As I explored in Why Do I Exist? A Mathematical and Biological Improbability, life is a statistical miracle—an almost impossible victory over the void. Yet at the height of our technical development, we seem to have forgotten what it means to win that wager against chance. Today, our civilization carries a shadow: a moral paradox in which we normalize the halting of our own species’ biological time, turning that unique and astonishing event into an hourglass without sand.
The Arithmetic of the Void: To grasp the magnitude of this phenomenon, we must look at the numbers without the familiar veils that soften them. Wars, with their media thunder; traffic accidents and pandemics that freeze the world—these pale in absolute volume when compared with the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.
In a landscape where conflicts and accidents claim hundreds of thousands of lives, statistics confront us with a staggering figure: more than 73 million voluntary terminations each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This means that, at the heart of our modernity, nearly a quarter of all beginnings of life are halted by human decision before their first breath—an amount that far exceeds the combined toll of violence and the great epidemics that so often shake us.
It is a colossal statistic that unfolds in the quiet asepsis of modern clinics. In the developed world, where scarcity is no longer the driving force, this number reveals a crisis of meaning. While natural death steals the past from us, this practice confiscates the future: it is the only “cause of death” born from an institutionalized decision within the very cradle of abundance.
The Paradox of the Species: Here lies the knot of our ethics. We are the only creature that, enjoying peace and resources, acts against its own renewal. We legislate to protect the nests of endangered species and recognize something sacred in the wild; yet before the human offspring—the most dependent and promising being in all creation—we have erected a wall of indifference.
Religious traditions have long guarded the idea of life as an indisposable gift. But even from pure reason, a question arises: Is it truly progressive for a society to offer renouncing the child as the only escape from the mother’s crisis?
Loneliness as Testimony: Sensible hope begins with understanding that what we often call “free choice” is, at times, a cry of loneliness. Many women do not reject the child; they reject the landscape of precariousness, the professional judgment, or the absence of a “tribe” to sustain them. The paradox sharpens when we see that we have built a world hostile to motherhood, where the arrival of a child is perceived as an obstacle rather than the culmination of life.
The true tragedy is a society that leaves the woman alone before the abyss, convincing her that her autonomy depends on stopping that internal clock.
Weaving a Net of Welcome: The path toward light requires moving from indifference to radical hospitality. The ethical response is not censorship, but the empowerment to love:
- Comprehensive support: Human networks that assure the mother that her life and her child’s life have a place in this world.
- Workplace dignity: Transforming structures so that motherhood is not a professional suicide, but a protected social value.
- A culture of hope: Recovering our sense of wonder for fragility. A baby is not a private project; it is the common good that renews our history.
A Horizon of Light: Hope resides in believing that we are capable of greater humanity. Imagining a future where the statistics decline not by the force of law, but by the force of support.
A world where every woman, when confronted with the vertigo of the unexpected, finds so many extended hands that choosing life becomes the natural consequence of feeling safe and loved. Perhaps then, those “hourglasses without sand” will begin to turn again, and each new heartbeat will be celebrated as the victory of a civilization that has finally learned not to leave anyone behind.
Nullius in verba