From the Editors

Abstract

The exact numbers are not known and likely never will be, but somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of all “naturally” fertilized human eggs never develop into anything most people would recognize as human. In fact, the majority of those never-known pre-embryos come and go before their brief existence is even known to the woman who hosts them—she is most likely to experience only a late menstrual period, or more likely, nothing at all. For whatever reasons, spontaneous “wastage” of early fertilized eggs is extremely (to many people, astonishingly) common. But this is human biology, and maybe natural selection, in action. It just happens. There is little or no element of “choice” involved, and thus little controversy attached to this biological phenomenon.