Mission Aborted

I wondered when I was going to have to lay out an argument for this overdone and redundantly pointless discussion, but it has come up a few times in my personal life lately, so I'll bump it up the queue. About a week ago I was taking a Greyhound home from Hamilton. It passed through Ingersoll, one of a couple small towns along this route, when I noticed a rather well kept yellow bricked church. It was very modern looking, with new insulated glass windows and fancy ramps and elevators to show off how up-to-code and welcoming a place it was. Then, as I was wondering how the recession might be affecting their business, something caught my eye. On the front lawn, at the corner nearest to the intersection where the church sat was a small rose coloured granite statue. The statue was a warped heart shape, and etched into the base were the words In Memory of the Victims of Abortion. I was taken aback. I knew the christian stance on abortion, but there it was, right on the front lawn, for everyone to see. The word victim just carries such a punch, they might as well have put up a a sign that said "Fuck you babykillers!", the point they were trying to convey would have been the same.

What is the church's stance on abortion? Well, as far as I know (and I do hear differing views across the religious spectrum, but I would definitely cluster them closer to one side of the gauge), the church believes that abortion is wrong because "Life is Sacred", and that this life begins at the moment of conception. I don't think I need to go into any more detail about the religious viewpoint to begin my argument, because with those two statements, I already have so much to take issue with.

That phrase "Life is Sacred" gets thrown around a lot. I see it on the backs of cars and license plate covers that claim 'Life is Sacred - From Birth to Natural Death" or something like that. Euthanasia is a debate for another place and time, but I really would like to know what exactly this phrase is supposed to mean. In the sense it is being used here, it seems to mean that sacred implies 'worthy of protection' or 'of highest importance'. However, I've heard the term 'sacred' applied to inanimate objects, figurines, rituals, and holidays too. I personally think life is rare, fascinating, and worthy of the highest admiration, but not sacred. Think about it. If life was sacred, wouldn't we be given a little more of it to work with perhaps? Why a 60 to 80-year slice on this planet, at this time in history, when, for so many billions and billions of years, not only on this planet but as far as we can see (for now!) life as we know it played such a miniscule role in the scheme of the universe? An amazing development, for sure, but sacred? This 'sacred' life is regularly ended for so many people in so many awful and terrible ways every second of every day, week upon month upon year, for hundreds and thousands of years throughout our history. All around us, every person we've ever met, ever will meet, and ever could meet will die. You might say that this preciousness is exactly what makes life sacred, but I won't accept that. Diamonds aren't considered sacred. I think a more honest definition is that 'sacred' is anything that is important to the continuation and existence of the church, whether by member or by ritual. Due to the fact that parishioners tend to eventually expire, and also that expired parishioners cannot continue to propegate the doctrine of their faith, their members must be continually replenished and expanded. Therefore, anyone who could possibly grow up to be another member of the church and continue these traditions, whether they are two cells or two million, is therefore sacred and worthy of protection, at least until they turn their back on god. I can't wrap my head around the mental gymnastics here. On one hand, you've got folks saying that life is sacred, that the innocent need defending, and that the women who have an abortion should be punished with jail time. Are these the same people protesting lethal injections? What about sending troops overseas to be killed, and to kill others? Where did that sacred regard for life go? Not to steal too many of George Carlin's thoughts, but the message coming across to me here is: 'We only care about you while you're inside someone else's body and don't yet even have the capability to process a thought. Once you're outta that tummy, you're on your own.' I don't need to point out the hypocracy of anyone who uses this argument against abortion and then goes on to threaten any sort of retribution against blasphemers or members of an opposing faith.

One thing that never made sense to me was the claim that abortion is immoral because it is an 'unnatural' procedure. That we can create artificial organs and prevent disease is in no way natural either, and when we look at our close relatives in the animal kingdom, some of the behaviours they perform naturally (incest, murder) are completely unacceptable in civilized society. Where did we get this idea that aborting a child is any less natural than preventing pregnancy in the first place, or for all the fundies in the crowd who disagree with contraception too, any less natural than taking antibiotics for an infection? These are all human creations. If god DID create us, wouldn't it make sense that anything that is within our ability as a species should have been a natural progression of our continued development? To think that we could create new technologies that are somehow offensive to god makes absolutely no sense. If he didn't agree with some specific action he shouldn't have created us with the ability to execute that said action. Oh, wait a second, this is GOD we're talking about here. I forgot for a second that he's a TOTAL JERK and does things like that ALL THE TIME in the bible. You needn't go any further than the garden of Eden in Genesis without him dangling some damn treat in our faces that we're not supposed to touch (even though we wouldn't have understood that this was an evil action at the time. That knowledge came after eating the apple, not before). I won't go off on that tempting creationism-bashing tangent, but I still think it sounds incredibly silly to have, in the words of Gene Roddenberry an "all-knowing, all-powerful god that creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes". I should point out that statistically, a great percentage of pregnancies abort on their own with no medical influence whatsoever. I hope god will take responsibility for those ones; he should already be aware of the unfathomable amount of violence and hatred that has been carried out in his name during the history of our species.

In a way it all comes back to that essential church doctrine that faith is something that is to be spread and shared with others. People of faith know that not only is their specific interpretation of scripture the correct one among many conflicting interpretations that all also claim infallibility, but that they must ensure that other people must also abide by these rules even if they don't belong to their sect. This is unacceptable. The entire question about when life begins doesn't even matter in the debate, because there is a much more pressing question that first must be answered: why do people of faith think that they have the right to impose their handpicked moral values on others? People of the Jewish faith don't eat pork, but you don't see them trying to pass laws making it illegal for others to do so. It would do the faithful a lot of good to come down from their cloud of sacreds and holies and doctrines and take a few shots of reality every so often. The reality is that we can already see the effects of making abortion illegal, because there are plenty of countries that have already done just that (see this excellent article in the NY Times on El Salvador). What you will learn is that laws against abortion still do not prevent abortion, they simply make it more dangerous for everyone involved. You get babies born into families that can't support them, children born to mothers who find it difficult to love them because they are the product of their emotionally scarring rape and not a loving relationship, soaring populations, and a rising number of inmates.

I'll leave you with one particular story I heard that really highlights the incredulity of this issue: A young single mother was pregnant with a child. During the pregnancy, it was discovered that she had developed a cancerous tumor in her body. Luckily for her, it was caught early and would have been simple to treat with doses of radiation except for the fact that the radiation would have killed her unborn child. So, instead of performing the obvious choice of saving the woman, the doctors refused to treat her cancer as specified by the anti-abortion laws of the country. Her stomach grew, her cancer grew, and after 9 months, she gave birth to a child that she would not have the chance to share the joys of parenthood with, because now the cancer had spread through her whole body. She died shortly after, leaving a very sad little boy to wonder quietly to himself one day as he was growing up what exactly it was about life that was so sacred it was worth killing his mom for.