ARRIVING AT MAYBE - ON ABORTION

 

 

American Elm Tree: Leaves, Bark (Pictures) - Identification and Care (leafyplace.com)

When does an elm develop to the point where it can be called a tree? Is it already a tree when as a seed, it spins through the air in a tiny, fragile frisbee to land on a concrete roadway, in your eave trough, or in a field of wheat stubble? Can it be called a tree when  a warm spring sun and an April shower awaken it and it thrusts out a root cell after having lain dormant through a winter? And if it should wither or be swept up and burned, or be plowed under in a field, could we say that it was a tree cut down?

Or if the cocky rooster should mount a hen so that she would lay fertilized eggs, and if we should poach and eat such an egg, would it taste like chicken?

Or if a human sperm fertilizes a human egg and cell mitosis commences, is it more like the elm seed flying from the mother tree, already fertilized? Or is it more like a new human person, like an elm sapling, say, seeking sustenance so that it might one day be a tall, standing tree … one day?

Or why do mother elms produce a million seeds and a human man’s body produce a million sperm unless nature has already determined that of the million, 999, 998 will, on average, fail; will land on sidewalks, in toilets, in a condom or a stubble field?

In the Western World, people’s ubiquitous preoccupation is not for getting food, but for mitigating the effects of too much eating. Similarly, birth prevention preoccupies us far more than does birth planning. This seems unsurprising to me in a world where food and sex are in surplus. Frankly speaking, we humans seek to control when and who and how many new humans will be produced, only we do it very sloppily so that abortion becomes a consequence of repeated failure. We are—collectively—as dumb as elm trees when we ought very much to know better.

How much demographics and economics—the big pictures—affect how we look at birthing or not birthing children is a subject for another day. The Chinese government rewarded couples who limited their new-human output to one per  because the population was growing faster than services could be provided, but they overshot, and now they’re rewarding the new-human output of three per couple. A growing population is prerequisite to a growing economy, and, well, the economy is everything, isn’t it? But that’s content for a big, fat book all by itself.

For a time in our evolutionary development (if we think that way for a moment), the powerful copulation urge must have served as a necessary defense against population extinction; in our time it’s a “benefit” we’d probably be better off without. And if we imagine ourselves beginning from a blob of plasma millions of years ago, or if we’re thinking we’re just one rib away from Adam, would either help us understand the dilemma of the greatest miracle—life—as either a blessing or … a curse?  

The threshold at which a fetus assumes the rights and responsibilities of an independent person is something we disagree about. It makes a big difference to the women who bear most of the responsibility for gestating and nurturing what may become an independent person.

By our actions over the centuries, we seem to have decided that the emergence of a new person happens at birth. We’ve named new persons at birth, not at conception. We have no cultural ceremony to mark the passing of a spontaneously-aborted fetus. We know full well that our memories don’t extend back beyond our birth, indeed that our consciousness is not developed enough in our neonatal time to record memories of our infancy, let alone our gestation.

We are not invited into formal schooling until we’ve lived for five years or so. We reach puberty around twelve or thirteen, are forbidden to drive before we reach sixteen, are wards of our parents until we’re eighteen—with some exceptions, of course. In other words, the independent human takes a long time to develop. The thresholds to stages of growing independence are decided by adult humans and it’s no surprise that humans would imagine conception to be the first anniversary in the continuing development of a specific human person. But if that’s true, then aborting an infant, or a teenager or even an adult would be of similar moral weight as terminating a fetus, and v.v. But we know that the death penalty persists in many cultures and that in war, the immediate objective is to “abort” the armed human minions of an enemy state.

Self-abortion is legal in many states.

Do you see what I mean about the dilemma in reaching a judgment about the independent rights of a fetus? If not, let me complicate the question further.

Stories of accidental or forced pregnancy in women who don’t wish to--or can't--make the sacrifice necessary to gestate and nurture a child at the time, well, that’s the most common scenario for which abortion is seen as an option. (I’m not forgetting here that all pregnancies, save one, have implicated a man as well. A man who may as easily see a pregnancy as being restricting to his options, and therefore—having no wish to father and nurture a slowly-developing human—may reach out for an abortion option.) Common as the stories are, they can’t be assumed to be identical, neither in their first, middle nor last chapters.

