pro-life

I don't usually post like this (or do I even post anymore? I've gotten so bad at blogging), but I keep thinking I would like to write down what it means to me to be pro-life. It's going to be super long, because I have insomnia right now. So, don't read it if you are worried about being offended or you are going to go off on me too much. This is by me for me, and day by day, in small, age-appropriate pieces, for my kids.

I know that generally, pro-life means you are against abortion. That is a great start, and a very important piece, because, well, if people don't get a chance to live in the first place, all the rest of it doesn't really matter.

I guess I was thinking about this extra hard (although I have definitely wanted to write it down before) because a friend said something to the effect of, "I don't understand how people can be anti-abortion and pro-fertility treatments," because maybe there should be some balance as far as the big population picture is concerned. Okay, point considered.

So, I have to say first of all, killing someone is just not okay for someone who is hardcore pro-life, so that does have to trump other things. However, being Catholic as well, yes, we are pro-life and we don't believe IVF is morally acceptable. I do definitely agree with the consistency of following God's plan for the universe this way. If the babies make it into the world, let them come. Ideally you would wait until you are married before you try to make this happen. If the babies aren't coming, why are we creating them in labs? Aren't we supposed to have some issue with overpopulation (says some science)? Why are we spending lots of money to create new people when there are so many people in poverty in the world that could use a leg up? Or just plain kids out there already who need loving homes? It honestly doesn't make sense. Granted, I understand how this stance on IVF makes people's feelings hurt if they are experiencing low fertility as a couple. But, maybe as a society we should move away from how something "makes people feel" as the ultimate litmus test of if it is ethical or morally right.

However, once someone is created via IVF, then we still have to honor them as a person, because, in fact, they are. So, it does make a bit of a dilemma, because I do not believe the process that created a person is morally sound, but, they are a person nonetheless with equal personhood rights as anyone else. However, if you feel like, well, we just can't respect someone who is created in an immoral way, babies are born out of wedlock all the time. Is it "morally right" to have been conceiving this child without a stable set of parents for them to be born to? Probably not. Is it an ideal situation for the child? Probably not. Does it make the child less valuable? No, absolutely not. The child still is worth as much as any other child.

Okay, so let's go through what it means to me to be pro-life:

First - I am anti-abortion. It simply does not make sense that what the majority of society would rejoice over as their baby in the early stages of development can also be presented as disposable tissue. It is both idiocy and blindness to adopt the viewpoint of the baby as not actually a baby. There are so many resources explaining the anti-abortion viewpoint, but if you have any scientific sense (or even just a brain might be enough), you must realize that the entity inside the mother is both genetically distinct and is Homo sapiens, due to the number and type of chromosomes. Also, it will continue to develop towards an independent physical state of infancy if left to its own devices, barring genetic or developmental differences that do not allow the person to reach that stage of development. You don't have to be a developmental pediatrician to figure this one out.

Next, I am especially against aborting people who do have genetic differences based on their difference. This seems to somehow be okay to people even when "regular abortion" is not. It is so wrong to be systematically exterminating one of our sources of neurodiversity. I have to completely disagree that people with genetic or neurological differences are somehow worth less than other people. I in fact believe that every person has equal human worth. Many people disagree with me on this point, but that is the position I hold. The homeless guy on the street is of as much human worth as Donald Trump. The nonverbal child with Down Syndrome is as of much human worth as Hillary Clinton. (In fact, possibly of more worth, although that is a matter of opinion). The problem is for many of us that we don't know how to value and appreciate and reach out to the first people in each of the sets. This is a journey we have to take both personally and as a society, but it does not mean we need to be killing people we perceive as a burden to society until we can feel comfortable with them.

