Unborn Life

July 11, 2020 Sociocultural Issues No Comments

We’re talking about human lives. Let’s not put the pro and con against each other now. Let’s just posit some situations and think and feel about them.

This is about how you can feel about it.

It’s not about what’s in a book. It’s not about what anyone tells you, including me. It’s only about what you think or feel.

What you think or feel may concord, or it may not.

Would you put your life in the balance for ten unborn lives?

You will probably never be able to do so. This is a ‘mind experiment.’ But you can just imagine that you have been put before this choice. What are you going to do? Give your life? And if you wouldn’t do it for ten, would you do it for a hundred unborn lives?

This is an exercise. The effort lies in trying to feel what such a choice would be like. If life is sacred, are two lives than twice as sacred? Are ten lives ten times as sacred? What about a hundred lives? What about your life? Is it especially sacred?

People are indeed put before a comparable choice sometimes. I am put before a remotely similar choice daily. Will I do things that are mainly good and enjoyable for myself, or go on doing stuff because I think I’m doing it for other’s sake rather than mine? I’m not complaining.

What is the value of a life that is not fully lived?

It’s about human life. What about another?

For many pro-lifers, an animal life hardly lies in the balance. They gladly eat meat from a life that was enjoying itself (or precisely not) just a few days earlier. Why is this so? Please don’t judge it. Let there be no straightforward accusation.

But try to feel why there is this balance in which animal life is worth less than human life. Apart from “Someone said so, ” what can be the reason? Is it a natural, congenital insight? Is a human born automatically with the correct insight that humans are the best?

I grant it.

What would you do if some other creature turns up with the same self-referred insight about humans? It may be an alien. It may be A.I. from another planet. It may be future A.I. from this planet.

Or it may be some humans who, as a group, alienate themselves from the rest and think you are worth only as much as something half between them and an animal. This is not about the ethics of the situation. Just do the exercise: What would you think and feel? Would you be able to say okay, that’s fine to me?

How do you feel about animal life now? How do you feel about a chicken or a sheep or a cow?

Is ‘valuing life’ the same as ‘following rules’?

Here comes my feeling. I don’t think these can ever be the same. That is not by itself an indication of who’s right or wrong, of course.

But it gives a twist. This is not about ‘valuing life’ versus ‘not valuing life.’ It’s about ‘following rules’ versus ‘not following rules’ as the basis of ‘valuing life.’ I deem myself to be pro-life much more than anyone who is merely following ‘the’ rules, subordinating life to those rules even while they are, looking at them from another planet, arbitrary. To me, ‘valuing life’ presupposes much work, much thought, much feeling about it. Life is worth this effort. Following rules just for the rules and not for life, is not valuing life.

This way, in my view, the pro-life movement is a pro-following-rules movement.

That still doesn’t say who is right or wrong – unless by some rule. But I invite anyone to think and feel about it. Thinking and feeling about it is already different from following a thoughtless and emotionless rule.