I do not believe that life begins at conception. Conception is a scientific term for something that is too sacred to be relegated to some kind of fecund biological interaction. I take the origin of life to be something that ought to always remain a mystery to us. I take Jeremiah’s to heart when he wrote, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you…”
So, for me, the fact that abortion has merely become an issue of trying to defend a hard-line, scientific position on the mystery of human existence is, as I see, dehumanizing to begin with. I reject the notion that in order to defend life I must know the intimate details of the constitution of the human person with scientific certainty. “Scientific certainty” can mechanize the world in many beneficial ways, including this gadget I am typing on right now, but the hubris of science is in that it knows no limits and expects us all to play along—and we do.
For me, the central issue of abortion is not a matter of choice vs. life. Those two words are flimsy pieces of propaganda that are neither consistent, nor genuinely opposed by either “side.” The very idea that we use that language with the self-righteous “pro” prefixed to these empty words—and take ourselves seriously—is another defeat. No one truly believes that their position is anti-choice or anti-life, otherwise they might have interesting (albeit disturbing) things to say.
For me, I see the issue as one over the body. I do not mean to exclude the soul or use the term “body” as a corpse-like thing, I mean it holistically. The maxim is that we can never decide when to eliminate a vital body—life. In the case of pregnancy, we have a body that depends on another body for its survival. Likewise, the body supporting the dependent body can be put at great risk by such a relationship too.
In no cases can we defend the idea of taking the life of either body, at any stage. However, there seem to be cases where the competing interest of each body come into conflict. There are also cases where the bodies may not need to be conjoined together in order to survive. Late, but not full, term bodies can, and do, survive without being in the body of the mother.
We are required to preserve all human bodies as best we can given the cases when there are competing interests for survival. But I do not think we are required to force the mother to give up her body for the child beyond reason. That would include raising the child. And we need to provide all resources to her body to ensure that her dignity is being upheld in the midst of the process.
I want to think that being a mother is always a gift, but the truth of the matter is that it can be great to burden to many women for all kinds of reasons. We need not make this an issue of motherhood, we simply would have to carryout the basic maxim to never eliminate a body—even if we remove the body from the other body for the sake of its preservation. I think that science could help us by providing the means to being able to preserve the bodies that are, for grave reasons, removed from the body of the mother. If either body dies after every attempt is made, then, we should mourn and give them proper burial.
Is the cases of bodies that have not reached a stage of development to survive on their own, I think we need to give incentives—major incentives—to a scared, terrified, and reluctant mother should give the body inside her womb time to have a chance of its own. After all, the sacrifice of her body in this noble affair is no small potatoes, to say the least.
As for the Church, I think it should offer more liturgical reasons to make this point, with both bodies, in the life of a person. That would include baptism, last rites, or other rites of extreme unction for pre-fullterm bodies—human persons.
What we should not do, as I see it, is make this an issue of empty politics (not all political issues are empty) that centers around the legislation of things that are argued over from the losing perspective of the person as some kind of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. We are not made by science and our life is a mystery like the Life which we image. Moving with love and care for the bodies of women and their children and abandoning the sloganized polemics of the choice/life divide, I think we will find a closer and better way to move forward.
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