The right to life
It has been hailed as the most noble and righteous act a human being can perform. We are decorated, saluted and celebrated for doing it. It makes heroes of even the slimiest minions. Stories of it strike awe in the hearts of the unqualified.
It is to save a life.
The enormous sanctity that has surrounded this act has bestowed upon it an almost mythic power, an immunity to critique. And perhaps it’s well deserved immutability. It is an awesome expression of self-determination, compassion and the intangible persistence of the human spirit.
Yet there are muffinheads like me in the world who make it their business to question the unquestionable, and to criticize the unchallengeable, often either to great success or supreme failure. I figure my odds are right at 50/50 on this one, so why not take a chance?
There are two questions I’d ask when we say we’re going to “save” a life. First, what are we saving it from, and second, what are we saving it for?
As to the first, we assume that to save a life means to save it from death. So what’s death? We don’t really know. But we know we don’t like it and we go to mind-bending lengths to prevent it. It’s an understandable aversion.
The ways we die can be ugly and powerfully frightening. But as for the actual death, many of the world’s religious traditions would have us believe that it’s probably not so bad. Modern biomedical science indicates that it’s most likely (quite literally and absolutely) nothing-a simple ceasing of the organism’s vital functioning. Energy dissipates, and nature does what we’d suspect would be in her best interest to do-recycle.
In sum, we can say, for the sake of fun philosophical arguments, that we don’t really actually know what, if anything, happens to us after we die. We probably won’t for a long, long time. So we don’t know what we’re saving each other from.
It could be simple, painless and anticlimactic brain death. Or it could be an eternity at a remote tropical resort being fed coconut milk and having your feet massaged, in which case I think the term “save a life” might be more suitably replaced with “viciously and mercilessly deprive someone of paradise.”
Now for the second question. What do we save lives for?
Beyond blithe theoretical banter, this is a question begged by two very immediate and concrete social and political issues that face our fair nation-abortion and war.
The label “pro-life” has redefined the depths of the American potential for self-contradiction through its adherents’ slaying of innocent people and blowing up of clinics in a very effective effort to discourage abortion. Moreover, for a group who claims to be out to protect and advocate life, they seem awfully uninterested in it.
To my knowledge, and please contact me if you have divergent information, pro-lifers pay appallingly little attention to the lives of children who are victims of the abhorrent suffering to which they’re subject once born to families who can’t support them or don’t want them. If they succeed in their goal of making abortions utterly unavailable, they’ve “saved” millions of lives for untold years of inhumane hardship. It seems their efforts might be better directed toward making lives out of the paltry existences that the unfortunate scrape out. For those of us who like to maintain at least casual contact with reality, to suggest that our duty in the protection of life lies only in ensuring a birth reveals a much more profound irresponsibility and disrespect for life than does an abortion.
We, as a country are presently in the hands of a presidential administration who is taking the duty of illegalizing abortion very personally, and very seriously. Along with being ready to return reproductive control to the hands of fate, they’re also positively itching to start a war. They too claim to be dedicated to preserving life, while at the same time taking aggressive steps toward destroying a great deal of it with guns and bombs. How do these two policies jive? I don’t think they do. James Madison said that if tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Uncanny foresight for an era in which dental hygiene was a luxury.
To conclude, I think it will be very difficult for us as a society to foster a meaningful respect for life in an atmosphere of such extreme and pathological fear and denial of death. If our greatest goal is to avert death, an esoteric phenomenon to begin with, at the expense of attention to what we define as life, we’ve rendered ourselves nothing more than a happenstance conglomeration of bustling cells. Does life mean more to us than fleeting electrical impulses that dictate consumption and reproduction?
Time and George will tell.