But here's one story: A band of rebels in a fictitious country kidnaps teenaged girls from a school and spirits them into a remote camp where they are repeatedly raped. For various reasons, some are ejected, some escape and some find their way back home. The horror visited upon these girls, their families and community might well seem to clarify that abortion can be an ethical choice, but is it? If conception is the initial stage in the development of an independent human, then the determination to abort a blameless fetus conceived by a rape carries the same moral weight as does the therapeutic abortion of an inconvenient pregnancy. Doesn’t it?

But can there be a morality that preserves a right for one person (at the fetus stage, say) to thrive only with the plundering of another person’s physical, emotional, spiritual resources? Is the teenaged child obligated to abandon hopes for a future, lose her own right to independence for the sake of an unwelcome fetus growing inside her? And if a young couple engaged in establishing a household and nurturing budding careers find themselves pregnant through a failure of precautions, is the medical termination of the pregnancy of the same moral order for this couple as for a rape victim? BUT, the fetus is innocent, you’d say, and it doesn’t deserve capital punishment. And you’d be right, I think.

Both yes and no (to the question of abortion as a lawful choice) are supportable with sound arguments. Only, your conclusion—your choice of arguments—will depend on your initial position on a number of things. Are we as individuals masters of our destiny or are we beholden to conform to a moral standard beyond ourselves? Do we see community as the arbiter of ethical behaviour, or do we tend more toward, “it’s none of yours or anyone else’s business.” Do we see the life of a human as sacred or as negotiable? Is being human primarily about walking erect and sporting opposable thumbs, or is it marked by levels of consciousness? And—most telling of all, seems to me—do we think of our lives through a biological or a mystical lens?

Perhaps—in our confusion about when a potential human, who then becomes a viable human, and then becomes a conscious and independent human—we could conceivably agree that in law, at least, a human is beneficiary to all of “human rights” at birth, and that “human responsibility” shall be recognized, learned and embraced by eighteen or so years of age. (Wait, what? Isn’t that exactly what we hold to now?)

Family planning—that is, deciding how many children a couple or an independent woman will have, and when—is not only allowed, but applauded. There is no penalty for producing none or only a few children when one is capable of producing many. Taking steps to prevent a sperm consorting with an ovum is not seen as denying life to a potential human, is it? Every age creates conditions of the succeeding age in many ways: how many humans there will be sharing space and resources is one way, but how much or how little any given female contributes to the desired population level is her call, even though its manipulated by government indirectly because it can’t be controlled directly: child support, cheap daycare, outlawing abortion, free condoms in schools, you name it.

What we may sense, but choose to deny, is that the procreation project is human-directed. Humans grant life, deny life, squander life, destroy life and/or nurture life at will. They plant elm trees and they cut them down, not because God or evolution wills it, but because they do. When an independent human life begins and ends is human-decided and human-directed except when aging or illness or war or natural disasters demand their due.

Another story: A village is located in a remote area, five miles from the nearest fresh water source. Necessity requires that all those who are able make the trek to water every Saturday and return with ten, twenty or forty litre containers of water. So the chief and council set up a guide: men eighteen to sixty carry forty litres, women eighteen to sixty carry twenty litres and children ten to eighteen and seniors sixty to eighty carry ten litres. Refusal will result in a household doing without the common water supply.

Protests arise. How can a rule govern what individuals are capable of? Only I know whether I have the physical resources to make that long walk, carry that weight.

And if a woman or a couple determine that they lack physical, spiritual or emotional resources to handle a pregnancy and the parenting responsibility, should a rule, or the persons involved decide?  

All this almost persuades me that even if I see my life as a human to be end-product of a creative or of an evolutionary process, clearly reproductive issues are relegated to the control of the independent-but-community-acknowledging-humans in our midst. Let’s hope they are smart, and if possible, smarter than I am.

I’m still stuck on yes, or no, or maybe, much of the time. It depends. It always depends.

One thing I know. As a fully matured human person (actually past ripe by quite a bit), I think my chances in life were enhanced greatly by being wanted, loved, cared for from the moment my mother and father sighed contentedly and lit cigarettes, until and beyond the feast they prepared for my wedding day. I've never been a person who was begrudged or commanded into birth, or into a life of continual deprivation or suffering, so I can't compare, never having walked even an inch in those shoes. 

(Here, I admit to lying: my parents didn’t smoke.)