Along with this, I believe it is very, very important to instill in my children the worth of every person who is different from them. Isaac in particular has started noticing children with physical or neurological differences in his class. I try to validate his observations and also try to provide a different perspective. For example, I actually observed his class earlier this year, and noted one of these children did not have a way to communicate anything of value with others. Isaac pointed out that the kid makes loud noises and it gets the attention of others in the class and they laugh and it bothers the teacher. I said, "Well, if you couldn't talk and you wanted to interact with your classmates, would you do something silly to make them laugh too?" He decided that, yes, he probably would. I hope he feels like he can keep having these conversations with me, because of course, on a different vein, I feel quite strongly about access to augmentative and alternative communication for everyone who cannot meet their communication needs verbally. You can go here and click "Communication Bill of Rights" if you want to delve into that further.

So, where are we? Getting to birth. Obviously I am anti- any sort of thing that would kill those children someone just worked so hard to bring into the world. So, war would be one of those things. I do find this challenging, because most people say, "Thanks to our service men and women, our country is free." Since we have never tried an alternative, I guess we won't know the truth of that statement. However, I feel like the U.S. has enough weight in the world that we could also effectively do this from a defensive, rather than an offensive, stance. I am anti-war, because I am pro-life, and war kills people before God decides it is their time. It is challenging to consider situations like Syria, where it seems like we should probably just go kill the people that are killing all the other people, but unfortunately, I am sure it is much more complex than a simple "kill the bad guys" solution. (On a side note, I think we should definitely be trying this more complex solution rather than just standing by.) There are people on one hand who either are extremely power-greedy or hungry and/or believe that their viewpoint is a valid one. There are also people who have an opposing viewpoint, which may have some validity too. I think we have to start solving some of these modern-day crises with modern-day solutions, which are going to have to include dialogue. Although, given the utterly base reaction most people who I thought were open-minded have had to the recent election, this will clearly have to be a very select group of people who are actually open-minded, to have this dialogue with people who are probably not understanding and open-minded themselves (since they have chosen to kill people to try to solve their issues) and figure out what can be done so that the different groups of people can stop trying to kill each other to solve their problems. It will also take a lot of humility, so that the best solution can actually be attempted. This is probably why we normally just go with the "let's kill them" routine. I also don't know why we are so involved in other countries' problems. I think by trying to proactively stop issues that might affect us, we also create a lot of problems. Look at CIA involvement in Africa, the taking-out of Khadafi which destabilized the entire Sahara/Sahel region, even campaigns in the Middle East. Later, we were like, "Oops, I guess we let this other faction rise to power that was worse than the other." So, this one is more complicated to actually put into practice, because no one wants to stand by and let someone with a mental illness systematically kill other people off, but I'm not sure killing (even planned take-out of just an evil dictator or two) is the way to fix the problem. Until I can be convinced that killing other people is indeed the way to get them to stop killing people (haha, I guess it does keep those specific people from killing other people, but not necessarily the larger group), I'm going to remain anti-war. I'm sorry, I don't support our troops killing people.

Then, I guess we can move on to the next obvious human-caused-death option, capital punishment. Surprise! I'm also anti-death penalty. I don't think I would have thought as hard about this had I not had someone very close to me go through the prison system, but honestly, it is a broken system. You get in once and your chances at having a normal life after that do pretty much pre-dispose you to choosing a criminal way of making a living. It's hard to get a job, even rent a place. But you don't want to be homeless, and you have to pay for the place you are living in. So what do you do? Also, many people that are in the system, again, make up part of our neurodiversity. We haven't yet figured out the best way to help many of these people see their importance as part of the big picture, and we can easily downplay their importance, leading them to be more likely to make less ideal choices, or just the wrong choices, because they didn't have the skills they needed to make it through. I get it that it's expensive to keep someone locked up for the rest of their life. I just don't feel like a life for a life really gets us anywhere. Yes, I think we need to pay to lock people up for the rest of their lives if they really are that dangerous. And we need to make a big shift in the way we approach education and recognize human worth. I do like some of the work they have been doing with Collaborative Problem Solving, which we were trained on at my previous job. The idea is that there is a set of skills we all need to be successful in life (related to flexibility, problem solving, language, etc), and if someone is behind in their development of a specific skill, maybe that's where we should focus our intervention, so they can learn the skill they need to be successful, rather than trying to stamp out their behavior. The behavior is happening because of a lagging skill.

