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| Pregnant woman |
The subject is not simple, and I am wary of any simplistic answers that one hears on the streets, at least in the United States. For here, in France, there is only a handful of the more extreme, fundamental views from Catholic individuals and others who gather in the streets, or kneel with huge crosses or Holy Virgin statues, holding signs about abortion, Freemasons, Jews, gays or for the return of the monarchy.
Here I’m attempting my own synthesis of such a passionate subject. You who read my words right now, please unplug your definitive preconceptions, your emotions and your hatreds. And while you read, play an album of JS Bach, for example “Violins and Oboe d'Amore Concertos”, and let’s continue this discussion.
Let’s put aside on ideas that cannot be resolved in one way or another, foror example, the status of the embryo. We all agree that the embryo is potentially a future human being . But who can say that it is a mass of cells that develops in the woman body or that it is more than that: already a human being in its most vulnerable form, having a soul, an even a life project willed by God? These are imaginary representations - often much tougher than any findings positively established. Science itself cannot ignore the images that populate the human mind when it comes to life. It cannot give any definitive argument in one direction or the other.
Life is a mystery, not only in its infancy. It is found that life requires favorable environmental conditions: a certain range of temperature, water, light and time. But even when all conditions are established, life does not appear. These conditions are favorable, necessary; but they do not create life. There’s no spontaneous generation, so. We check every day in our world that life comes from life. Like a torch passing from one hand to the other, life is communicated, it is given, it is contagious. And nobody knows how it all began. We can say: "this is God." If it satisfies you, ok. Personally, I think the mystery remains unsolved. I do not know how it all works and why. I even believe that it is beyond our understanding and our ability to understand. Far from exalting myself an illusory knowledge, I feel very humbled by all this mystery.
Our Earth is full of life, and that includes life underground, on the seabed, suspended in the air and of course at ground level where billions of insects leave enough room for billions of birds, mammals, spiders and other reptiles so that they can grow. Among the abundant life are human beings who, we’re told, have never been so many on our small planet. Is life in danger? According to physicists, our sun still offers a bright future, and our planet should enjoy its moderate heat and its light for several billion years before becoming uninhabitable when the sun will become a supernova, unless spread elsewhere in the meantime, life will disappear.
Notwithstanding the time that is given to us, close to infinity on a human scale (hominid appeared there 3 to 6 million years ago, modern man there are only 100,000 years) life is in danger on earth. Not because of natural disasters that have always existed and have often been the beginning of new developments but because of human violence. Man is the largest known predator. Man does not just destroy ecosystems that are essential to life; he destroys, often without reason, flora and fauna, including those of the oceans and billions of animals each year for his consumption.
What is even more heartbreaking and incomprehensible is that man has a passion for war, resulting in the deaths of millions of human beings every year. Even the small wars of the past have succeeded to bring about contemporary genocides, world wars, atomic bombs dropped on civilian populations, all regional conflicts that disfigure the idea that we can have about the human being and his self-called belief in the sanctity of life. The war takes many forms. The form called economic "crisis" or "war" is quite pernicious, but it is equally effective in generating a lot of misery and death of millions of impoverished populations, subject to starvation, lack of care and education. One day the capitalist doctrine will surely be condemned for crimes against humanity...
There is another war, and we have begun to realize only a few dozen years: the war against women! Until then we took for "natural" order that men arrogated many rights as they interfere with the rights of their wives or sisters. Awareness of this injustice is so new, so fragile, and so precarious that anything could destroy it. The forces that want to oppress women, for the mere fact of their biology, are still the majority in the world.
What can explain (not justify) the true hatred of women that all societies of the world are steeped? There was first, I think, that the brutality (equated to the force) has always been given more value than sweetness (equated with weakness). But this brutality is the prerogative of men, because of the visible difference of male and female body. A woman I admire very much (my wife) put me on the way of another relevant explanation: the woman has the extraordinary power to give life, something man cannot offer. This helplessness works in its way, bringing man to a certain low level in behavior and understanding. He wants to control life, that he cannot give, and does this through the control of women whom he demands submit for his enjoyment and descent.
When old white men debate in parliament the right or not to abortion they continue, that they want to or not, the ancient posture to submit woman to male dictates, even in the deepest of their intimacy, which is certainly not a coincidence. Now let’s denounce the hypocrisies and contradictions. Neither speech, nor bigot nor consumerist materialist discourse that we hear on both sides are relevant, even if they bring all elements deserving reflection.
