Googling the statistics one finds that about 70% of pregnancies end in miscarriage if failure of the fertilized ovum to implant in the uterus is included.
Not counting implantation failures, 15-20% of confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage.
Either way, one can only surmise that there are millions of spontaneous abortions each year. I use the word "abortion" advisedly because according to those who regard a fertilized egg as a "person," a miscarriage is also the death of a "person." The objection to certain forms of contraception is framed precisely in terms of those methods being "abortifacient" because they can result in miscarriages, even if undetected by the prospective mothers.
But wait. Those spontaneous and natural abortions are not really the same as those brought about by human intervention. Because in the traditional view of God, it is God's mysterious will that those spontaneous abortions should occur. Preventing babies and their birth by means of human knowledge and applied techniques is wrong because it goes against nature, which is surely a realm where everything happens according to God's will. And human beings (oops, I mean "mankind") therefore should not do anything contrary to nature. In which case, we should get rid of all our technologies, both simple and complex, including the technology of fire and the use of tools, and return to living as naked apes. But wait again. Is it not "natural" for human beings (dang, I mean mankind) to create and use technology to enhance and enrich survival?
But if its okay for humans to use technologies on behalf of their sundry biological needs, and for that matter, there mere wishes, why is contraception wrong.
Well, I suppose there is the religious argument that specifically in the case of contraception (and abortion) God doesn't want human beings to apply their technology. But that is an argument only for a certain class of religious believers who cleave to a pretty specific interpretation of a Holy Book that many simply don't share. So why should that class of believers feel that it is right to force their standards to everyone?
(By way of a non sequitur, one doesn't see priests running around trying to baptize miscarriages.)
And regarding the specifics of that religious argument, as far as I can tell, there are no unambiguous biblical passages that forbid contraception, or even abortion. Neither in the Old Testament is there much sentimentality about babies, as when God apparently ordered the Israelites to bash out the brains of the their enemies' infants. (In another passage, Onan got in trouble because he didn't want to impregnate his late brother's widow, which was a very specific rule at the time. That passage also is often taken as forbidding masturbation, which plainly is not the issue.)
It is also clear from some of the remarks that Jesus and Paul made about family life that they and thus many of the early Christians thought there were definite limitations on the Old Testament command to "be fruitful and multiply"--meaning at the least that it was not to be taken as an admonition to individuals, but only to the generality of mankind (I mean, human beings)--if that.
It is a complete travesty of the notion of "religious freedom" that contraception should figure as an issue before the Supreme Court of the U.S. If a Court majority sides with Hobby Lobby, Roberts and the conservative judges will likely try and craft some clumsy narrow ruling that would prevent the principle involved from being applied to other medical issues, such as blood transfusions and vaccination. Even so, the fallout from breaching the wall between church and state looks to be an awful, awful mess.
One hopes that Kennedy will be a Good Guy on this one.
R.
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/
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