The Nature of Things

I'm' going to give this another go; you must admit that I'm tenacious, if nothing else. I'm discussing the debate over a woman's right to decide who and how her body is used. It definitely should not be clowns like DeSantis or Alito. Allow me to point out what should be obvious.

Long before modern science emerged, the ancient authorities on all things were mostly the somewhat new philosophies of monotheistic religion. There's still much debate about when monotheism, the belief in a single god, started, but it was over two thousand years ago for sure and may have been three or four thousand years. Before that, humans had multiple gods who were charged with controlling the weather, illness, natural disasters, and, yes, fertility. In a word, we were a rather uninformed species struggling with the vagaries of life.

We didn't understand much of anything; we reacted to whatever the hell ran over us, often by sacrificing a goat or neighbor to one of the gods. Today, most of us are educated in math and science. We understand life and our universe a thousand times better than our animal-hide-covered ancestors. Among the many bewilderments about life as a human were this weird thing that happened when we copulated and a woman's belly began to swell. Any number of rituals were performed to ensure the birth went well. Everything from rubbing the mother's belly with beer to her sitting in the dirt. One thing was clear; childbirth was a potentially dangerous proposition for the mother and the developing fetus.

Along came Christianity to suggest that all the pain and dangers of childbirth were punishment for Eve enticing Adam to eat the apple. Even in modern religious beliefs, the notion of a woman being impure after childbirth persists. In other words, humans were dumber than a bag of hammers or a barrel of monkeys when it came to science. Hopefully, we are a bit better informed today, so let's try to put human reproduction in perspective.

Science has grown a human ear on the back of a mouse, cloned Dolly the sheep and her sisters, cloned dogs and cats, and produced human embryos in a Petri dish. Lab-grown meat will soon be sold to US consumers for the first time, with the federal government granting permission for two separate businesses to offer their chicken products to people. I would argue that the mystery of birth and life is very close to being solved scientifically, just as were the mysteries of thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and all the other life events that befuddled our ancient ancestors.

I am not asking anyone to give up their belief system. I ask that we let go of ancient beliefs in the divinity of human life over all other life. Yes, death is still a mystery, although it shouldn't be. We see it every day in virtually every life form on the planet. Keep your faith and believe in your god if it helps you make your way through life.

But there is nothing miraculous about how life evolves on our planet. It is a well-understood, documented, and duplicated process taking place without the intervention of any deity. A mother's decision to end a pregnancy before the fetus is viable outside the womb is the equivalent of deciding which chicken eggs we sell in the stores and which ones we decide should gestate until they are chickens. I know that sounds cold and hard to some, but that's because we have been indoctrinated to believe that we were made in God's image and we, like him or her, are divine and separate from all other life forms in our world.

The ancient authorities insisted that human life resulted from divine intervention while all other life was placed on the earth for us to use and abuse as we wished. Ever since then, we have run roughshod over our planet, killing, eating, and endangering lifeforms at will. 

Initially, we are a collection of cells like any other creature. We need to understand that a woman is the only person who can decide whether to allow the gestation period to play out inside her body or end it before that collection of cells becomes a viable human. It's not you, or me, or certainly any man, but the woman who holds that collection of cells inside her body.