Now let us consider the "sanctity " of life. This argument often refers to the idea that life is sacred and must be protected. Religion is often the origin of this idea. But I think that in reality what is expressed, in regards to he behavior of our societies, is to offer a notion about who has the right to live and who does not. For, if life is sacred then we must reject everything that destroys it: preventing wars, denying death penalty and ultimately change the economic system that generates so much destruction. Actually behind the argument for the sanctity of life there is the idea that an innocent embryo has the right to live, but a bastard who does not deserve life can be put to death. In this position I can see the temptation to play God. After all, if it is God who gives life, He gives it to everybody whether innocent or bad. This is probably incomprehensible but it is a fact. So do we have the right to correct what He decided? After all the Gospel warns us not to do that: "while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them."
It seems extraordinarily hypocritical to claim to herald life and support the death penalty, war and economic systems that destroy life. And yet this is what the anti-abortions do, often from the most conservative circles of society. The fact that these areas also defend a vision of the subaltern woman, subjected to man, is obviously not a coincidence.
I truly believe that life is sacred. I believe that not in a strictly religious way, although I recognize that there is a mystical dimension in this belief, the kind of belief in the sanctity of the human person, affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, life appears to me to be both miraculous, strong, profuse and at the same time fragile and touching in all its manifestations. Life is fragile and it’s heartbreaking to see how easy it is to crush the delicate little flower (and this symbolizes the fate that is made to many manifestations of life in the world). It is also moving to see the gentle lamb slaughtered by the butcher, the friendly dog get kicked, chicken - though presented as the model of maternal love in the gospel - confined in a cage until becoming mad, lay eggs that are immediately removed and finally shot as an object that it has never ceased to be in the spirit of our consumption society. And yet life is strong, as that small sprig of grass that grew in a gap of a concrete slab, like the blind fish that persist to live in pools of water at the bottom of buried deep caves, or the shrimp that live on the ocean floor under hellish pressures, warmed and fed through stacks of lava from the earth's core. And what about those wonderful people who survive under extreme life conditions in the torrid or frozen deserts?
Yes, life moves me deeply. And when I realized that I did not need to kill or to have animals killed to feed me, I became a vegetarian because I did not see why I had to participate in the massive massacre of animals throughout the world, while I did not need meat to live. Thus, inhabited by this love for life, I saw that my choices were consistent: vegetarianism, fight for environmental protection, animal welfare, refusal of factory farms, refusal of “sport”’ hunting (when it is not a necessity to live) and fur clothes. And of course: rejection of torture and of death penalty.
At this point I guess you might expect to see me take a stand against abortion in the name of the respect due to life. But it is not that simple. On the one hand I do not have definitive answers to questions expressed at the beginning of this article: what is an embryo? And I'm suspicious about those who draw conclusions that contains other more implicit questions. For example: who should decide what happens in the female body? Who is the master of a woman's fertility? But also: does man something to say? What is a human being? Is he just a consequence of biological functions or a love project, a story being written? And let’s not forget the other issues such as the following: does society help women in difficulty, the abandoned wife, the raped woman and the woman without resources? And also what about these customs, which bear the brunt of “faults” on only women: can they be revised?
Let’s not forget that other hypocrisy that sees fierce defenders of freedom deny women the right to dispose of her own bodies and decide for themselves to give birth or not. This allows total freedom for men, but offers conditional freedom for women. This is the scheme that has been offered for millenniums.
The conditional freedom offers confinement of women within biology. When viewed that way, it becomes a sort of curse from which men are easily freed, despite the fact they are imbued with the same clay. For certain biology is a fantastic dimension. But the human being is much more than that, obviously. Would we define one politician or a leader of a great company by his or her biological characteristics? Of course not, because we have developed a more abstract, more moral way of perceiving the human being. Besides, we know what happens when we define the human being by that biological appearance, for that is racism. But we do not stop doing that with women. The vision supported by our societies, as far as the construction of language, is fundamentally sexist.
What is natural in man? It appears simplistic if only explained by historians, anthropologists, psychologists and many other practitioners of various disciplines. The idea that man is a natural being is a fantasy brandished by conservatives of all societies. Obviously it suggests that God is behind this nature. And the man would be wrong to thwart his "nature." In this view there is a static vision, which comes also resonates well with the opposition to the idea of evolution. Things are laid out once and for all, in a fashion in which it should not change. This fixed belief does not offer a potential for change.
