provisional ethics.

[written as is because originally posted elsewhere where they may not be pro-life, but i'd like your comments]

I hate it when I have to break new ethical ground in public. It's hard to tell when one's provisional ethicizations are crack-smoking or not, or whether there are large holes, or whether it's all coherent. I think I've hammered something out, but I'll have to run it by my bioethicist [everybody should have one on staff]. Anyways, the idea I'm opposing is this:

Suppose life begins at conception and all of the following women know that. They may also believe contraception is immoral, for whatever reason. Suppose that a typical woman will miscarry in the first 6 weeks of pregnancy 33% of the time. Being stressed will cause her to miscarry 90% of the time, according to recent research. If a woman conceives while she knows she is stressed, is she a murderer? Is she more dangerous to her children than a drunk driver? Is she playing Russian roulette with a ten-bullet gun with only one empty chamger? Suppose a woman knows that she has a medical condition which causes her to miscarry 100% of the time which she has no control over. If she conceives, is she a murderer?

One presumes, of course, that in none of these cases the woman has malicious intent, just as a typical drunk driver has no malicious intent. Indeed, she may as well have all the best intentions, whatever those are and the woman has done everything in her power to make it less probable that the child will miscarry, it just happens that she is stressed anyway or she unexpectedly became stressed afterwards. My argument was that this case is substantially different from drunk driving because the action which puts her children at risk is the very act which creates the children. She's not spinning the roulette wheel for lives which are already there, but rather the very spin of the roulette wheel is the thing making the lives. Obviously, one should do all that is in one's power to increase the odds on the roulette wheel. Since /being, as such, is good/, there is nothing wrong with creating a life when there is a 90% or 100% chance that one cannot help that the person will die shortly after, for existing for a short time is better than never existing.

The question is, is this coherent, or am I on crack? Are there holes? Are there improvements? Are there major leaps in there? I'm not interested in attacks of the sort, "Ah, but the thing's not a human life from conception...". I'm no ethicist, so I'm not sure about any of this. This is only for my personal edification.