By Richard D. Erlich

This is a continuation of what I had to say in an essay stating that life doesn't begin; it began. There I pointed out that the abortion controversy doesn't really have to do with the question of when life begins or "What is life?" but with "What is human?" -- when a living being becomes and should be recognized as a "(human) person under the law."

It's a dangerous question.

Slavery in the US was based in the idea that Blacks were not fully human and, hence, could be bought and sold and exploited like nonhuman animals. Nazi extermination programs were based even more consciously in the idea that Jews and Roma (Gypsies) and other groups were literally degenerate and/or subhuman. I wouldn't want to employ what's been called "The 'Twice is Always' Rule," but it should give us a serious warning to recall that these questions of definition of "human" weren't resolved by argument but by wars.

People aren't always -- or often? -- logical, but we are indirectly governed by logics, plural: where different ideas lead. Push to its end one way to oppose abortion, and the logic goes like this.

Human beings are essentially souls, souls to be saved. (The body is at most the temple of the soul, at worst its prison.)

Human beings are "ensouled" at the moment of conception, so a human zygote -- the fertilized egg -- is not just a unique individual organism but an unborn baby, in some variations, an unborn baby who can be saved or damned.

To kill that baby is the murder of an innocent, and possibly worse: the condemning of that innocent to Hell as an unbaptized baby. The abortion rate in the US is now at a very low point, as these things go, but we're still talking some 1.2 million abortions in 2005. If a human zygote, embryo, fetus is a human child, that's a body-count each year of massacre proportions.

Even as it is the shame of the World War II Allies that they didn't do all they could to act against the Hitlerian Holocaust -- including bombing the camps and the rail lines when begged to -- so it is to the shame (and damnation?) of members of our generation to fail to do everything possible to stop a holocaust in unborn, unbaptized babies.

Maybe including, as a last resort, violence, even lethal violence against those one sees -- following such logic -- as mass murderers.

On the other side (the one I'm on) is a logical and historical argument less rigorous, or rigid, but equally powerful: for giving women control over their bodies.

These arguments can't be reconciled by argument, but there is a possibility for a political resolution, and we know what it is. You attempt to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare": which includes actively pushing birth control and hell yes, making condoms readily available to anyone old enough to know what they are -- and making sure U.S. kids know about birth-control/STD-prevention by puberty. It means the opportunity for freely-made, early decisions by women who might want an abortion to have one or to carry the fetus to term. And on the other side, it means legal restrictions on late-term abortions.

Such a resolution is no solution and it neither will nor should satisfy a lot of people (press the Slavery/Holocaust analogy, and you'll see the problem). But most Americans will be able to live with it, and such a messy resolution will allow us to get through a very dangerous period and move on to other conflicts.

Richard D. Erlich is a Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Ventura County, California.

Posted by Mark at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If it seems like I haven't been writing here for a while, it's because I haven't. I have been enlisted to write for a political blog, Demockracy, and as such, have been posting much of my stuff there.

But here's something that wouldn't go well on a political blog. It's about a hand transplant patient. David Savage was 19 when he lost his hand in an accident with a metal-stamping machine. Two years ago, he received a hand transplant from a cadaver donor. Now, he is able to feel sensations in his new hand that he could feel in his old one, something that scientists thought was impossible. It was previously assumed that when a limb was lost, the portion of the brain devoted to sensation in that limb was re-used for other functions. It turns out that Savage's brain reprogrammed itself, and now the part of his brain that controlled sensations for the old limb is performing that function for the new one.

What has brought us this marvel? The ability to take a dead person's hand, connect to a live person, and have that live person feel sensation in the new hand?

I'll tell you what didn't bring us this power: mysticism. Belief in, and subsequent fear of, an almighty, overarching, transcendental and inexplicable being did not attach a new hand to David Savage. Rituals, dances, prayer -- these things did not give David Savage a new hand.

Science gave David Savage a new hand. Human ingenuity, empiricism, logic, and reason all did this. Magic and the supernatural did not.

It's important to keep these things in mind as long as Sarah Palin is the vice presidential candidate. Sarah Palin not only believes in God, she believes in a Christian God who created the Earth 5,000 years ago. She further believes that she should be fulfilling the goals of Christianity through her political office.

A Sarah Palin world would not able to reattach hands. A Sarah Palin world would look very much like the Dark Ages, with man struggling to understand the world around him through a lens of religion.

This is not to say that religion is not valuable; it just turns out that it doesn't create things like new hands, longer lifespans, less mortality, going to the moon, flying around the world, spending extended lengths of time underwater, harnessing the world's knowledge and delivering it to everyone's homes. Religion is incapable of doing any of these things for us. By its nature, religion precludes the use of the observable world for any purpose other than serving as a testament to the greatness of a supernatural creator.

Perhaps the only religion that could be useful to a scientist is one in which the supernatural deity creates a world, gives it a set of rules, and lets it go. This idea of the "clockmaker god" has been embraced for hundreds of years, including by amateur inventor Thomas Jefferson. In this use of religion, the deity can be understood, and the rules that govern the operation of the universe can be discerned by human beings.

Sarah Palin's evangelical Protestantism, however, is no such thing. She believes that prayer can heal the sick, that hoping for a cure is just as powerful as using science to create a cure. She believes that creationism carries just as much weight as evolution and that both should be taught in schools. Sarah Palin could do nothing for David Savage; no amount of prayer can bring a man's hand back. But a lot of science, it turns out, can.

Posted by Mark at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)