sanderling couple Blackfoot and Silverbar, and Anguilla the eel. We see them struggling to survive, making a life, battling harsh weather, feeding, fleeing, and embarking upon their final journeys to mate and then die. Today we are familiar with the high-definition, IMAX version of what Carson conjured through language—the swoops of riveting pursuit and slow-motion escapes of the nature documentary. That she honed her storytelling chops while writing the public-service equivalent of bingeable TV is unsurprising. About 80 years later, Sea-Wind still reads like a scintillating adventure tale. Reviews from scientists and nonscientists alike praised it for its “lyrical beauty” and “faultless science,” “so skillfully written as to read like fiction.”

Carson wanted not just to entertain but also to impart an abiding sense of interconnectedness. In a section of Sea-Wind about the reawakening of life on spring seas (yes, seas have seasons too, I learned), Carson pulls us in to witness the great seasonal mackerel spawn, a “sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky at the Milky Way.” There, we are introduced to one mackerel, whom Carson cheekily names “Scomber.” (Scomber is a genus of fish, known as one of the “true mackerels.”) We see Scomber’s conception, his development from an egg floating passively on the sea, his formation of a backbone. Alone, he must evade the hungry mouths of anchovies who are themselves hunted by larger bluefish. Crossing the murky depths, he’s soon caught in the grasp of a “shimmering oval globe”—the comb jelly Pleurobrachia. But before he’s sucked into its pulsing mouth—nail-biting tension here!—the comb jelly and Scomber are both unexpectedly trapped in the mouth of a sea trout, who fortunately spits them both out after a few experimental bites.

The sequence is thrilling, while showing in immersive detail the workings of one food chain among innumerable others in the ocean. Though there is little sentimentality here about the death of any particular creature—everything, whether plankton or fish or mollusk, is always eating or being eaten—there is a sense of horror at human plunder. The sheer scale of what humans took for themselves is what made them monstrous. Carson opts to portray the ravage of resources indirectly, through mood and insinuation. We zoom in—something is amiss. Coming over the plateau, Scomber and his companions see some large haddock caught, “turning and twisting slowly on the hooks that they had swallowed.” Narrowly evading this gruesome scene, the mackerel then confront another threat looming from below: a trawl net, a “cavernous bag” scooping up thousands of pounds of life from the ocean floor.

[Read: Netflix’s Our Planet says what other nature series have omitted]

After spending all of Scomber’s life with him, how could the reader not feel for him, root for him? Narrating from the point of view of animal protagonists is a classic technique that builds empathy bridges, but in this case it’s done without the purely commercial manipulations of, say, Disney movies. Instead, a different political agenda is at work. The violence inherent in extractive capitalism and the particular logic that allows for some lives to be rendered utterly dispensable is intimated rather than stated. Can Scomber persist? At the end of the mackerel chapter, Carson floats away from the besieged mackerel’s mind and into the mind of a young fisherman on the deck of a boat, who’s been at sea for only two years:

He sometimes thought about fish as he looked at them on deck or being iced down in the hold. What had the eyes of the mackerel seen? Things he’d never see; places he’d never go. He seldom put it into words, but it seemed to him incongruous that a creature that had made a go of life in the sea, that had run the gauntlet of all the relentless enemies that he knew roved through that dimness his eyes could not penetrate, should at last come to death on the deck of a mackerel seiner, slimy with fish gurry and slippery with scales.

What had the eyes of the mackerel seen? How was it that this mackerel, who had “run the gauntlet” of the sea, should end life in this ignoble way? The young fisherman is confronting these ecological questions firsthand, asking the questions that Carson would like us to ask. And now that we’ve experienced what the mackerel saw and the fisherman wondered—what follows?

Fever of Mobula rays in Espiritu Santo, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)

If Carson’s sea books can serve a “utilitarian” purpose today, guesses Sandra Steingraber, an environmental activist and the editor of the new Sea Trilogy edition, they mark a “disappearing natural baseline” that describes “how the all-creating ocean functioned, how its creatures lived and interacted.” As I read, I noted, sadly, all the past-tense verbs in that sentence. Is it already too late to know the sea as Carson once did? In her introduction, Steingraber goes on to list the currently unfolding catastrophes that Carson never lived to see: “industrial overfishing, or news of the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, or massive floating garbage patches, or icebergs the size of states breaking off Antarctica, or micro-plastics replacing plankton in the water column, or plans for deep-sea mining.” To that list one might add ocean acidification, hypoxic dead zones, sonar testing, and coral die-off. Steingraber strains for some silver lining: “But her words fortify us for battles” and—she sums things up waveringly—“inspire curiosity and care about what we are in the process of losing.”

Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford. Even Carson, when she wrote the new preface for the revised 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, couldn’t help but inject an urgent warning about the practice of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. She called the previous assurance that the sea was so large as to be inviolate a “naive” belief. Today, as dire emergencies unfold, rationalizing time spent merely appreciating the natural world seems even more difficult. During the COP26 climate conference, protesters held up signs spelling doom and chanted: “If not now, when? When?” Greta Thunberg summarily declared the conference a failure, dismissing it as a meaningless PR event for “beautiful speeches.”

[Read: The dark side of the houseplant boom]

The climate crisis requires urgency on a global scale: Countries need to act, policies need to be set in motion. But slowness is needed as well. As the writer Naomi Klein points out in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, our “culture of the perpetual present” is not equipped to deal with the generations-long nature of the crisis. Market forces compel us to speed up precisely when we need to take a beat; to insulate ourselves from the physical environment precisely when we need to develop a more intimate connection. Modern life guarantees the atrophy of important “observational tools,” Klein writes; rather than stopping someplace to get to know its rhythms and cycles, we sever and uproot ourselves by living through screens and portals. All of this helps maintain the harmful illusion that if one environment gets destroyed, there will always be some other “away” to escape into.

Cormorant hunting sardines in Los Islotes, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)

In our day-to-day lives, pure enjoyment of nature can seem somehow suspect or unproductive, and the justification of such time spent is often couched in utilitarian or economic terms. Walks are for clearing heads; hikes are good exercise. Carson anticipated this line of thinking. In The Sense of Wonder, she asks rhetorically, “What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder … ? Is [it] just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood, or is there something deeper?” Though we tend to think of the American mid-century as a time of prosperity and advancement—perhaps they had time to wonder, but we don’t—it was, in fact, equally plagued with existential emergencies: the Cold War, McCarthyism, segregation and intractable racism. Stopping to wonder seemed frivolous back then too. Carson’s rebuttal, rousing and powerful, argues that wonder provides no less than joy, hope, and inner strength in the face of despair and annihilation:

Those who dwell … among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

Trusting in wonder’s resonant effects is something akin to faith. Fear can be motivating, but so can love. Taking a cue from Carson, I’ve been trying to take more walks with open eyes and an open heart, unpracticed as I may be. I treat myself like a child and go around with a pair of binoculars. After reading that the spring migration of birds is again in full swing, one night during a full-ish moon, I took my binoculars and sat out on the stoop. One of the fun activities that Carson recommends is to point the lens to the moon to see if you can catch the silhouettes of migrating birds as they pass across its shining face. I also listened hard to detect the “wisps of sound,” the “sharp chirps, sibilant lisps, and call notes” of eager flocks. Instead, I heard trucks clattering down I-95 and my neighbor wheeling his garbage out. After about half an hour, I brushed off my pants and headed back inside. It hadn’t been a spectacular experience by any means, but, maybe because I had strained so long to hear them and see them, I dreamed of the birds that night. In my mind’s eye, an endless, exuberant procession of birds passed high above the sleeping city, dipping in and out of the moonlit clouds, calling to one another from darkness to darkness. They were sure of their destination, unwavering.

By the time they are six months old, 75 percent of babies in the U.S. use formula. And for many babies under 1, formula is the primary or exclusive source of nutrition—which is why the baby-formula shortage is so frightening to many parents. The reasons for the shortage include the general supply-chain issues plaguing many sectors of the economy and the shutdown of a major formula plant earlier this year due to contamination. Manufacturers have increased production, but can’t ramp up fast enough to meet demand, because such production is heavily regulated.

Parents are panicking about what to do. For some families who rely on specialized formulas, this is a true crisis; they may literally not be able to access what they need. This problem needs urgent policy attention. For families on WIC, rules restricting eligible formulas have made life more difficult. A relaxation of these rules for a few months should help.

