Choosing Life

Choosing Life

It has occurred to me that while I very often write about the hottest political topics of the moment, I have gone the better part of a week since the abortion topic hit our headlines in such a stark manner as it has, and I have not yet chosen to write on that topic. It is a hard topic to address, not because my views are conflicted, but because there is almost no topic I can think of that is more morally charged with strong views. This past week in my last ethics class for the semester, I did not try to avoid it, but rather led with the topic because it is the sort of ethical issue that students will undoubtedly have to face in their careers and it seems better to give it a test run in this relatively safe open forum than to have them be neophytes to it at some future moment of crisis. The issue is perhaps most controversially framed as pro-choice versus pro-life though even that characterization gets caught up with debate. It was mentioned by one student that risking a woman’s life by forcing her to seek out an illegal and often less than safe abortion solution was hardly a pro-life stance in one sense. Likewise, another student proclaimed that an unborn child is not being given any choice in the matter when abortion is undertaken. One person went so far as to claim that anyone who exists and is therefor alive and representative of those who were allowed to be born is not entitled to opine on the termination of life of the as yet unborn. That, of course is countered by the strongly voiced view that white, economically privileged males are hardly in a position to have a valid point of view on the issue of what a woman chooses, privately, to do regarding her own body. I’m reminded of that line from the movie 42 when the white southerner warns off Jackie Robinson from staying in his temporary home in Florida by saying there will be, “trouble, trouble, trouble.” This abortion topic is nothing but trouble.

Many ethical conundrum are such that we waffle on the topic over the course of our lives. Perhaps we start left, turn right and then return left over the course of our lives. Sometimes we wander here and there over the terrain depending on who we know that is impacted by the issue or perhaps even how the issue touches us personally. I consider myself to be a very thoughtful person in the sense that I think carefully, fully and often about most subjects as anyone who reads my stories can tell. That is not to say that I am always reaching the “right” conclusion, but rather that I have at least gone to the trouble to turn it all around in my thought process so that I expose each facet for consideration. That tendency does often cause me to reevaluate positions and sometimes even change my mind. It’s less about being fickle and more about reassessing based on new perspectives or information. I also consider myself a very caring person and not someone so brusque as to not have concern for the feelings and reactions of others. Despite all of that self-righteous positioning, I think it is fair to say that I have never once altered my stance on the abortion issue since the first moment I realized it was a two-sided issue. I have always been pro-choice, even before I heard it referred to in that manner. I have never even come close to feeling that there is a stronger argument to be made for the right side of this issue other than that of pro-choice.

The idea that every one of a woman’s eggs should be allowed to emerge into full-bodies life is simply not mathematically possible. At birth, women have within their systems, approximately one million eggs. Today there are 7.9 billion people on earth (that’s up from 7.8 billion the last time I looked, despite the fact that COVID-19 has claimed 15 million of those lives). It is said that 49.6% of the world is comprised of women. That means there are about 3,918,400,000 women out there, give or take a few. If every egg a woman was born with became a human being, there would be 3.19184 quadrillion people on earth. Of course that is silly. To begin with, those women only have 300,000 or so eggs when they reach puberty (though pro-life people don’t necessarily find the age of a conceiving woman to be a very compelling red line) so that would lower that number to only 1.17552 quadrillion, which is….still a pretty silly number. Upon further investigation, I find that each woman only ovulates between 300 and 400 eggs in her reproductive lifetime (let’s call it 350 for argument sake). That brings the number of truly possible human beings down to a much more manageable number of a mere 1.37144 trillion human beings that have a right to exist in this world. The only problem is that it is said that the Earth’s capacity is at most 10 billion (that would be only 2 billion if they all lived like Americans live). That means that 1.36144 trillion of those people would not be able to live (at least not on Earth) given its limited resources. But wait a minute, natural lifespan figures into this equation as well. Global lifespan is now 73.4 years. If we let every person who could be born get their fair share of time on Earth, we could make it work if everyone only chose to live for 195 days. Of course, since a six-month-old is not exactly self-sufficient, we would need to designate a few people at birth to grow up to be care givers so that all those souls could get their 195 day allotment and be cared for until their time on Earth was over.

I went through that math to remind myself that the fertilizable eggs in a woman’s womb are simply not possible to be all conceived in world with the limitations that Earth has. Therefore, until we are living someplace or somehow such that we can support more than 10 billion people, this is really all a very moot point. Perhaps then we could afford the luxury of being pro-life the way the pro-life contingent wants us to be. In fact, we know that nature gives women all those eggs (notice that I haven’t even bothered calculating a man’s procreative limits since each ejaculation has on average 350 million sperm and that would all get very very silly) on the off chance that once in while, one will get fertilized, and then get made viable and then get born and then survive long enough to be a productive human being. That is nature’s model and it is based on the law of very large numbers. It is not based on any particular moral or ethical coda. We were not put here to spew out all the children we possibly can for as long as we can. We were put here on Earth to carefully consider and make choices about how to live our lives and how and when to choose to procreate. We are not societally driven to begin procreation the moment we are physically able and we are not compelled to spend our lives in a mindless process of procreation. We are all supposed to make informed and personally-driven choices about how we use our bodies to OUR best purposes for our lives. Some of us choose to have one child, others want more, some want none. None of those choices are morally superior to the other.

There is something to be said about the notion that once a child is born, no matter what it’s circumstances or its ongoing viability may be, when it is a life unto itself, it has the right to survival as best it can manage, not necessarily on its own, but to the best of the ability of the society into which it is born. Some societies put limits on children (either by number, age or even sex) and recognize that survivability of the entire community is paramount above and beyond the survival on any one soul. Until a child is self-sustaining, they believe that society owns that life. As a more enlightened society today, we have instead decided that the notion of viability should only be considered in terms of survivability when the fetus is in utero. The pro-life cohort believes viability starts very early…less than 15 weeks since conception. That becomes a slippery slope back into the womb and those hundreds of thousands of waiting eggs. Why should viability be defined to start with fertilization? Good question if you are a pro-life person.

Phew, I’m now completely tired out and feel twisted into an ethical knot. What I am not is moved to alter my view. We are given a better than survivalist brain either by God or by nature (or some combination thereof) and the only right decision seems to me to be that we each have the freedom of choosing life, not just for ourselves, but also for any procreative material within us. That ability to choose is taken away from us by society at some point for sure. It cannot be before conception, and it must be after birth, so that leaves some time during those forty weeks of gestation. Life exists all around us in every plant and animal, but the ability to make a choice is uniquely human. Therefore, I have always found the stronger argument to favor choice over raw life, so for much of that 40 weeks, I believe a woman should have the ability of choosing her life path rather than the choice being forced upon her by society. It seems to be the only uniquely human choice.