human life is consciousness.
Through Life on the music train. - GGE
Probably the most convincing argument against abortion is
that a foetus[1] is
life, and life is sacred.
Let me qualify that: it’s human life that’s
considered sacred; we’re much more cavalier about the worth of animal and plant
life. We can argue the definition of life
as including all that can grow, independently of another’s control. Or we can
apply the definition we use when through disease or accident, consciousness is
irretrievably lost and we withdraw our support for continued biological life.
We unplug the machinery even though cells continue to replicate themselves, the
body continues to digest food and maintain a viable temperature.
“In practice, human life is consciousness.”
But to assert it as a dictum misses an important point when applied to
abortion: a foetus generally has potential to become conscious, while we
only “pull the plug” when the potential for consciousness no longer
exists.
If it needed to be complicated further, we might consider
that every egg produced in a female person’s body carries potential to become a
conscious human being. So then, is birth control to be lumped in with abortion
as preventing potential, sacred life?
Generally, we take the easy way out. We simplify a
complicated problem until it can be dealt with arbitrarily, summarily: abortion
is killing, so equivalent to murder. Birth control gets an inexplicable pass,
except that an unfertilized ovary lacks the potential to become sentient unless
fertilized. Enter condoms and birth control pills. The Catholic Church
attempted to sanctify procreation to the point of making abortion and
birth control equivalent; it never worked and, I think, never will.
Copulation is foundational to procreation; it’s also a
biological hunger powerful enough to become an activity in which procreation is
secondary—or of no relevance at all. This built-in, biological hunger made good
sense when “being fruitful and multiplying” was essential to humanity’s
survival; in an overpopulated world, the survival plan of creation/evolution of
human life becomes self defeating.
Procreation is biologically, strikingly similar across the life
spectrum. Female plants and animals produce seed, males fertilize the seed and,
well …you get the point. The protocols around fertilization vary considerably,
though. Wind and insects are counted on to make this process happen in most
plants. Elk routinely fight for the right to fertilize as many eggs as
possible, explained by biologists as an evolved strategy to insure the
strongest possible offspring. Neither protocol applies to humans, where
pregnancy can happen “by accident,” by miscalculation, even by force.
Tragically also in those who produce an embryo without the will, the
commitment, the basic skill to parent a human child. This made more poignant by
the fact that whereas humans take years to reach maturity, an elk is an
independent adult at three years of age, a lettuce plant at three and a half
weeks and a fruit fly in an hour or so.
From this viewpoint we most
resemble trees, I guess.
“What a piece of work is a
man! How Noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In Action, how like an Angel, in apprehension, how like
a God!
The beauty of the world, the
paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
(Hamlet II,ii)
Hamlet is not the first, and certainly not the only skeptic
to have hit upon the dichotomy, namely that the most miraculous reproduction of
the most miraculous life form inside the miracle of life itself …is also source
for so much corruption and violence.
Humans are created in the perfection of divine imagination
according to the Psalmist:
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:13-14 NIV)
Who can argue that life is less than unbelievably amazing in
all its aspects? Especially compared to the apparently lifeless universe in
which it finds itself.
In Hamlet’s reasoning, how can anyone usurp such an
endowment using tools of hatred, bloodshed, fraud and connivance? His uncle has
killed his father, the king, and usurped both his throne and his queen,
Hamlet’s mother. He suspects his mother of having collaborated in this
murderous, adulterous debacle and all his faith in the reverence and fidelity
on which his world relied is swept away under waves of outrage and hurt. And in
this state, he drives his lover, Ophelia, to take her own life, murder by negligence,
if you will.
Of course, Hamlet’s understandings and beliefs are shaped in
a different environment than ours. The turmoil he experiences juggling the
“honour is regained in revenge” motif
against—one can argue—his Christian abhorrence of interpersonal violence undoes
him in the end. His dying words are, “the rest is silence;” the struggles
between human impulses and moral behaviour are only resolved by his dying.
In summary, human sexuality presents as an inscrutable
jungle of complications that seem so entirely unnecessary that the lack of
viable resolutions seems only to indicate our breathtaking ignorance. “If you
eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, you shall surely die.”
In North America and Europe, the conviction that abortion is
murder rests largely on religious foundations. Reading the Psalmist’s “thou
hast knit me together in my mother’s womb” places the onus for life or death under
the Creator’s direct control …if understood literally. But all the evidence
tells us that we humans are the ones with hands on the life-or-death controls.
When it comes to bearing children, we decide whether or no, and if yes,
then how many, and if necessary whether to keep or give up for adoption,
nourish or neglect, love or tolerate. Except for the fact, of course, that
often serendipity, means we’ve started a baby …accidentally.
How would our cultures change if sex were free and open,
bound only by consent and human sovereignty-of-the-person, and would have
nothing to do with procreation. It would be more like eating ice cream or
winning at tennis or having a satisfying massage than like rutting clandestinely
in the back seat of a Nash Rambler, and …
…if human procreation would be more like Walleyes, where the
female lays egg(s), swims off and the male follows and fertilizes the egg(s).
In humans, that would mean that no child would be unwanted; reproduction would
always follow an actual, joint choice.
Finding a way to keep the egg(s) warm wouldn’t involve
rocket science.
Abortion would be rare.
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