But for many parents, the issue isn’t that they cannot find formula at all, but that they cannot find the type of formula they typically use. They can find Enfamil, but not Similac. Powder, but not liquid.

[Read: We’ve never been good at feeding babies]

What, as an individual parent, should you do?

Let’s start with what you shouldn’t do. First: Don’t stockpile. More formula is being produced now than last year at this time.

Second: Don’t make your own formula. You can find “recipes” for formula online, with ingredients like cod liver oil and nutritional yeast. But they typically do not have the appropriate nutrient content. Although milk is the main ingredient in most formulas, milk alone is not a close substitute. Its carbohydrate content is too low, and it lacks many of the vitamins and minerals that are necessary for infants.

Third: Don’t stress too much about the brand. Beyond specialized formula, one formula is not too different from the next. Most are a mix of milk, lactose, oil (typically a combination of safflower, coconut, and soy), and whey protein. Soy formulas replace milk, lactose, and whey with corn and soy.

FDA formula regulations are extremely strict, for good reason. They require a set amount of calories from protein and fat, vitamins (A, B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, E, K, niacin, folic acid, pantothenic acid, biotin, choline, inositol), and minerals (calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, oron, zinc, manganese, copper, iodine, selenium, sodium, potassium, chloride). The result is that the nutrient compositions of formulas, regardless of manufacturer, are extremely similar.

Let’s compare Similac and Enfamil, the two leading brands. They have virtually identical compositions of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. And their vitamin and mineral contents are also very, very similar. Similac has slightly more biotin and Enfamil has slightly more B12, but the values are close, because they have to be.

[Derek Thompson: What’s behind America’s shocking baby-formula shortage?]

Where formulas do differ is in the source of the ingredients. Formulas can be organic. They can be made with milk from grass-fed cows, from happy cows, from more sustainable sources of soy. These distinctions matter to many parents. I also understand that some babies are quite picky, and that switching from one brand to another can cause distress and sleepless nights—for babies and their parents. But in this moment of constraint, parents can trust in the fact that basic nutritional content is extremely similar across all options.

Even if you prefer organic broccoli, in a pinch, conventional broccoli is a substitute. And a much better one than cauliflower, which in this analogy is the make-your-own option.

Of course, all of this misses the point a bit. The central concern is affordable access to formula for everyone. Policy makers have made some progress, even floating the idea of adding infant formula to the Strategic National Stockpile. The FDA is considering allowing more imported formula. And the Department of Health and Human Services has a new website where families can get help finding formula. These are small steps that will hopefully lead to bigger ones.

In the meantime: Don’t stockpile, don’t make your own, and rest assured that, for most babies, whichever formula you can find should be a suitable substitute until production is back at normal volume.

If Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization becomes law, we will enter a post–Roe v. Wade world in which the laws governing abortion will be legislatively decided in 50 states.

In the short term, at least, the abortion debate will become even more inflamed than it has been. Overturning Roe, after all, would be a profound change not just in the law but in many people’s lives, shattering the assumption of millions of Americans that they have a constitutional right to an abortion.

This doesn’t mean Roe was correct. For the reasons Alito lays out, I believe that Roe was a terribly misguided decision, and that a wiser course would have been for the issue of abortion to have been given a democratic outlet, allowing even the losers “the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight,” in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Instead, for nearly half a century, Roe has been the law of the land. But even those who would welcome its undoing should acknowledge that its reversal could convulse the nation.

[From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate]

If we are going to debate abortion in every state, given how fractured and angry America is today, we need caution and epistemic humility to guide our approach.

We can start by acknowledging the inescapable ambiguities in this staggeringly complicated moral question. No matter one’s position on abortion, each of us should recognize that those who hold views different from our own have some valid points, and that the positions we embrace raise complicated issues. That realization alone should lead us to engage in this debate with a little more tolerance and a bit less certitude.

Many of those on the pro-life side exhibit a gap between the rhetoric they employ and the conclusions they actually seem to draw. In the 1990s, I had an exchange, via fax, with a pro-life thinker. During our dialogue, I pressed him on what he believed, morally speaking, should be the legal penalty for a woman who has an abortion and a doctor who performs one.

