There is a very good reason why we say “I’m going to be a dad!” when we learn our wives our pregnant. It’s because we’re not a dad yet.

There’s a very good reason we don’t celebrate our conception days.

There’s a reason why (most of us) don’t treat a miscarriage the same was a stillbirth.

The rate of spontaneous abortion is shockingly high, and the rate of miscarriage is high as well. Pregnancies are not inevitable paths to the birth of a child, even without the medical availability of abortion. Fetuses are not the same as children, they are not people.

Even if one has a religious belief that a fetus has some special, non-medical property to it— a soul— there is no religion that treats every miscarried or spontaneously aborted fetus as though it was a person dying.

Tradition is sometimes a very wise thing. Tradition shows us that, culturally, we have never considered a potential child as the same thing as a child.