In fact, man is certainly a natural being in the sense that he belongs to the nature, an environment and a biological parentage. But he is also a man of culture. And by culture we must understand everything that interacts with him, makes him grow and shapes him. This culture is already within his family, where values will interfere at all levels of relationships. We know that good or bad treatment from the family have implications for the development of the child, as well as the quality of food and enough sunlight or not. From the point of view of child development, cultural parameters are as important as the natural or physical parameters. We know that the child's brain is reduced in volume due to abuse. Not that the brain, well housed in the skull, suffer specifically from the blows, but because the attacks at the child's dignity have significant psychological impact. These induce physical dysfunction, including growth delays and development of physical and psychological illnesses that may be only happen in his adulthood. We even know that adults subjected to conditions of oppression, institutionalized contempt or deprivation of liberty, see their minds and brains affected, even if their vital parameters were not upset. They can become crazy or develop diseases that kill.
But at the same time, we see the beneficial and measurable effect of trust, kindness and attention. When the abused child is extracted from a hostile cultural environment, he or she will be able to resume development, both mentally and physically, including the impact of the brain's suffering. He will be able to grow again if he finds resilient tutors. He will even be able to develop exceptional qualities because of the hardships he or she went through (if those hardships have not totally destroyed him, obviously). The damaged adult can also get survive. Sometimes just speaking heals. We can say words have become an essential part of the human being’s life. They can kill. They can also bring life.
According to nature alone, the male sows his seed and then goes away, and the female must deal with the consequences. The human being does not work like that. First he’s in solidarity with everything that happens to other beings in his environment. He feels responsible: he cares about the consequences of everything he does. Thus the man is not just content to sow his small seeds, he manages the possible consequences. Making love, we know, does not necessarily mean "life community" or "procreation project." The best would be to prevent unwanted pregnancy through contraception. That some men still oppose contraception today is unforgivable. In any case, in my opinion, it totally reveals the continuing enslavement of women that is at the heart of such positions.
But then there remain unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes, most of the time probably, these pregnancies end happily, with the pregnancy going to full term and the unexpected child welcomed. However, an unwanted pregnancy can be a real tragedy for the woman. First, the tragedy occurs because of society. A woman, pregnant at the wrong time, and out of wedlock, by a man who is not the woman's true lover, creates pressure for the woman from a society that has created rules to keep her under the yoke of men. When she is pregnant at that "wrong time," she brings dishonor on herself, dishonor upon the family or clan, dishonor that will affect the unborn child too. And then there is the personal drama of the woman pregnant of a coward, the man who does not love her, the abuser, the one who took his sole pleasure and then left. And also this body, this biology that works by itself, which accuses her becomes part of the issue. The body reacts purely mechanically, even when there is no life plan, no desire. This body, which unintentionally destroys a (social) life, for the life of a human being, as we have seen, is not only a biological life. It is a social life, a story, a narrative being told; and it needs a lot of nurture for all aspects of a human being life to coincide and align to foster the emergence of a new life.
Abortion is not an easy option for any woman. Whether it is legal or not, women use that option, through all times, as a last resort when they have no other solution. It is already quite dramatic that some women find themselves in such a situation, in the anguish of a body that seems to obey to external orders rather than to their own will or desire, in a society that does not provide them with alternative options to expose them to more risks of unsafe abortions, even when they are illegal.
I believe many pro-choice people would prefer not to have to resort to abortion. So we develop and make available contraceptives, including for adolescent minors, or offer other mechanisms to prevent pregnancy, including the next morning pill. But we also must change attitudes and customs that oppress women, so they are finally respected, develop the reception of unwanted children without blaming women who do not want or cannot raise their children. But at the same time, until all this progress is established, we must accept this desire not to give birth and protect women who express it.
This is the most humane position, since we know that the human being is nature, culture, desire, and narrative, not just biology.
If I have convinced one person to re-examine his or her position on the matter of abortion, that is good. For those who are pro-life it is important for us all to attack all the great evils of our world that hurt life: pollution, production of too much and intolerable waste, inequitable distribution of wealth. Let’s work together against ideologies that drive people against each other, intolerance leading to murder, conflicts of interests and desires that throw people into war. Let’s convince our Chinese or Indian friends to rid themselves of habits that lead to forced abortion of millions of women and unfortunately pregnant little girls, who are considered intolerable burdens, especially for the poor. Let's build new hope in our societies: respect, great respect for all women, protection, listening, and let’s provide them good material conditions able to help create families with children who have chances of grow healthy, aid structures for all difficult situations (school failure, income loss, father absence, illness...) Yes, let’s treat all these evils combined to remove ignorance and indifference from our world, so that abortion is not the issue but life itself, how it is defined and lived.
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