Friends, in our country the “right” side of the political spectrum is full of little Moamar Al-Qaddafi’s. Take the matter of former Kansas Attorney General, Phillip Kline. He abused the power of office to serve idiotic but widely shared, religious belief by illegally prying into the affairs of Dr. Tiller’s abortion practice, leading to that doctor’s later assassination. He is on trial in a courtroom many of whose observers are embued with similar, ten-thousand year old, pre-scientific superstitions about the nature of life, personhood, biological conception, pregnancy and childbirth. Several false ideas are still commonplace, stemming from prehistoric outlooks that still infect most religions.
Let’s start with a few facts of definition, using question and answer.
Q. What is a zygote? A. A fertilized ovum. Personhood and personality are too complex to begin at the formation of an individual genome. A vast distance intervenes between the initiation of a genotype and the long-continued development of a phenotype, which is an observable fulfillment of an adult specimen of the species, modified through time by many factors of nurture, stimulus and environs. A genotype may be ultimately expressed in a varied range of possible phenotypes, depending on factors and influences extraneous to the genetic code material present in the original cell, or zygote.
Q. What is a blastocyst? A. The zygote divides into blastomeres, identical cells which also divide several times and continue to multiply. At first the cells become smaller and smaller until the blastocyst reaches the uterus, where it starts being called a morula. On about day-10 after conception the morula implants in the uterine wall and starts growing into an embryo. Many blastocysts quit developing and degrade into the maternal fluids. Many morulas fail to implant. Some embryos fail early in pregnancy or abort spontaneously later as fetuses. There are many causes for this, internal and external. Q. What is a fetus? A. For our purposes, an organically developing specimen of human life totally dependent on good placement in a woman’s womb for nearly nine months. Q. Is a fetus a baby? A. No, not until well into third trimester when it may survive if born prematurely. Q. Is a fetus a child? A. No. Some call it a child by metaphoric extension of its status as somebody’s offspring, but there are no children in utero, any more than there are soldiers or workmen in the womb. No child is unborn.
Most people are infected by sloppy culture with confusions of language and ill-framed, badly organized ideas which make them seem unable to distinguish between acorns and the great oaktrees some acorns grow up to become. Q. What is a child? A. An individual human that has grown from infancy, through toddler-hood to begin to talk and interact socially with others. Q. Is a child a person? A. No, except in the wishful opinion of its parents. Now, for two really big, important questions:
ONE: Q. What is a person? A. A person is a human organism that has grown through childhood to display increasing social interaction and activity as an identified member of one or more groups, starting with the family and perhaps attaining world-wide affiliation with humanity. A person is necessarily part of a people, even if that is no more than a hunting and foraging band in an otherwise unpopulated wilderness. Persons are collectively people. They participate with others in abstract relations, language behavior (even if mute) and concrete, physical activities. Humans nowhere survive long in a state of totally separate, individual independence. Only in some sort of society can any kind of person arise. People must interact with each other supportively. They commune and cooperate. Only within that community is competition meaningful, except as whole communities or factions conflict, compete and make war on each other.
A person has personality which is not always strong or well integrated. Personalities can reflect community and discommunity within themselves, even so far as seeming to be internally at war, at risk of breaking down and falling out of community, unable to communicate and cooperate effectively with others. Is the fetus or a newborn baby a person? Certainly not. Personhood may be ascribed to infants by family members and law codes but acorns are never oaktrees any more than embryoes are babies. (The eyes of wishfully biased beholders of toddlers may be as if crossed or out of focus! Love and pride are blinding forces. Even past twenty, one can remain a rudimentary person.)
TWO: Q. What, where and when is a soul? A. The answer is too simple for quick and easy conveyance in simple speech, but to put it simply as possible, the soul or spirit is identical with the bio-organic process that produces and sustains a person bodily and mentally: in other words, a person’s very life itself. The “animating force” is nothing separate and apart from our sensing and observable selves. Self, of course is not limited to ego. Our souls make us possible. Spirit produces all we know of body, environment or anything within or without. It lets us have thought, memory, perception, intention and make effort to grow and accomplish. Just as energy, mass, time and space are not separate things except as named concepts, so spirit and matter are one thing. unless we wrongheadedly subscribe to primordial error for lack of perceived alternatives and under sway of prehistoric, unscientific metaphysics due to lack of sophistication about language, meanings and thought processing. Ignorance enslaves us to cultural habits.
Our beloved, late President Ronald Reagan sometimes communicated as wildly as Glenn Beck, though without blackboards, tears and waving arms. In his 1988 State of the Union address, Reagan asked: “. . . can they [the pro-choice liberals] deny that now medical evidence confirms the unborn child is a living, human being entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” His mind was positively antediluvian. Sadly, his is not alone.
Entitlement to life seems strangely uncharacteristic to hear from an anti-entitlement Republican. No fetus in a womb is at liberty to pursue more happiness than its position provides, nor has it more freedom than it may need to stretch, kick and grow. Clearly it cannot engage in any outgoing, entreprenuerial project more than to get born when the mother’s womb contracts, compulsively thrusting it involuntarily into the world. Such conservatives seem more liberal toward fetuses than to women who carry and bear them or to the persons whom babies become unless they turn into loyal Republicans, which has always been a self-defeating and hampering outcome for the world, not unlike the impact on Libyan life of the daffy, self-absorbed dictator, Moamar Qaddafi, for whom Libya became his own, recreated womb within all-mothering North Africa.
No Comments