Sterilization I'll just touch on briefly, because it's not really a pro-life thing unless you want it to be. Actually, it totally is, philosophically, but I can have the following understanding of others' choices without buying into it myself.  I am definitely anti-forced sterilization and believe it is a massive human rights violation. This applies to every and any person - no one should force someone to undergo that. China, take note. Oh wait, you don't care about human rights violations. Voluntary sterilization I believe is more responsible than abortion, so if you have decided you don't want to have kids, but you also don't want to stop doing what leads to kids, I guess sterilization has a bit more merit because you are not killing someone who already exists (although philosophically it would be preferable to just make up your mind about what you want, act accordingly, like, hello, Natural Family Planning?, and not alter your body), so there you go.

Moving on, any other killing for convenience or whatever is not acceptable to me. So, I am anti-murder for whatever reason might happen in the next 30-50 years of a person's life. Drug and alcohol abuse are not ideal because they kill you slowly. Smoking too.

I'm anti-suicide because, again, I believe that you have innate human worth and you should not be able to choose when you go. Also, it really upsets the people that love you and is just plain cruel to them. In this case, their feelings do count, okay?

I am pro-environment to the extent that we all live on this planet, and we must consider the impact of our daily actions on our planet, so that other people may also live. Animal life is also good to preserve, and biodiversity is pretty cool and helps us appreciate the beauty of our world and importance of taking care of it, but human life is even more important. When we kill our natural world, we do wrong to those living in poverty. If you are barely scraping by, you are not going to spend money to plant a tree to improve your quality of life from its shade and air-quality enhancement properties. This is why I get pretty irritated when, for example, the neighbor up the street a few houses wants to convince the owner of the apartments to cut down some large trees so he can have a better view of Mount Hood. If you want a better view of Hood, pony up the $$, man. Buy a property with a guaranteed view of Mt. Hood. Don't try to sneak it by cutting down a bunch of trees that enhance others' quality of life. I also try not to buy from China when possible (it's really hard, guys) especially there is an option from somewhere else, because, besides their other human rights violations, the government sure doesn't seem to care a lot about their environment. If it kills everyone living there, they don't frankly give a hoot.

And finally, I'm anti-euthanasia. I still believe that, consistent with the rest of my views (gee, I hope so; if I'm not consistent, please let me know), people have equal human worth regardless of any factors, including if they are old and are, again, perceived by some to be a "burden" to society. I believe the elderly should be respected, even though, for a while, this will be a challenge for us because some of the baby boomers have views about children that are downright weird (like, they actually seem to hate children playing and *shocker* being kids, and are massive helicopter-parenting advocates), we still can't kill them off just because they are annoying or senile. I know some people believe it is their right to end their life when they choose. I disagree. I think that the only Person with that right is God. I might have to suffer a lot at the end of my life. Because of my faith, I can offer that suffering up for the souls in Purgatory and the like. Even if you don't have the faith thing going for you, think of it this way. It might be uncomfortable or painful or incredibly frustrating if you lose abilities you once had, but no one knows what death is like really, so why would you choose uncertainty over certainty? At least you know what you are experiencing at the moment. Also, just based on the sheer potential for people to use euthanasia/elder-killing as a reason to off their "burdensome" older relatives, I have to reject it.

Wow, that feels pretty thorough. Maybe some other day I'll get to what I think are some of the root causes of the anti-life sentiments present in society, but, teaser, I think it comes down to Barbie and productivity. At least, that's where I'm at right now.

And maybe, maybe, I might try to post a little over Christmas break. It would be good to do some catching-up!