My point was a simple one: If he believed, as he claimed, that an abortion even moments after conception is the killing of an innocent child—that the fetus, from the instant of conception, is a human being deserving of all the moral and political rights granted to your neighbor next door—then the act ought to be treated, if not as murder, at least as manslaughter. Surely, given what my interlocutor considered to be the gravity of the offense, fining the doctor and taking no action against the mother would be morally incongruent. He was understandably uncomfortable with this line of questioning, unwilling to go to the places his premises led. When it comes to abortion, few people are.

Humane pro-life advocates respond that while an abortion is the taking of a human life, the woman having the abortion has been misled by our degraded culture into denying the humanity of the child. She is a victim of misinformation; she can’t be held accountable for what she doesn’t know. I’m not unsympathetic to this argument, but I think it ultimately falls short. In other contexts, insisting that people who committed atrocities because they truly believed the people against whom they were committing atrocities were less than human should be let off the hook doesn’t carry the day. I’m struggling to understand why it would in this context.

There are other complicating matters. For example, about half of all fertilized eggs are aborted spontaneously—that is, result in miscarriage—usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Focus on the Family, an influential Christian ministry, is emphatic: “Human life begins at fertilization.” Does this mean that when a fertilized egg is spontaneously aborted, it is comparable—biologically, morally, ethically, or in any other way—to when a 2-year-old child dies? If not, why not? There’s also the matter of those who are pro-life and contend that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest. That is an understandable impulse but I don’t think it’s a logically sustainable one.   

The pro-choice side, for its part, seldom focuses on late-term abortions. Let’s grant that late-term abortions are very rare. But the question remains: Is there any point during gestation when pro-choice advocates would say “slow down” or “stop”—and if so, on what grounds? Or do they believe, in principle, that aborting a child up to the point of delivery is a defensible and justifiable act; that an abortion procedure is, ethically speaking, the same as removing an appendix? If not, are those who are pro-choice willing to say, as do most Americans, that the procedure gets more ethically problematic the further along in a pregnancy?

[Read: When a right becomes a privilege]

Plenty of people who consider themselves pro-choice have over the years put on their refrigerator door sonograms of the baby they are expecting. That tells us something. So does biology. The human embryo is a human organism, with the genetic makeup of a human being. “The argument, in which thoughtful people differ, is about the moral significance and hence the proper legal status of life in its early stages,” as the columnist George Will put it.

These are not “gotcha questions”; they are ones I have struggled with for as long as I’ve thought through where I stand on abortion, and I’ve tried to remain open to corrections in my thinking. I’m not comfortable with those who are unwilling to grant any concessions to the other side or acknowledge difficulties inherent in their own position. But I’m not comfortable with my own position, either—thinking about abortion taking place on a continuum, and troubled by abortions, particularly later in pregnancy, as the child develops.

The question I can’t answer is where the moral inflection point is, when the fetus starts to have claims of its own, including the right to life. Does it depend on fetal development? If so, what aspect of fetal development? Brain waves? Feeling pain? Dreaming? The development of the spine? Viability outside the womb? Something else? Any line I might draw seems to me entirely arbitrary and capricious.

Because of that, I consider myself pro-life, but with caveats. My inability to identify a clear demarcation point—when a fetus becomes a person—argues for erring on the side of protecting the unborn. But it’s a prudential judgment, hardly a certain one.

At the same time, even if one believes that the moral needle ought to lean in the direction of protecting the unborn from abortion, that doesn’t mean one should be indifferent to the enormous burden on the woman who is carrying the child and seeks an abortion, including women who discover that their unborn child has severe birth defects. Nor does it mean that all of us who are disturbed by abortion believe it is the equivalent of killing a child after birth. In this respect, my view is similar to that of some Jewish authorities, who hold that until delivery, a fetus is considered a part of the mother’s body, although it does possess certain characteristics of a person and has value. But an early-term abortion is not equivalent to killing a young child. (Many of those who hold this position base their views in part on Exodus 21, in which a miscarriage that results from men fighting and pushing a pregnant woman is punished by a fine, but the person responsible for the miscarriage is not tried for murder.)

“There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?”

That strikes me as right; with abortion, we’re dealing with an awesome mystery and insoluble empirical questions. Which means that rather than hurling invective at one another and caricaturing those with whom we disagree, we should try to understand their views, acknowledge our limitations, and even show a touch of grace and empathy. In this nation, riven and pulsating with hate, that’s not the direction the debate is most likely to take. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying.