Painful nonsense

I want to tread lightly here because we are dealing with bruised reeds that I want to take care not to break. But the ideology that’s causing this bruising is something we need to break. That ideology needs to be smashed into a million pieces to keep its nonsense from bruising and breaking anyone else.

This is from a guest post by Matt Appling, writing on Caleb Wilde’s terrific Confessions of a Funeral Director blog. Wilde writes regularly about death and loss and grieving and all the related topics that we tend to avoid thinking about whenever we can get away with not thinking about them. That’s led him to write or share many moving posts about people grieving the loss that comes from miscarriage. And that, in turn, led to Appling’s guest-post Sunday on the subject of infertility: “The Thing About Funerals: Most People Never Have One.”

Here is the core of Appling’s thesis:

It turns out that, in reality, most of the people who have ever been born, never had a funeral. They were never mourned. Their pictures and obituaries were never in the paper.

… It’s called spontaneous abortion and doctors think that half or maybe even two-thirds of pregnancies end in the first few days. For every one of us living here on Earth, going to jobs, raising our kids, thinking about our hopes and dreams, there are two, three or more little lives who were never even noticed by anyone, not even their mothers and fathers. They never had a birthday, much less a funeral.

Let that sink in. For each of us who get to live, who get to have a name and a family and a job and will get to be mourned when we are gone by the people who love us, there is a crowd of people who never have any of those things. The odds are ridiculously stacked against us before we even get here.

This is nonsense. Literal nonsense of the Lewis Carroll variety, albeit far crueler. Appling is telling us that “most of the people who have ever been born” have never been born.

The word “born” cannot bear that. It will not allow itself to be used and misused in this way. We cannot make people who have never been born a subset of people who have ever been born. Neither language nor logic will allow it.

But the real problem here is not Appling’s contradictory and contrived use of the word “born.” The real problem lies with his use of the word “people.”

He has no choice, of course. Appling is an evangelical pastor. He’s required to speak this way of people and personhood, even though he is unable to make it make sense. And so he goes on to discuss all the many things we associate with people — birthdays, funerals, names, families, jobs, love, hopes, dreams, etc. — and is forced to conclude that most people, the majority of all the “people” who have ever lived, will never experience any of those things.

“Most of the people who have ever been born, never had a funeral.” Most of the people who have ever been born never had a birth. Most of the people who have ever been never had a thought, never took a breath, never formed a memory, never spoke a word, never felt a touch, never ate food, never drank water, never heard their own name.

Most of the people who have ever been born have never been born. Most of the people who have ever been, in sum, were not people.

That is all that this can mean, but that is something that Appling is not allowed to say. And because he is not allowed to say it — not allowed to allow himself to even think it — he is forced to say that most people are never buried because most people are never born, never breathe, never speak, hear, see, think, touch, feel, remember, believe, hope, or love. He is forced to say that all of those are things that most people — the majority of people — never do.

That’s what comes from the evangelical ideology of “personhood” that asserts personhood from the moment of fertilization. If we prohibit any distinction between all of “the people who have ever been born” and the greater number of zygotes which will never be more than zygotes, then we must accept that most people are not what we think of when we use that word people.

There are myriad hurtful and harmful implications of this beyond the torturous thinking and nonsensical language it forces its followers to adopt. Here let’s just consider the hurt and harm that this radical redefinition of personhood does to people like Appling.

He and his wife are trying to have children, and they’ve been faced with the pain and the loss of failed pregnancies. Appling describes the heartbreak this brought them:

A week after we discovered the pregnancy, she was officially not pregnant. We never … made any announcement. The tiny life never got to see the world, have a name, or be mourned by our friends and family.

This is cause for mourning and cause for pain — the pain of dashed hopes and the pain of dreams denied, or at least deferred. That hurts. But it is not the same kind of pain as, for example, the pain of parents whose teenage child has been killed in a car accident.

What does it mean, then, for either set of parents to be soaked in an ideology that does not allow any distinction between those things? What does it mean for them to be held by an ideology that insists they’re not allowed to respond to such different kinds of pain differently?

This ideology ladles cruelty on top of cruelty. It kicks people when they’re down. It’s pastoral malpractice. And that’s far too high a price to pay for the kind of nonsense that refuses to see any difference between all the people who have ever been born and all of the “people” that have never been born.